New Workday Candidate Profile lets job seekers save their information once and reuse it on every Workday application

Workday is taking aim at one of hiring's most persistent frustrations: the requirement that job seekers re-enter the same personal and professional details every time they apply to a new employer.

Announced at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas on October 13, Workday Candidate Profile will allow job seekers to store their contact information, work history, education, and skills in a single portable profile and use it to auto-fill applications at any of the thousands of companies that run recruiting on Workday's platform.

**How it works for candidates** When a job seeker encounters the Workday Candidate Profile sign-in option on a company's career site, they authenticate with their email address and a one-time code — no new password to remember. According to Workday, approximately 80% of standard application fields will already be populated before the candidate types a word. Candidates retain full control: they can review, edit, and supplement any pre-filled information, and they decide what each individual employer sees. The company says the flow will make applying around 40% faster compared with completing the same form manually.

The feature is also accessible via mobile, a detail Workday explicitly highlighted for hourly and frontline workers, who disproportionately rely on smartphones during job searches.

Workday was deliberate in clarifying what the profile does not do: it plays no role in ranking, recommending, or rejecting candidates. It is strictly a data-portability and form-fill tool.

**Why this matters for employers** Application drop-off is a costly recruiting problem. Workday cited industry data suggesting 60% of candidates abandon applications because of length and friction — meaning employers who invest in sourcing and attracting talent often lose candidates before a single application is even submitted. Workday Candidate Profile, the company argues, will increase the share of started applications that get completed and improve the quality of submitted data, reducing the recruiter follow-up needed to chase missing information.

Critically for enterprise buyers, Workday says employers will not need to reconfigure their career sites, screening questions, or existing recruiting workflows to benefit. The profile integrates into the existing apply flow without requiring changes on the employer side.

**Analyst perspective** Kyle Lagunas, founder and principal analyst at Kyle & Co., characterized the announcement as a practical advancement in hiring UX. "For as long as I've worked in talent acquisition, we've asked job seekers to prove who they are from scratch every time they apply," Lagunas said in the release. "Workday Candidate Profile flips that. Job seekers bring their story with them, and recruiters start the conversation with context instead of a blank form."

**Availability and context** Workday Candidate Profile is expected to reach general availability for Workday Recruiting customers in early calendar year 2027. The announcement was made alongside Workday's broader agentic AI narrative at Rising 2026, which also featured the company's Talent Acquisition Agent and Autopilot Agents — pointing to a product strategy that pairs friction-reduction tools for candidates with AI-driven automation for recruiting teams.

With more than 11,500 organizations — including over 65% of the Fortune 500 — reportedly running on Workday, the cross-employer portability of the candidate profile could accumulate significant scale quickly once the feature ships.