Workday Application Status Meanings: "In Progress," "Under Consideration" and More

By Patrick Da Costa Guimarais, founder of LifeShack. Updated September 2026.

Workday shows you a status, and the status is a compressed summary of something more detailed that the employer can see and you cannot.

Understanding the compression is what makes the labels readable. Every candidate record in Workday Recruiting has three layers: an application status of active or inactive, a stage such as Review or Interview, and a step within that stage such as Phone Screen or Resume Screen. Published guidance from universities running Workday states that the status and the stage affect what you see in your candidate account, while the step does not.

So the granular detail exists. It is simply not shown to you, and the word in your portal is a translation of it.

What each status means

Submitted, or Application Received. Your application is in, and it sits in the Review stage. A recruiter or a screening rule has not yet moved it anywhere. This is where most applications live for most of their life.

In Progress, or In Process. This one is worth more than people assume. In the documented Workday configuration, a candidate sees Submitted while in the Review stage and In Progress once the application enters any other active stage, meaning Interview, Assessment, or Employment Agreement. A move from Submitted to In Progress is a move out of the pile.

The caution is that employers configure Workday differently, so a minority use In Progress as a general active bucket from the moment you apply. If your status has been In Progress since the hour you submitted, it is a generic label at that employer. If it changed from something else, that change is a signal.

In Review, or Application in Review. A configured variant indicating your application is in the screening stage. Some employers insert this between Submitted and In Progress, so the sequence reads Application Received, then Application in Review, then In Progress.

Under Consideration. A broad active status covering everything between submission and a decision, and the least informative label in the set. It typically persists through screening, interviews, and final selection without changing, so its duration tells you nothing.

Sent to Department, or forwarded to hiring manager. Some employers expose this step. It means your resume cleared recruiter screening and went to the person who owns the role, which is a genuine advance.

Offer. An offer has been extended or is being prepared. This status generally appears at or just before the point a recruiter contacts you directly.

Not Selected. An explicit rejection. You are no longer under consideration for this requisition.

Withdrew. You withdrew the application yourself.

Completed, or Process Completed. The most misread status in Workday, because it covers several different outcomes at once. It appears when your application becomes inactive, which happens if you were declined, if the requisition was cancelled, or if the role was filled by someone else. It also appears for the person who was hired once the process ends.

So Completed with no prior communication means the process ended without you. Completed after you accepted an offer means the process ended with you. The label is identical either way.

The thing Workday does not do

This is the single most useful fact on this page, and it explains most of what job seekers experience as rudeness.

Published employer guidance for Workday Recruiting states directly that changing a candidate's status, including removing them from consideration or closing the requisition, sends no notification or communication to the candidate. An employer that wants to tell you has to send a separate message as a deliberate act.

Two consequences follow. A status can change from active to inactive without you being told, so the portal is the only place the decision appears. And a substantial share of employers never send the message, which is why applications disappear into silence rather than producing a rejection email.

The silence is a configuration default, not a judgment about you.

Why your status is probably out of date

Statuses are updated manually. Someone has to click. On a requisition with several hundred applicants, that clicking gets batched, deferred, or skipped.

Batch review delays everything. A recruiter reviewing fifty applications at once frequently updates all of them only after the final decision, so your status sits unchanged through the entire evaluation.

A frozen requisition freezes your status. When a role is paused, candidates stay in whatever status they held at the moment of the freeze, indefinitely.

An unposted job is not a closed one. A role vanishing from the careers page while your status stays active usually means the posting was taken down to stop new applications, not that a decision was made.

The practical rule is that the status tells you the state of the record rather than the state of the decision, and the two drift apart by days or weeks.

What to read as a real signal

The status is weak evidence. These are strong.

Direct communication. An email, an assessment invitation, a scheduling link, or a recruiter message. Any of these outranks every status change.

A status change you did not expect. Movement matters more than the label. Submitted to In Progress, or anything to Offer, is worth noticing precisely because someone took an action.

