Coming soon: connect JobHakken to your own CRM and inbox tools

Job hunting eventually turns into relationship management — recruiters you're talking to, referrals you're chasing, people you met at a career fair. That's CRM territory, and it's not something JobHakken should try to become. Rebuilding a contacts database and an email client inside a job tracker is exactly the kind of scope creep that makes a focused tool worse at the one thing it's for.

The plan instead is to let JobHakken connect to tools that already do this well, without swallowing them.

What it's meant to look like

The design starts from JobHakken's own privacy stance: local-first, nothing assumed about where a service runs. So rather than a single "sign in with X" cloud connection, the plan is a plain configuration — a base URL and an API key, pointed at wherever your instance actually lives:

Base URL: http://localhost:<port>     (a local, self-hosted instance)
      or: https://crm.example.com     (a remote one you run or host)

That's deliberate: the integration is meant to work identically whether your CRM is running on the same machine as JobHakken or on a server you manage elsewhere — JobHakken shouldn't hardcode an assumption about localhost, a specific port, or Docker.

From there, the intended workflow is small and specific:

• Open a job or application in JobHakken → Add/Find Contact → JobHakken creates or matches a person record in your CRM over its API, and remembers the link.
• Open in CRM opens your CRM's own, completely unchanged interface — JobHakken never forks or embeds it.
• If you've also connected an email-triage tool the same way, JobHakken can surface something like "Follow-up due" or "Reply received" on the application, sourced from that tool's own state.

JobHakken stores only the minimum reference needed to keep the link — not a copy of your contacts, and not your email.

Why self-hosted is the point

Nothing here works by JobHakken reading another app's database directly, or automating its interface — only its documented API, the same way you'd integrate any two separate products. That means it's equally happy talking to a cloud-hosted CRM and a fully local, self-hosted one — and self-hosted is genuinely the stronger privacy option here: your contact records and email content stay on infrastructure you control, in the same spirit as JobHakken's own local-first design, rather than adding a third company's cloud into the mix.

Not planned

To be clear about scope, this is not meant to become: a full CRM replacement inside JobHakken, an email client, autonomous outreach or cold-email sending, or bulk contact scraping. JobHakken stays the job-search layer; your CRM and inbox tool stay exactly what they already are.

Following along

There's no timeline to share yet. When this ships, the real step-by-step will replace this post — for now, if you already run a self-hosted CRM and this shape sounds useful to you, it's genuinely helpful for us to hear that before we build it. Get in touch.