Nobody counts the rejections.
This site does.

Dear Candidate is a public record of what happens after you apply for a job. You add an outcome — the company, the role, and how it ended: no answer, auto-rejected, interview rounds, an offer. No account, no name, no email. Every entry is one light in a map you can move through, and it adds up the numbers companies don’t publish.

The name is the line that opens almost every rejection: “Dear Candidate…”

I have a long work history. Good jobs, references who would pick up the phone for me, supervisors I left on good terms with. I left my last position because of a family emergency. When I came back and started looking for work, I sent more than 20 resumes over about a year and got denied or ghosted on nearly all of them.

Twenty is not many. I know that now. I read posts from people who sent 200, 500, more than a thousand. One that reached the top of r/jobs described 1,670 applications over 18 months before one landed. At some point it stopped feeling real, like I was dropping forms into a slot no person would open. I stopped applying and started my own small company to keep income coming in. That company is not this. This is the thing I wanted to exist while I was in it.

Here is what I kept getting stuck on. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts job openings and publishes them every month. I could not find anyone counting the other side — how many people applied and heard nothing, or got auto-rejected by software before a human read a word. “We’re hiring” is on every career page. “We took 400 applications and made zero offers” is nowhere.

So I built the record. I’m not a data scientist and this is not a study. It’s a count that did not exist, kept by someone who needed it to.

Corrections, questions, a company that needs its name fixed, press, or you just want to talk about the job market — reach me here:

dearcandidate.tracker@gmail.com

Found a bug or a wrong company name? The feedback form sends it straight to me.