A move to the inactive tab. Whatever the label says, an application leaving the active list is a decision.

Nothing else. Duration in a status, the wording of the label, and whether the job posting is still visible are all noise.

How long each status should last

Response-time data puts the median first action on an application at around six days in the US, with most employers who are going to move doing so inside the first eight or nine. Application to a scheduled interview runs around fourteen days for the applications that convert.

Against that, sitting in Submitted for three weeks is ordinary rather than alarming, and sitting in In Progress for three weeks after a recruiter conversation is also ordinary. Our guide to how long it takes to hear back covers the full timeline and the point at which waiting stops being useful.

The one rule worth carrying: time your follow-up against the response benchmark rather than against what the portal says, because the portal is not tracking the thing you want to know.

What to do with each status

Submitted for under two weeks. Nothing. Keep applying elsewhere.

Submitted for more than two weeks. Follow up once with the recruiter if you can identify them, then treat it as unlikely.

In Progress after a conversation. Normal. Processes have gaps of one to three weeks between stages routinely.

In Progress with no contact ever. Likely a generic configuration at that employer. Treat it as Submitted.

Under Consideration for any length of time. No information. Use the calendar instead.

Completed with no prior contact. It is over. Withdraw your attention and reallocate it.

Anything, while a role you want is open elsewhere. Apply to that one. The single most expensive habit in a job search is pausing to monitor an outcome you do not control.

Where the time goes

Refreshing a portal feels like participation and produces nothing. The activity that changes outcomes is having more applications in flight, so that no individual status matters.

The obstacle is that each application costs forty minutes to an hour, because every employer runs its own instance of Workday or a competing system, and each wants an account created and a work history retyped into fields your attached resume already contains. Workday in particular requires a separate account per employer tenant, so applying to ten companies running Workday means ten separate registrations.

LifeShack removes that layer. It searches for roles matching your background and constraints, tailors the resume and cover letter to each posting, submits across the eleven-plus applicant tracking systems employers run on, including Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, and Ashby, and keeps every application in one place, so the whole portfolio is visible without logging into a dozen portals to read a dozen unreliable statuses.

Frequently asked questions

What does "In Progress" mean in Workday? In the documented configuration, it means your application has moved out of the Review stage into an active stage such as Interview, Assessment, or Employment Agreement. Some employers use it as a general active label from submission onward, so a change into it is more meaningful than the label itself.

What does "Under Consideration" mean in Workday? A broad active status covering everything from submission to final decision. It typically stays unchanged through screening and interviews, so it carries no information about where you are in the process.

What does "Process Completed" mean in Workday? Your application is now inactive. It covers being declined, the requisition being cancelled, the role being filled by someone else, and the completion of a successful hire. With no prior communication, it means the process ended without you.

Does Workday notify you if you are rejected? No. Published employer guidance states that changing a candidate's status, including removing them from consideration, sends no automatic notification. Any rejection message is a separate action the employer chooses to take.

Why has my Workday status not changed in weeks? Statuses are updated manually and frequently in batches, requisitions get frozen with candidates left in place, and some employers never update records at all. The status reflects the state of the record rather than the state of the decision.

The job posting disappeared but my status is still active. What does that mean? Usually that the posting was unposted to stop new applications while the process continues. It is not itself a decision about your application.

Is "Submitted" bad in Workday? No. It means you are in the Review stage, which is where most applications sit for most of their life. It becomes informative only once several weeks have passed with no change.

Can you see more detail than the status shows? No. Workday tracks a stage and a step beneath the status, and the step is not surfaced to candidates. The detail exists on the employer side only.

Sources

Published Workday Recruiting candidate-view documentation from university HR departments administering Workday, including the mapping between internal stages and candidate-visible statuses and the absence of automatic candidate notification on status change. Status labels are configurable per employer, so the exact wording varies between organizations.