Workday · what the documentation says

What a Workday application status actually tells you

Workday documentation last checked on September 5, 2026. Every factual claim below is sourced from Workday’s own published documentation, linked at the end.

The short answer

Labels like Under Consideration, In Progress, Under Review and Not Retained are chosen and configured by the employer, not fixed by Workday, so the same words can mean different stages at two companies and no universal decoder exists. Workday's own documentation tells employers to configure disposition reasons through a Maintain Recruiting Dispositions task and to configure offer statuses through a Maintain Offer and Employment Agreement Statuses task, and it does not publish candidate-facing definitions for those four labels. This page answers each of them the only way the evidence allows: what the wording can and cannot establish, and what to do next.

The Workday labels people search for

Workday does not publish a candidate-facing definition for these, and the wording belongs to the employer. Each one below says what it can and cannot establish, and what to do about it.

What does Under Consideration mean on Workday?

It means your employer has an application stage they have named Under Consideration, and your application is currently in it. Workday does not publish a candidate-facing definition of this label, and the wording is the employer's: Workday's documentation directs customers to configure disposition reasons and offer statuses through their own setup tasks. At one company this stage can begin the moment an application is submitted; at another it can start only after a recruiter has opened the file. Both are Under Consideration, and the label alone cannot tell you which one you are in.

No definition of this label was found in Workday’s own documentation in the sources reviewed.

What it does not establish

That a human has read your application. The stage may be entered automatically on submission.
That you passed a screening filter. Pages claiming this label proves an ATS pass are asserting something Workday does not document.
That you are shortlisted, ranked, or preferred over other applicants.
How long the stage normally lasts, which is a function of the employer's process rather than the label.

What to do now: Treat it as submitted and unresolved. If the posting or your confirmation email gave a timeline, that timeline is real information and the label is not — use it. Keep applying elsewhere in the meantime.

What does In Progress mean on Workday?

In Progress usually indicates that something about your application is unfinished or still moving, but which of those two it means depends entirely on the employer's configuration. On some career sites it marks an application you started and never submitted, which is worth checking first because it is the one case you can still act on. On others it is the ordinary state of a submitted application working through the employer's stages. Workday does not publish a candidate-facing definition, so the honest first move is to open the application and see whether a submit step is still outstanding.

No definition of this label was found in Workday’s own documentation in the sources reviewed.

What it does not establish

Whether the progress is yours to make or the employer's. Check whether your own application is actually submitted before assuming it is with them.
That anyone is actively working on it right now.
That the process is advancing rather than simply open.

What to do now: Open your candidate account and confirm the application is submitted rather than saved as a draft. If it is submitted, treat it exactly as you would any unresolved application.

What does Under Review mean on Workday?

It means the employer has a stage called Under Review and your application sits in it. Workday does not define this label for candidates, and employers name their own stages, so the word review does not by itself establish that a person is reading your file. It is worth saying plainly because the phrasing invites the opposite assumption: a stage can be named Under Review and still be entered automatically.

No definition of this label was found in Workday’s own documentation in the sources reviewed.

What it does not establish

That a specific person has opened your application.
That review is happening now rather than scheduled, queued, or stalled.
That a decision is close.

What to do now: The same as any unresolved application: rely on any timeline the employer actually gave you, and keep the rest of your search moving rather than waiting on this one.

What does Not Retained mean on Workday?

Not Retained is the wording many employers choose for a closing disposition — the application is no longer moving forward for that requisition. Workday does not publish this label as a fixed candidate-facing definition; its documentation instead tells customers to configure disposition reasons themselves, which is why the exact phrase varies between employers who all mean something similar. Where it differs importantly from the labels above is that it reads as an ending rather than a stage, so the reasonable response is different: stop waiting on it.

No definition of this label was found in Workday’s own documentation in the sources reviewed.

What it does not establish

Why the decision was made. A closing disposition carries a reason internally, and that reason is not shown to you.
That your resume was the problem, or that any particular part of your application was.
That you were ranked below a specific other candidate.
That the role was filled. Requisitions are also closed, paused, or cancelled.
That you should not apply to this employer again.

