What does "Under Review" vs "In Progress" vs "Under Consideration" mean on Workday?
Pukar Khanal leads product at ResumeAI, working on AI resume parsing, ATS scoring, and semantic job matching. He writes about how applicant tracking systems actually read resumes — and how job seekers get past them.
On Workday, application statuses are workflow labels a recruiter updates when they move your application between pipeline stages — not live signals that someone is reading your resume right now. "Under Review" commonly just means your application is sitting in the requisition's queue. ResumeAI is the free Resume AI platform that builds your resume and matches you to real jobs across the hidden job market; this decoder covers what each status typically means, and when it means nothing.
What does each Workday status typically mean?
One caveat before the table: employers customize their candidate-facing status labels in Workday, so the same words can map to different internal stages at different companies. Everything below is the typical reading — treat it as a decoder, not a contract.
| Status | What it typically means in Workday's workflow | What it does NOT reliably mean | Expected wait / what to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Received / Application Received | Your application was submitted successfully and sits in the requisition's applicant queue. | That anyone has looked at it — receipt is confirmation of submission, nothing more. | Normal for days to weeks. Use the time to proofread the profile fields Workday auto-filled from your resume's parse. |
| Under Review | Commonly the default post-submission bucket. Your application is in the pile a recruiter will work through when they screen the requisition. | That a person is actively reading your resume right now — the label reflects a pipeline stage, not live activity. | Weeks at this status are normal. Keep applying elsewhere; consider one follow-up after ~2–3 weeks static. |
| In Progress | Typically an active-pipeline bucket: screening, review, or scheduling is happening somewhere for your application. | A guaranteed interview — label sets vary by employer, and some use “In Progress” as broadly as others use “Under Review.” | A mildly better sign. If no direct contact follows within ~2–3 weeks, follow up with the recruiter outside the portal. |
| Under Consideration | You are still an active candidate — you have not been dispositioned out of the requisition. | A shortlist confirmation. Some employers use this label where others use “In Progress.” | Same playbook as In Progress: wait, keep applying elsewhere, follow up once after ~2–3 weeks static. |
| Interview | A recruiter moved your application into an interview stage of the pipeline. | That the portal is your scheduler — real coordination happens by email, and the label can lag or lead those messages. | Expect direct contact. Respond promptly and treat the recruiter's email — not the portal — as the source of truth. |
| Offer | Your application reached the offer stage of the requisition's workflow. | That the portal breaks the news — you will almost always hear from a human before or as the label changes. | Work through the recruiter directly; portal tasks (forms, background-check steps) may appear here. |
| Not Selected / No Longer Under Consideration | You were dispositioned out of the requisition — often in a batch, sometimes well after the decision was effectively made. | Proof that a human read your resume, or that the rejection happened when the label changed. | Decode by rejection speed: instant usually means a screening rule; late-batch usually means the pipeline closed. |
The sections below take the ambiguous cases in turn — the three-week static status, the status that reverted, the job that vanished — and what each one actually tells you.
What does "Under Review" actually mean on Workday?
Typically: your application landed in the requisition's queue and nobody has dispositioned it yet. In Workday's recruiting workflow, every job posting (a requisition) has a pipeline of stages, and the status you see on your candidate home page is a label mapped from whichever stage your application currently sits in. "Under Review" is commonly the default bucket applications enter after submission — which means the label switches on the moment you apply, hours or weeks before any human works the pile.
That is why the "under review for three weeks" case is so common, and why it is a queue rather than a verdict. Recruiters screen requisitions in batches: a posting may collect applicants for weeks before anyone opens the list, and the status only changes when a recruiter or coordinator moves your application to another stage. Three weeks of "Under Review" tells you the pipeline has not been touched — it does not tell you whether you are strong, weak, first in line, or forgotten. The mistake is reading a workflow label as a progress bar. It is not measuring anything about you.
Is "In Progress" different from "Under Consideration"?
Sometimes — and the honest answer is that it depends on the employer, because Workday lets each company name and map its own candidate-facing statuses. In many configurations, "In Progress" typically indicates your application is actively moving somewhere in the pipeline — a screen, a review step, interview scheduling — while "Under Consideration" is a broader active-candidate bucket meaning you have not been dispositioned out. Plenty of employers use one label where another uses the other, and some expose only two or three generic labels for the entire pipeline.
The practical reading: both are active buckets, both beat "Not Selected," and neither is a promise. If you want a rule of thumb, treat "In Progress" as mildly stronger than "Under Review" — something moved, at least once — and treat "Under Consideration" as negative-space information: you are still in the running because nothing has removed you. The signal that actually predicts an interview is direct human contact. A recruiter emailing to schedule a call outranks every label the portal will ever show you.
