One state, one name

An application has one state. The tracker had three names for it.

Open a rejected application and the panel said Rejected. On the board it sat under a column called Closed. On the Pipeline tab it was counted in a bucket named rejected, next to two more — No answer and In progress — that appeared nowhere else in the product. Nothing was broken, but you had to work out for yourself that all of it was the same application.

There is now one vocabulary. The board’s columns, the funnel’s bands and the stage picker all read the same four groups — Applied, Interview, Offer, Closed — and every card in Closed still carries its own outcome, so you can see at a glance whether those 28 settled applications were rejections or accepted offers. The stage picker groups its options the same way, so Closed reads as a heading over Accepted, Rejected and Withdrawn rather than as a fifth state competing with them.

The Pipeline tab now shows each band broken down by stage instead of collapsing it. A Closed 28 that turns out to be Rejected 28 is a different month from one that reads Accepted 2 · Rejected 26.

Your mail now says what it did

The other half of the confusion was quieter. Seven emails on an application, including a plain rejection, and the stage never moved — with nothing anywhere saying why.

That was deliberate: we advance a stage from mail only forwards, and never into a settled outcome. Deciding an application is over is your call, not something we infer from a message. But the rule was invisible, so it looked like nothing was working.

Every classified message on an application now says what it means for the stage — Received → Applied, or, on a rejection, plainly does not move the stage. And when the newest message disagrees with where the application sits, you get a one-press offer to move it. It applies nothing on its own; once you’ve set the stage yourself, the offer stops asking.

If you use the API, GET /me/tracking/pipeline now returns counts per stage instead of the seven buckets — the same vocabulary you already set through the tracking endpoint.