How to Apply to Workday Jobs Faster: 7 Steps
If you have applied to more than a handful of jobs this year, you have filled out a Workday application. It is the system behind the careers page at a large share of big companies, and it has one specific property that makes it slow: nothing you type into one company’s Workday carries over to the next one.
I know this in more detail than I would like. I am a computer science student at Montclair State, and over the past several months I built a browser extension that fills these forms in. To do that I had to work through the full application flow across dozens of different companies, reading how each one structures its fields.
This is what I would tell a friend who is applying to fifty roles this fall. Steps 1 through 6 cost nothing and need no software. Step 7 is the tool I built, and I put it last on purpose.
Why Workday applications feel slower than they should
Workday is not one website. Every company that uses it runs its own separate installation, called a tenant, on its own subdomain. You can see it in the URL: it always reads something like company.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com.
That single fact explains almost everything that frustrates people about applying through Workday:
- You need a separate account, with a separate password, for every company.
- The work history you entered at company A does not exist as far as company B is concerned.
- Your browser’s autofill helps on the first page and then mostly gives up, because Workday’s dropdowns and typeaheads are custom components rather than standard form fields.
Once you know that, the fixes stop being about typing faster and start being about not typing at all.
Step 1: Build one master answer sheet
This is the single highest-value thing on this list, and it takes about twenty minutes once.
Open a plain text file, not a Google Doc, so it opens instantly and pasting from it does not carry formatting. Fill in every one of these, because nearly all of them come up on nearly every Workday application:
Contact and identity
- Legal first, middle, and last name
- Preferred name, if you use one
- Phone number with country code
- Full street address, with the city spelled the way Workday’s address typeahead spells it
Work authorization
- Are you legally authorized to work in this country? Yes or no
- Will you now or in the future require sponsorship? Yes or no
For each job, going back as far as you list on your resume
- Employer name
- Job title
- Location, city and state
- Start date as MM/YYYY
- End date as MM/YYYY, or whether you currently work there
- Two or three lines of description you are happy to reuse
For each school
- Institution name, spelled the way it appears in Workday’s list
- Degree level
- Field of study
- Start and end year
- GPA, if you include it
Everything else
- Languages and your honest proficiency in each
- Certifications, with the issuing organization and the dates
- LinkedIn, GitHub, and portfolio URLs
- Self-identification answers: gender, race and ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, or “decline to answer” for any of them
- References: name, title, company, phone, email
- Desired salary, earliest start date, whether you will relocate
Keep this file open in a second window every time you apply. Most of the time you spend on a Workday application is not typing, it is remembering. The month you started a job four years ago, the exact name of your degree program, the phone number of a reference. Having all of it in one place removes that entirely.
Step 2: Check for “Use My Last Application” before you type anything
If you have applied to the same company before, Workday can copy your previous application forward. The option appears on the first screen of the application flow, before you start entering anything.
Two things worth knowing. It only works within the same tenant, so it does nothing when you move to a different company. And it copies your old answers exactly, which means if anything has changed since then, you need to go through and update it rather than clicking straight past.
This is also the reason for step 6 below.
Step 3: Let Workday parse your resume, then check its work
Most Workday applications offer to read your resume and fill the form from it. It is usually labelled “Autofill with Resume.”
Always use it, and always check every field afterward. In my experience it does a reasonable job on employer names and job titles, and a much less reliable job on dates and on anything that has to map to a dropdown. Dates are the ones to check first.
The realistic way to think about it: it saves you typing, not reviewing.
Step 4: Set up Chrome’s built-in autofill, and know where it stops
Chrome can fill your name, address, phone, and email. If you have not set it up, go to chrome://settings/autofill and add your details there.
That covers the first page of most applications and nothing after it. The reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason most generic autofill extensions struggle here too.
A normal web form uses standard HTML inputs, which a browser recognizes and can fill. Workday builds its dropdowns, typeaheads, multi-selects, and repeating sections as custom components instead. To the browser they are not really form fields, so autofill does not see anything to fill. That is why you can have autofill working perfectly and still be typing out your entire work history by hand.
Step 5: The four dropdowns that waste the most time
These are the ones I have watched cause the most trouble across different companies.
- Education level. Your bachelor’s degree might be listed as “Bachelor’s Degree,” “Bachelors,” “Undergraduate Degree,” or something more specific to that company. Type the first few letters, then pick from the list rather than typing the whole thing, because the field usually will not accept a value that does not match one of its options exactly.
- Language proficiency. Different companies label the same scale differently. Some use plain words. Some number them, like “5 - Fluent.” Some use CEFR codes such as B2 or C1. Decide once what your honest level is for each language and pick the closest equivalent every time, rather than re-deciding on each application.
- Date fields. Some companies pre-populate date fields with today’s date. If you tab past one without looking, you can submit an application saying you started your current job today. Check every date field before moving to the next page.
- Self-identification. The voluntary disclosure and self-identification pages vary a lot in wording, and on some of them the options are not mutually exclusive in the interface even when they are logically contradictory. Read the options rather than pattern-matching to the last version you saw.
Step 6: Apply to one company at a time, not one role at a time
If you are applying to several roles at the same company, do them in one sitting. After the first application at that tenant, “Use My Last Application” is available for the rest, so the second and third take a fraction of the time the first one did.
Doing it the other way around, one role each at five different companies, means five first applications and no reuse at all.
Step 7: Use an autofill extension built for Workday
Everything above helps. It also has a ceiling, because you are still manually entering your work history and education into every new company’s system.
That is the problem I built Restday to solve. It is a Chrome extension that stores your details in your own browser, and when you click Fill on a Workday application it fills in work experience, education, languages, skills, certifications, and websites, including the dropdowns that browser autofill cannot reach.
A few things that are true about it and worth stating plainly:
- Your information stays on your device. It is not sent to a server and there is no account to create.
- It does not submit anything. It fills the form and hands it back to you to review.
- It deliberately leaves company-specific and open-ended questions blank, because a generic answer to those can hurt an application more than it helps.
- It is desktop Chrome only, since Chrome extensions cannot run on phones.
- The first 15 fills are free.
Common questions
No. Each company runs its own separate Workday tenant, so you create an account per company. There is no shared profile across them.
Workday builds its dropdowns and repeating sections as custom components rather than standard HTML form fields, so browser autofill does not recognize them as things it can fill.
You can fill out the application on a phone, but browser extensions do not run on mobile Chrome or Safari, so any autofill tool is desktop only.
There is nothing in a submitted Workday application that indicates how the fields were entered. What a recruiter sees is the same either way. What matters is whether the information is accurate, which is why reviewing before you submit is not optional.
Applying directly is generally the more reliable route, since the application lands in the company’s own system rather than depending on a third party passing it along.
Restday is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Workday, Inc. Workday is a trademark of its respective owner.