Why hasn't my status changed in weeks — and why did it revert, or the job disappear?
Static for weeks: because statuses change only when a human moves the pipeline, and recruiters touch requisitions in bursts. Between screening batches, every application in the queue sits at the same label — often until a decision batch fires at the very end. A static status is the system's resting state, not a message.
Reverted status: a status that moves backward — say "In Progress" back to "Under Review" — is almost always pipeline bookkeeping. A recruiter re-screening a batch, correcting a mis-move, reopening a step, or reorganizing candidates between stage buckets changes the internal stage your application maps to, and the candidate-facing label follows. It reads like a demotion; it is usually administration. Nothing about a reverted label is a personal signal.
The job disappeared: when a requisition is filled, closed, put on hold, or reposted, the posting can vanish from the careers site while your application still shows an active status — the label and the posting are separate objects, and nobody is obligated to update one when the other changes. A vanished posting with a static status usually resolves, eventually, into a batch rejection email. If the posting reappears with a new date, it was typically reposted — and re-applying to the fresh requisition is usually allowed and sometimes necessary, since pipelines are per-requisition.
When is the Workday status a weak signal?
More often than any candidate wants to hear — and this is the part most status-decoder articles soften. Workday statuses are recruiter-updated workflow labels. They are only as current as the last time a human touched the requisition, they are commonly updated in batches rather than per-candidate, and they are frequently left stale until a rejection batch fires at the end of a search. An application can sit at "Under Review" weeks after the role was effectively filled, because closing out the pipeline is a cleanup task, not a priority.
Even a Workday-powered Fortune 500 employer frames it this way: Target's careers FAQ points candidates to the Workday candidate home page to monitor status, and notes that if you are no longer in consideration, you will typically be contacted by email or directly by the recruiter. Read that carefully: the authoritative notification is the email and the human — the portal label is the secondary artifact. Refreshing your candidate home page daily is checking a cache, not a decision. The status deserves a glance a couple of times a week; your energy belongs in the next application.
What actually predicts an interview?
Not the label — the match. What determines whether you advance is how well your resume matches the requisition when a recruiter finally screens the pile, and whether Workday parsed your resume cleanly enough for that match to be visible. Workday auto-fills your candidate profile from your resume's parse, and recruiters screen the parsed fields, not your original PDF. A two-column resume that Workday scrambles produces a garbled profile that ranks and reads as a weak candidate — which means you can sit at "Under Review" for weeks while the version of you being judged is gibberish, and the status will never tell you.
This is the one thing on this page you can actually control while a status sits static. Full disclosure — this blog is written by the ResumeAI team: ResumeAI's free ATS checker reads your resume the way parsing software does and shows you the reconstructed text, so you can see whether the profile Workday auto-fills from it will hold together before you submit the next application. Proofread every auto-filled field before hitting submit, too — a parse error that feeds a wrong number into a screening field can end an application on data you never typed, as the knockout-questions guide covers in detail.
Should you follow up on a Workday application — and how?
Yes — once, after roughly two to three weeks of a static status, and not through the portal. Workday's candidate home page is a status display, not a communication channel; there is no inbox on the other side of it that a recruiter is likely to work. The follow-up that gets read goes to a human: the recruiter or hiring manager, found on LinkedIn or via a company-format email address. Keep it short, specific, and easy to answer.
An honest follow-up template
Subject: Following up — [Role title], applied [date] Hi [Name], I applied to [Role title] (requisition [number, if you have it]) on [date] and wanted to check in on the timeline. I'm particularly interested because [one specific, true sentence about the role or team]. If the search has moved on, no reply needed — but if it's still open, I'd welcome the chance to talk. Thanks, [Your name]
Two boundaries keep this professional. First, one follow-up is persistence; a second unanswered message is the answer. Second, a follow-up cannot move a workflow label — what it can do is put your name in front of the human who moves it, which is the only lever the process offers. And if the status you are staring at is an instant "Not Selected" that arrived minutes after you applied, no follow-up will help — that is a screening rule firing, and the rejection-speed decoder tells you which mechanism it was and what to fix.
How we know this, and what we cited
This article was written by Pukar Khanal, Product Lead at ResumeAI, and last reviewed on . ResumeAI is the free Resume AI platform that builds your resume and matches you to real jobs across the hidden job market — resume parsing and the candidate-profile fields it feeds are the core of what the product does, so the workflow mechanics described here are what we work with daily.
