Workday Application Status Meaning: What Each Label Tells You

TL;DR: Your Workday application status is a label the employer chose, and it summarizes up to nine recruiter-side stages in two or three words. "Submitted" or "Received" usually means the Review stage, "In Progress" can mean anything from screening to an offer, and a move to the Inactive tab means the application is closed. Workday does not notify you of a rejection unless the employer set it up. Read the label as a stage range, then act on the requisition number.

What does your Workday application status mean?

Workday application status: the label shown next to a job in the My Applications section of Candidate Home, the account you create on an employer's Workday careers site. The employer sets the wording; Workday supplies the stages underneath.

Workday is the most widely used ATS among Fortune 500 companies: Jobscan's 2026 ATS usage report (6th edition, built by checking the careers pages of all 500 companies) found that over 40% of them use Workday for talent acquisition. Each of those employers configures its own labels, which is why the wording changes from one careers site to the next.

The most detailed public mapping comes from UW–Madison's HR office. Its candidate view guide, updated December 2025, tells recruiters what an applicant sees for each internal stage:

Other Workday employers use different words for the same buckets. The University of Washington shows "In Progress" while HR reviews your resume, "Sent to dept" once the hiring manager has it, then "Not selected", "Withdrew" or "Recruitment Canceled". The City of Tucson uses "In Progress", "Not Selected" and "Hired". Public Health Ontario adds "Received" and "Under Consideration" before "In Progress".

Two rules hold across these examples. The Active tab means the application is still open, and the Inactive tab means it is closed. At employers that follow UW–Madison's mapping, "Completed" on the Inactive tab means you were declined or the job was canceled, since both produce the same word.

The nine stages behind the label

Workday's administrator guide on setting up the recruiting workflow lists the stages of the Job Application business process: Review, Screen, Assessment, Interview, Reference Check, Background Check, Offer, Employment Agreement and Ready for Hire. "Workday automatically assigns candidates applying to a job to the Review stage", and the employer decides whether recruiters must move candidates through the stages in order or can jump between them.

The same guide explains why you see less than the recruiter does. Each stage has two optional labels: an Action Label Override that internal users see, and an External Label Override used in communications to candidates. Workday's own course manual for recruiting administrators gives the example directly: "In Progress" displays for candidates instead of Review, Screen or Interview. The collapse is a configuration choice Workday teaches, not a glitch on one employer's site.

What each stage typically means for you:

• Review: you are in the pile. Nobody has to have opened your file.
• Screen: a recruiter, a questionnaire or both are checking minimum qualifications. Workday's subprocess manual says a recruiter who declines you here is prompted for a disposition reason.
• Assessment and Interview: stages that involve you, through a test, a questionnaire or an interview invitation.
• Reference Check, Background Check, Offer, Employment Agreement: late stages. You would know about them.
• Ready for Hire: the hand-off to the hire process. A requisition can have one or several openings.

If your label says "In Progress" and nobody has contacted you, the realistic range is Review or Screen. Later stages involve you directly.

Why "In Progress" can sit there for weeks

The label stays put for four documented reasons, and none of them means your application is being read every day.

Steps are invisible. Inside each stage, Workday runs smaller steps (send a questionnaire, schedule an interview, collect feedback). The UW–Madison guide puts it plainly: updating the status and stage "will influence what they see in their Candidate Home account, while the Step does not." A recruiter can do a lot of work on your application without your screen changing.

Several stages share one label. With the External Label Override from the course manual, an application can move from Review to Screen to Interview while displaying "In Progress" the whole way. Your status only changes when you cross into a bucket the employer labeled differently.

Frozen jobs keep their old status. When a requisition is frozen (a budget hold, for example), UW–Madison's table shows the candidate keeps "the status they were in at the time". The job is on hold and the label does not say so.

Nobody has to close your application until the job closes. Workday documents two bulk clean-ups. When a candidate reaches Ready for Hire and no openings remain, Workday declines the other active applications on that requisition and closes their job application events. And an employer can configure Close Job Requisition to decline all candidates still in Review or Screen with the reason "Job Requisition Closed", mapped to Rejected. Until one of those runs, an application nobody chose to advance can stay "In Progress" for the life of the requisition.

The subprocess manual describes one more bulk action that catches people out: when you are hired, Workday can automatically decline all your other applications at the same employer. A sudden column of "Completed" entries after an offer is that rule.

Does Workday tell you if your application is rejected?

Only if the employer built that message. In Workday terms a rejection is a disposition: a reason the recruiter picks when declining you. The Create Recruiting Dispositions page shows each reason maps to one of two stages, Rejected or Declined by Candidate. To email declined candidates, the employer has to add a notification step to the Job Application process with the trigger "Trigger on Disposition". The same page offers a Candidate Label Override, so the reason you read in that email can differ from the reason the recruiter picked.

