Wouldn’t it be great to find out if a Human Resources Manager opened your email? And wouldn’t it be even better to know if the company you applied for clicked on your LinkedIn profile or resume link in that email?

Recently, I discovered www.yesware.com, an gmail add-on for salespeople that allows you to track your emails. Since job seekers try to sell themselves to companies? I figured out that this tool is brilliant for applicants to easily keep track of their application emails. Yesware works like a newsletter service. It embeds a tracking pixel in your email, and your email still looks like the same. There is just a tiny picture (one pixel) attached for tracking purposes.

Once you have the pleasure to not go through an applicant tracking system (online application forms) and you already know the email address to send your application to, this tool becomes indispensable. After you installed it in Gmail and activated the tracking, it will notify you whenever an application email gets opened or the recipient (an HR manager) clicks on your links in that email. Now, you know when to follow up and you can see if your application emails are working or if you should edit your message.

After tracking your email, you can see how often the recipient opens your email and clicks on the included links, and you can see the location and if it was opened from a mobile device or desktop computer. This way, you can easily keep a record of the emails that you send out. However, this tracking doesn’t always work. Some emails do not get tracked and some load the pixel without the intended recipient actually reading the email.

Since links can be tracked, I would suggest to include your resume as a link in your application email; either use LinkedIn or save your resume somewhere online. The free version comes with 100 tracking events per month, which should be enough for the purpose of tracking your applications but there are also other services available like http://bananatag.com/.

Good luck on your job search and happy tracking!