Any time I talk to someone about the worst part of applying to jobs, it's when they come across Workday as the ATS. Compared with other platforms, it's by far the most onerous in terms having to create an account, which you only use once, and filling in pages of information. Let me share with you some secrets about how Workday is often used by employers.
Workday is the largest ATS platform by market share and is often used by the largest companies (i.e. "enterprise"). Its primary mission is not about hiring people. It is foremost an HR database, designed to handle employee records, org charts, payroll, benefits, time tracking, and recruiting. What makes Workday so frustrating to use is that it's designed for the recruiter and not for the candidate.
The reason Workday seems to "force" you to cut and paste every detail from your resume into their system is because (1) their resume parser is truly terrible and (2) you are their willing database entry slave because you want that job. Workday's "sell" to large employers is that their HR department can search through millions of current employees, past employees, and past applicants to surface potential people they can reach out to, for different jobs. The chances of that actually happening to you, though, is very slim.
So, what should you do? According to a recruiter I spoke with, she said when she personally applies to a job and sees the Workday UI, she simply skips all optional fields, the ones without an * asterisk. The human recruiter and hiring manager reads your PDF application, they do not see the text boxes you entered. HR managers have Workday accounts, but hiring managers don't, so recruiters typically forward your resume in your original PDF format. That's another reason to not use Word, because Word documents look different on different screens, and can be missing fonts and other elements.
In fact, Workday's "AI" is a company they acquired, HiredScore AI, which does a database search to find old candidates and assign them a grade.
Workday is currently under a class action lawsuit alleging discrimination on hiring, due to the use of AI. Read more about it here: https://fairnow.ai/workday-lawsuit-resume-screening/
Next time you come across a site that uses Workday, save yourself 10 minutes and don't cut and paste your resume into text boxes. Don't be their database entry slave.