Employers make opposite choices here:

So check Candidate Home rather than waiting for an email. "Not Selected", "No longer under consideration" and "Completed" on the Inactive tab all mean the application is closed. If you can still see a Withdraw option, the application is open: Workday's withdrawal setup shows the button only at stages where the employer added a candidate-withdrawal disposition, so its absence alone proves nothing.

A rejection on one requisition says nothing about your other applications at the same employer. Each application is its own job application event with its own status.

What can screen you out before a recruiter reads your resume

Workday documents two mechanisms that can act at the Screen stage before a person looks closely at your file.

The first is the questionnaire. Workday's questionnaire setup notes say employers can "assign points to multiple choice questions to eliminate ineligible candidates and advance high scoring candidates". The page's own example reads: "A candidate gets low scores because of age threshold. Workday eliminates the candidate." Workday's create-a-questionnaire walkthrough deploys its example questionnaire at the screen stage "so that only eligible candidates are progressed to the next stage", and the companion scoring video gives "Yes" to a legal work-eligibility question 100 points and "No" zero. A "Not Selected" within minutes of applying, before a human could have read a resume, fits a scored answer: work authorization, a licence, location, years of experience. Re-read the posting's minimum qualifications against what you answered.

The second applies where the employer uses Workday's HiredScore features. HiredScore grades each candidate A to D against one requisition. Its candidate grades reference defines B as meeting all basic qualifications and D as not meeting most of them, judged on how closely the resume matches the job description. The documentation places the grade in Spotlight and the Pending Actions dashboard, both recruiter tools. Our guide to ATS scores explains what recruiters see, and the Workday lawsuit explainer covers the age-discrimination case over these tools.

Both mechanisms read what you typed or uploaded. Answers decide the questionnaire, and the resume text decides the grade. A grade built from resume text cannot credit a job title or certification the parser failed to extract. You can run the free ATS checker to see the text a parser pulls out of your file before you upload it to the next Workday form.

How to read your status and what to do next

Find the right Candidate Home. Workday careers sites live at addresses like workday.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Workday or, at the University of Washington, wd5.myworkdaysite.com/recruiting/uw/UWHires. Each employer sets up Candidate Home in its own Workday configuration; Workday's Candidate Home setup page even leaves it to the employer whether an account is required. Sign in on the careers site where you applied, and keep a list of those sites with the email you used on each.

Translate the label into a stage range. Use the table in the first section: Submitted or Received means Review, a generic In Progress with no contact means Review or Screen, and anything on the Inactive tab is closed.

Note the requisition number. The University of Washington's requisitions carry an ID such as REQ-0000…, and its jobs page asks candidates to include it in any question. The same page draws a line worth knowing everywhere: HR can help with the submission process, but "We do not have access to information about individual hiring decisions." Workday supplies the software while the employer configures it and makes the decision, so questions about a status go to the employer's HR or recruiting contact, not to Workday support.

Do not wait on one application. A status can sit at "In Progress" until the requisition closes, so the label is a poor signal of interest. If weeks of applications produce no interviews at all, our diagnosis guide for missing interviews works through knockout questions, parsing and keyword gaps in the order that costs least to fix.

What does In Progress mean on a Workday application?+

Your application is open and has moved past, or is still in, the first Review stage. Workday's administrator training shows employers how to display In Progress for Review, Screen and Interview alike, so the label alone does not tell you which. If nobody has contacted you, the realistic range is Review or Screen.

Does Workday tell you if your application is rejected?+

Only if the employer configured a notification that triggers on a disposition. UW–Madison tells its recruiters that changing a status sends nothing to the candidate; the City of Tucson says candidates are notified immediately. Check Candidate Home: Not Selected, No longer under consideration, or Completed on the Inactive tab all mean the application is closed.

What does Completed mean in Workday Candidate Home?+

At employers that follow the mapping in UW–Madison's guide, Completed on the Inactive tab means the application was declined for any reason other than your own withdrawal, or the job requisition was canceled. It does not mean you were hired.

What are the stages of a Workday application?+

Workday's Job Application business process uses Review, Screen, Assessment, Interview, Reference Check, Background Check, Offer, Employment Agreement and Ready for Hire. Every applicant starts in Review. Candidates see employer-chosen labels that group these stages.

How do I contact Workday support about my application?+

Contact the employer, not Workday. Workday provides the software; the employer's HR or recruiting team runs the requisition and owns the decision. Include the requisition number (REQ-) shown on the posting or in Candidate Home.

Key takeaways

• A Workday status is an employer-chosen label over nine internal stages, so treat it as a range, not a precise position.
• Active tab means open, Inactive tab means closed; "Completed" on the Inactive tab covers both rejections and canceled jobs.
• "In Progress" can last until the requisition closes, because steps inside a stage do not change your screen and Workday clears unchosen applicants in bulk.
• Rejection emails exist only where the employer added a disposition notification; check Candidate Home instead of your inbox.
• Fast rejections usually come from scored questionnaire answers at the Screen stage, while HiredScore grades, where licensed, are built from your resume text against one job's qualifications.