How to apply for a job on Workday

Workday is the recruiting system behind many large employers' career sites. You can tell you are on one when the address ends in myworkdayjobs.com or myworkdaysite.com. Three things set it apart from the one-page forms of Greenhouse or Lever:

• An account per employer. Every company runs its own Workday, and an account at one does not sign you in at another. Ten applications to ten Workday employers means ten accounts.
• A form of several pages. A progress bar at the top names the steps, and one button at the bottom reads Save and Continue (or Next) until the last page, where the same button reads Submit.
• Structured history. Workday asks for your work experience and education as separate entries, each with its own title, company, dates and description, even after you upload a resume.

None of this is hard, but it is slow, and the account step is where most people lose track. The rest of this guide walks through each page in the order Workday usually shows them. Employers configure their own questions, so the exact pages you see can differ.

On the posting, press Apply. Workday often offers more than one way to begin: starting from your resume, using your last application at that employer, or applying manually. Applying manually gives you a blank form you fill yourself; the resume option has Workday read your file and fill what it can, which you then have to check line by line anyway.

Before you start, have these ready: the resume you want this employer to see (as a PDF), your work history with month and year for each start and end date, your education, and your answers to the questions most employers ask, such as whether you need visa sponsorship and what salary you expect. Our guide to answering application questions covers those.

Next comes the account page. If you have never applied to this employer, choose Create Account and enter an email, a password, the password again, and tick the box that you agree to the employer's terms. If you have applied before, Sign In with what you used then. Some employers then email you a link or a code to verify the address before the form opens.

A few habits save a lot of trouble later:

• Use the same email everywhere. Recruiters reply to it, and you will need it to sign back in and check the status of your application.
• Use a different password for each employer. Each account is separate, so a leaked password at one employer opens only that one. Keep them somewhere you can find them.
• If Workday says the email already has an account, you applied to this employer before. Switch to Sign In, and use Forgot your password if you do not remember it.

My Information

How you heard about the job, whether you have worked for the employer before, your legal name, address, email and phone with its type and country code. Some employers add a preferred name. Workday's drop-downs often open a list you have to scroll or search, and the country you pick changes which address fields show.

My Experience

Work experience entries (job title, company, location, whether you work there now, from and to dates, a description), education entries (school, degree, field of study, dates), languages, skills, a resume upload and links such as your LinkedIn profile. If you uploaded a resume earlier, check what Workday parsed: dates and titles are the usual mistakes. Our guide to how an ATS parses a resume explains why.

Application Questions

The employer's own questions. Expect right to work and sponsorship, willingness to relocate, notice period, salary expectations and questions about the role, many of them required. Answer the facts about you exactly; a wrong answer to a sponsorship question can end the application on its own.

Voluntary Disclosures and Self Identify

Equal employment questions such as gender, ethnicity and veteran status, often with a terms box, and on many US forms a separate page asking whether you have a disability. These answers are voluntary and every question has an option to decline. Read any terms box on this page: by pressing Submit, you are the one agreeing to it.

Review and Submit

A read-only summary of everything you entered. Open each section and check it, because once you press Submit the application goes to the employer and you cannot take it back. You can usually see its status later by signing in to the same account.

Jobapplier's browser extension works in your own Chrome, on the Workday page you opened. When you press Autofill in its panel, it goes as far as Workday lets it on your behalf:

1. It presses Apply and then the apply manually option, so you start from a blank form it can fill.
2. On the account page it types your sign-up email and a strong password made for this employer alone, and points at the agreement and the Create Account button. It ticks and presses nothing there. If Workday says the email already has an account, the panel switches to Sign In and tells you; if a password was refused before, it points at Forgot your password.
3. Once you are in, it fills each page from your Jobapplier profile: your contact details, each job and school as its own entry, the resume, and answers to the employer's questions written from your profile and your Application answers card. Every answer the AI wrote is marked so you can find it.
4. When nothing required on a page is empty, it presses Save and Continue and fills the next page. It only presses the button while the progress bar places the page before the last, and only when the button reads as a Next: the site's own words first, and on a page in another language the AI names which control is Next.
5. It stops at Review. The last Submit is yours: press Submit Application in the panel, or Workday's own Submit on the page. The panel's button stays disabled, and says why, while a required field is empty.

The email and password it used show in the panel under Sign-up Information, hidden until you press Show, with a Copy button, and again on the application's Review page in Jobapplier under “Your account at” the employer. The account is yours: you can sign in at the employer without us. Before an account is opened you can change the sign-up email (for every employer) or the password (for this one) in the panel. If you type a password of your own on Workday's page instead, the panel asks whether to save it; answer Not now and it never leaves your browser.

For a resume made for this one posting, press Apply with tailored resume instead of Autofill: the posting's own resume, named Resume.pdf, goes into every resume field of the form. See how to tailor a resume to a job description.

Some steps are the person's by design, and the extension leaves them alone:

• ticking the account agreement and pressing Create Account or Sign In
• the verification link or code an employer emails you; Jobapplier does not read your mail
• any CAPTCHA the page shows
• a photo or video, if an employer asks for one
• the final Submit

Anything you type into a field yourself counts as yours at once, and the extension does not write over it. If a setting in the extension turns a kind of field off, that field stays empty with the reason shown in the panel, even when it is required, and Submit waits for you to fill it.

Jobapplier's cloud Agent does not apply on Workday. Workday applications are filled in your own browser, with you at the account step and at Submit.

• Fill your history once, in one place. Workday asks for every job and school as an entry. If your profile already holds them with months, the extension fills each entry and you only check them.
• Watch the dates. Workday wants a month and a year, and a role you still hold needs the “I currently work here” box instead of an end date.
• Read the red banner. When Save and Continue does nothing, Workday has marked a field in error, often a drop-down left on Select One. Fix it and continue.
• Answer equal employment questions once. Store your answers on your Application answers card and the extension uses them on every form. If the card leaves one open, the extension's setting “Let AI give its best answer” decides: on, which is the default, the AI picks an answer; off, it picks the form's decline option or the most neutral one. Either way you see it before you submit.
• Keep the account details. You will need them to check the application's status, to withdraw it or to apply again at the same employer.

The extension is for Chrome and is not in the Chrome Web Store yet. You connect it to your account under Settings, Login & Security, Your Browsers.