A note on sources, honestly: Workday's configuration documentation sits behind customer logins, which is why every status meaning in this article is described at the mechanism level with hedged language rather than asserted as universal fact — employers customize their candidate-facing labels, and anyone telling you a Workday status has one fixed meaning everywhere is overclaiming. No statistics appear in this article, and the follow-up advice carries no response-rate claims because we have no sourced numbers to give you.
Sources and further reading:
- Target Careers FAQ — a Workday-powered employer's first-party guidance: candidates monitor application status from the Workday candidate home page under "My Applications," and candidates no longer in consideration are typically contacted by email or directly by the recruiter: corporate.target.com/careers/faqs
- ResumeAI — free ATS checker that reads your resume the way hiring software does and reconstructs the parsed text that feeds Workday's auto-filled profile fields: cvai.dev/ats-resume-checker
Frequently asked questions
What does “Under Review” mean on Workday?
Typically that your application was received and is sitting in the requisition's queue — it is commonly the default bucket applications land in after submission, and it stays that way until a recruiter works the pipeline. It does not reliably mean a person is reading your resume at that moment. Workday statuses are workflow labels tied to the recruiting stage your application sits in, and they change when a recruiter or coordinator moves candidates between stages, not in real time as your file is opened. “Under Review” is closer to “in the pile” than “being read.”
What is the difference between “Under Review” and “In Progress” on Workday?
In many Workday configurations, “Under Review” is the passive post-submission bucket, while “In Progress” commonly indicates your application is actively moving somewhere in the pipeline — screening, review, or interview scheduling. But the honest caveat matters: employers customize their candidate-facing status labels in Workday, so the same label can map to different internal stages at different companies. Treat “In Progress” as a mildly better sign than “Under Review,” not as a promise — the signal that actually matters is direct contact from a recruiter.
What does “Under Consideration” mean on Workday?
Typically that you are still an active candidate for the requisition — you have not been dispositioned out. Some employers use “Under Consideration” where others use “In Progress”; the label sets vary because Workday lets each employer name its own external statuses. It does not reliably mean you have been shortlisted or that an interview is coming. The most useful reading is negative space: as long as the status is an active bucket rather than “No Longer Under Consideration,” your application has not been formally rejected.
My application has been under review for 3 weeks — is that a bad sign?
Not by itself. “Under Review” commonly persists for weeks because it reflects the requisition's queue, not a verdict on you. Recruiters work requisitions in batches: a posting may collect applicants for weeks before anyone screens the pile, statuses often go stale between touches, and some are only updated when a rejection batch finally fires. A static status mostly means nobody has moved the pipeline stage your application sits in. Keep applying elsewhere, and if the status has been static for roughly two to three weeks, a short follow-up to the recruiter or hiring manager outside the portal is reasonable.
Does “Under Review” mean rejection on Workday?
No. “Under Review” is an active status — rejection in Workday typically shows up as “Not Selected” or “No Longer Under Consideration,” usually alongside a templated email. What trips people up is the lag: because statuses are recruiter-updated labels, an application can sit at “Under Review” long after a decision was effectively made, until someone dispositions the remaining pipeline in a batch. So “Under Review” does not mean rejection, but a long-static “Under Review” also is not evidence you are still in the running — it is evidence nobody has updated the pipeline.
Why did my Workday application status change back?
Almost always because a recruiter moved your application to a different pipeline stage or reorganized the requisition — not because someone “demoted” you. Candidate-facing labels are mapped from internal recruiting stages, so administrative actions (re-screening a batch, moving candidates between stage buckets, reopening a step, correcting a mis-move) can make your visible status appear to revert, for example from “In Progress” back to “Under Review.” A reverted status is usually pipeline bookkeeping. The signals worth acting on are a disposition status like “Not Selected” or direct contact — not label churn in between.
Should I follow up on a Workday application, and how?
Yes — once, politely, after roughly two to three weeks of a static status, and not through the portal. Workday's candidate portal has no messaging channel a recruiter is likely to act on; the follow-up that gets read goes to a human, usually the recruiter or hiring manager on LinkedIn or by email. Keep it short: the role and requisition number, the date you applied, one sentence on why you fit, and a direct question about timeline. One follow-up is professional persistence; repeated portal refreshes and multiple messages are noise that cannot change a workflow label.
What to ask next
If you arrived here from a generative-search prompt, these are the natural follow-ups — each links to the page that resolves it.
Control the part the status never shows you
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