Job Application Status Analyser

An automated n8n workflow that monitors your Gmail inbox, classifies job application emails using a local AI (Ollama), and logs every application — with company, role, and status — to a Google Sheet in real-time.

No cloud AI APIs. No rate limits. Fully local, fully private.

How It Works

Gmail ➜ Preprocess ➜ Filter Spam ➜ AI Classify (Ollama) ➜ Parse ➜ Merge ➜ Judge ➜ Google Sheets

1. Email Ingestion — Gmail Trigger polls for new emails every minute from Primary/Updates categories. A manual backfill trigger lets you process the last 150 emails on demand.

2. Preprocessing — Extracts subject, sender, body text, date, and application links (ATS portals like Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, etc.) from raw email data.

3. Spam Filter — Drops newsletters, promotional digests, and sale emails via regex before they hit the AI.

4. AI Classification — Sends each email to a local Ollama instance (Llama 3.1 8B) with a structured prompt. The AI extracts:

   • Company name
   • Role / job title
   • Status — applied | rejected | interview | offer

5. Smart Fallbacks — If the AI returns unknown:

   • Status → 100+ keyword normalization map + regex body scan (e.g., "unfortunately" → rejected, "interview scheduled" → interview)
   • Role → Regex extraction from email body (e.g., "apply for the Software Engineer 3, AMP role")
   • Company → Sender display name → domain extraction (with generic domain blocklist) → body scan patterns ("team at X", "your application to X")

6. Override Rules — The word "unfortunately" in any email body forces status to rejected, regardless of AI output.

7. AI Judging Gate — A second Ollama pass validates each result, filtering out any remaining spam or false positives.

8. Google Sheets Upsert — Clean data is written to your Google Sheet with columns: company, role, status, Application Link, Last Update Date, Applied Date.

9. Daily Summary — An hourly scheduled trigger reads the sheet and generates application stats (applied/interview/rejected/offer counts).

Setup Steps

Prerequisites

• Docker Desktop installed
• Gmail account
• Google Sheets API enabled (Google Cloud Console)

1. Clone & Start Services

git clone <repo-url> && cd job-status-analyser
docker compose up -d

This spins up two containers:

2. Pull the AI Model

docker exec -it job-status-analyser-ollama-1 ollama pull llama3.1:8b

3. Import the Workflow

1. Open n8n at http://localhost:5679
2. Go to Workflows → Import from File
3. Select text.json

4. Connect Credentials

Follow the n8n prompts to authorize both accounts.

5. Configure Google Sheet

1. Create a new Google Sheet with these column headers:

   company | role | status | Application Link | Last Update Date | Applied Date
   

2. Copy the Sheet URL and update it in the Upsert Row in Sheets and Read All Applications nodes.

6. Activate & Run

• Click Active toggle to enable the Gmail trigger (polls every minute)
• Or click Backfill Trigger manually to process your last 150 emails immediately

Tech Stack

Tip: If specific company emails are still misclassified, add keywords to the STATUS_NORM map or BODY_PATTERNS array in the Final Merge Logic node.