What to do now: Mark the application closed in your tracker and move the effort to live applications. If several applications are ending at this same point, that pattern is worth diagnosing — one rejection is noise, a repeated stage is a signal.

Portal labels are inconsistent between employers, which makes them a poor thing to run a search on. Record what you actually observed instead — applied, replied, interviewed, closed — and the pattern across applications becomes readable even when one label is not. If several applications keep stopping at the same point, that pattern is the thing worth diagnosing.

What Workday documents

Paraphrased from Workday's own public documentation, not from third-party guides.

What resume parsing is for: Workday documents resume parsing as a way to create a prospect or job application from an attached resume, available on tasks such as Create Job Application and Create Prospect. It populates fields from the resume and, in Workday's words, lets you "review the resume data" — a data-entry step with a human looking at the result, not an automatic verdict.
Fields it will not auto-fill: Workday's documentation states that parsing does not auto-fill fields configured as hidden, and specifically does not auto-fill Languages or Skills. That is worth knowing before assuming a skills list alone carries your application.
Format affects the result: Workday states directly that parsing results "can vary based on resume format and order of words", and recommends resumes without images or image-based styles. This is a vendor telling you, in its own documentation, that formatting changes what gets extracted.
Employers can switch it off for applicants: Job application templates can be configured to hide resume parsing for external candidates while keeping it for recruiters. So whether parsing even runs on your application is an employer setting.
Dispositions and statuses are set up by the employer: Workday's Recruiting Subprocesses documentation tells customers to configure disposition reasons through a "Maintain Recruiting Dispositions" task, and offer statuses through a "Maintain Offer and Employment Agreement Statuses" task. That is the vendor stating, in its own admin documentation, that the wording and the reasons behind these labels are the employer's to define — which is why no page, including this one, can publish a universal table of what they mean.
The statuses Workday itself sets: The same documentation does name a few statuses Workday sets during its own subprocesses — it describes Workday setting a candidate's status to Assessment, Reference Check, Background Check and Offer as those steps run. Notably, the four labels people search for most — Under Consideration, In Progress, Under Review and Not Retained — are not among them, and the documentation does not define what any status means to a candidate.

What the employer configures, not the software

This is the reason no page can hand you a table of status meanings, including this one.

Which statuses exist and what they are called, including the external labels a candidate sees.
Which stages and questionnaires an application passes through, and in what order.
Whether resume parsing is shown to external applicants at all.
How and when candidates are notified, and how much of the internal process is ever surfaced.

What you can actually observe

The status label the employer has chosen to expose to you, and changes to it over time.
Whatever the employer configured to appear in the candidate-facing view for their site.
Your own submitted application and attachments.

What nobody outside the company can know

Including us. We would rather be useful about the limits than confident about things we cannot see.

What a specific status label means at a specific employer. It is their wording for their process, and two companies can use the same word for different stages.
Whether a human has read your application, and when.
How your application was ranked, if it was ranked at all.
Whether a change in status reflects a decision about you or a routine bulk process step.
We cannot tell you any of this either, which is why this page does not publish a table of status meanings. The pages that do are guessing.

What you can actually test

Whether the text in your resume file can be machine-extracted at all, which fields survive that extraction, and which format patterns put your structure at risk. Workday's own guidance about avoiding image-based styles is exactly the kind of thing our extraction pass makes visible: if the text does not come out for us, that is a real signal, independent of any employer's configuration.

Free, no account, and your resume is not saved. It is our own diagnostic, not Workday’s parser — which is exactly why we only claim what it can observe.

Our view

The useful question is not what your status label means. It is whether one application is worth this much of your attention. Refreshing a status page is the least productive hour in a job search, and a label you cannot decode is not information. Make sure your resume is readable, then spend the effort on deciding which roles deserve it.

RoleSprint is a job-search product, so read that as a commercial opinion. It is also the argument we would make if we sold nothing: a readable resume is table stakes, and the decision that changes your search is which roles you spend your hours on.

Check whether a specific role is worth applying to Work out what one application actually costs you

And if several applications have gone quiet rather than just this one, the question is no longer about any single status page — read the roles you are chasing as one target market instead.

Sources

Workday's own documentation. Not nofollowed — these are genuine citations supporting the claims above.