You're applying for jobs. You've got 12 open applications, 4 follow-up emails due this week, 2 interviews scheduled, and a pile of notes on each company. You're tracking it in a spreadsheet that's already out of date, or a Notion board you built during week one and never opened again.
Here's a simpler pattern: keep all your applications as rows in a Stash collection. Company, role, status, notes, next-action date — all in one place. Ask Claude "what needs follow-up this week?" and it searches the store and tells you. No context-window stuffing, no manual updates.
This is the job tracker pattern. It takes about 10 minutes to set up and zero maintenance after that.
Spreadsheets work until you're in a Claude conversation and you can't remember the status of that role at the fintech startup you applied to three weeks ago. You have to stop, open a tab, squint at your spreadsheet, come back.
Notion works until you realise you're paying for a 5-row-limit context fetch (Notion's free API returns max 25 rows and costs tokens to include inline) just to track your job hunt.
Custom instructions work until you have more than 15 applications and the list is longer than the 2,000-character limit.
The Stash pattern sidesteps all three: the store is server-side, Claude only fetches what it asks for, and there's no row limit or character limit to worry about.
Each row in your jobs collection should have:
stripe-eng-lead)2026-05-28)Keep notes short. Claude can search any field, so detailed prose in notes is fine — but if it grows past a paragraph, split into a second record keyed stripe-eng-lead-interview-notes. Token-light retrieval is the whole point.
In Claude → Settings → Connectors, paste:
https://app.stashlite.com/mcp
Sign in with Google. You'll get your own private store — nobody else can read it. Takes about 60 seconds.
Open a new Claude conversation and say:
I want to track my job applications. Create a collection called "jobs" and add these: 1. company: Stripe, role: Engineering Lead, status: applied, applied: 2026-05-28, follow_up: 2026-06-11, notes: Great culture, 15% above base. Contact: Sarah Chen sarah@stripe.com 2. company: Monzo, role: Staff Eng, status: interview, applied: 2026-05-19, follow_up: 2026-06-08, notes: Technical interview on June 10. Contact: Tom Reeves t.reeves@monzo.com 3. company: Revolut, role: Senior Eng, status: rejected, applied: 2026-05-10, notes: Rejected after first screen. Worth reapplying in 6 months.
Claude adds the rows. You never have to touch a spreadsheet again.
Any time you want a status check:
Search my jobs collection — what needs follow-up this week? Today is June 8.
Search jobs for "interview" — what interviews do I have coming up?
Search jobs for "Stripe" — what's the status there?
Stash does a full-text search across all fields and returns only the matching rows. Your context window stays lean — Claude isn't reading 40 rows to find the 2 you care about.
Just tell Claude:
Add to jobs: company: Wise, role: Staff Backend Eng, status: applied, applied: 2026-06-08, follow_up: 2026-06-22, url: https://wise.jobs/staffeng-backend
Or more casually:
I just applied to Wise for their Staff Backend role. Add it to jobs with status applied and follow-up in 2 weeks.
Claude knows the schema from context and fills in the row.
This is where the pattern gets genuinely useful. Before an interview:
Search jobs for "Monzo" and give me a prep summary — what's the role, who's the interviewer, any notes I should have in mind?
Claude pulls the row and can then help you prep for the specific role, interviewers, and any notes you left yourself — all without you having to repeat the context.
Update the Monzo row in jobs: status is now offer. Notes: base £135k, 10% bonus, 0.2% equity. Need to decide by June 15.
Search jobs for "Revolut" and update status to withdrawn — I'm going with a different offer.
| Approach | Works in Claude | Survives new conversation | Searchable | Maintenance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet | No (copy-paste) | Yes (external) | Ctrl+F only | Manual |
| Custom instructions | Yes | Yes | No | Manual; 2k char limit |
| Notion | Via API (expensive) | Yes | Notion search | Manual or sync |
| Stash via MCP | Yes (native) | Yes | Full-text | Just tell Claude |
Free accounts get 2,500 records and 50 queries per month. For a typical job search — 30–50 applications, a few status updates per day — you'll stay well inside free. If you're running a very active search (100+ applications, multiple conversations per day), you'll hit Pro territory: £8/month.
Ready to track your applications in Claude?
Add Stash in 60 seconds — free to start, no card required.
Add to Claude →Connector URL: https://app.stashlite.com/mcp