What does "under consideration" mean on a job application? At the employers that publish a definition, it usually means your application arrived and sits in a list that a person may review. It rarely means anyone has read it yet, and it is not a shortlist. The words also change from one applicant tracking system to the next, and often from one employer to the next on the same system, so the useful question is not what the phrase means in general but what it means where you applied.
This post goes system by system, using vendor documentation and the guides employers write for their own recruiters, which are the closest thing a candidate has to the source.
The short answer
Three employers that publish their setups show the pattern:
- The University of Pittsburgh, whose Talent Center links to a Taleo career section, answers the question in its applicant FAQ: "Under Consideration means that your resume/application has been added to a list of applicants for the hiring manager to review."
- The City of Greeley, Colorado, which uses Oracle's cloud recruiting product, tells its hiring managers that when they open a new applicant, "the phase will default to new, and the state will default to 'application under consideration'" (City of Greeley).
- Auburn University, on iCIMS, maps a brand new application to the candidate-facing status "Under Review" in its published workflow.
So both of the phrases people search for, "under consideration" and "under review", can appear the day you apply. Read either one as "received and waiting", and look for other signals before you read it as progress.
| System | Who chooses the words | An early label you might see | How a rejection shows up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workday | The employer | "Submitted" (UW-Madison), "In Progress" meaning under review (UW) | "Completed" (UW-Madison), "Not Selected" (UW) |
| Greenhouse | The employer picks a sharing level; stage names come from a fixed list | Active, or Applied and In review | Inactive, or Application closed |
| iCIMS | The employer maps its internal statuses | "Under Review" (Auburn) | Employer defined; the email can be optional |
| Oracle Recruiting Cloud | The employer can rename phases and states | State "application under consideration" (Greeley) | "Rejected by Employer", with an automatic email at Greeley |
| Taleo | The employer builds the workflow | "Under Consideration" (Pitt) | "Not Selected" on the recruiter side (UAB) |
| SmartRecruiters | Fixed states at the API level | NEW, then IN_REVIEW | ARCHIVED, with the substatus REJECTED |
The rows are examples from named employers, not rules for every company on that system. The sections below give the source for each.
Under consideration versus under review
A lot of advice ranks these two, usually with "under consideration" as the stronger signal. No vendor document cited here sets that order, and the employer guides show it can run either way.
Auburn's iCIMS mapping is the clearest example. Its recruiters work through more than a dozen internal statuses, and candidates see a much shorter list. Everything from "Application Received" through "Search Committee Review" shows the candidate Under Review. From "Interview Scheduler" and "Interview Scheduled" through "Selected for Hire" and the pay approval steps, the candidate sees Further Consideration. After that come Verbal Offer, Offer, Onboarding and Hired. At Auburn, then, "consideration" is the stronger word, and only because Auburn chose it.
Workday shows the opposite habit. The University of Washington's candidate communications guide gives the meaning of its "In Progress" status as "Application is under review". That is the first stage, not a later one.
That also answers the question of whether "under review" is a good sign. It is not a bad one, but at Auburn it is the default for every applicant, and on Greenhouse "In review" is a stage every setup must include, so it carries little information about you.
Workday
Workday supplies the machinery and each employer supplies the vocabulary. Workday's administrator course material describes a configuration called Dynamic Action Labels and gives its purpose as making sure "candidates do not receive internal terminology (e.g., Interview, Offer)" (Workday). The internal steps are detailed, the outside label is deliberately coarse, and the mapping between them is each employer's setting.
Two published mappings show how far apart that can land. The University of Wisconsin-Madison shows "Submitted" during review, "In Progress" for every other active stage including interviews, and "Completed" for any decline and for a canceled requisition (UW-Madison). The University of Washington shows "In Progress" for review, "Sent to Dept" once the resume goes to the hiring manager, and "Not Selected", which it describes as "Candidate is no longer under consideration".
If your Workday account says "Under Consideration", that is either a label Workday delivers or one your employer wrote. Either way, its meaning is set by that employer, and the Workday application status meaning post works through why the same words differ between tenants.
Greenhouse
Greenhouse does not use the phrase in its documented candidate-facing vocabulary at all. What you see depends on which of three levels the employer turned on: nothing, a two-state active or inactive flag, or named stages through a feature called MyGreenhouse Stages (Greenhouse).
The stage names come from what Greenhouse calls "a standard set". The ones an employer can choose are In review, Initial screen, Interviewing, Hiring team interview, Team interview, Technical interview, Assessment, Onsite interview, Executive interview, Reference check, Background check and Offer, and Greenhouse adds Applied, Hired and Application closed itself. "Every setup starts with In review, which you can't remove", and it maps to the employer's application review stage, so on Greenhouse "In review" is close to the first thing you can see, not a promotion. On the two-state setup, Greenhouse documents that applications are active by default and turn inactive after a rejection, including four days after the rejection date if no email is scheduled or sent (Greenhouse).
So "active" on Greenhouse is the closest equivalent to "under consideration", and it is just as weak a signal, because it is where every application starts. The full breakdown is in the post on Greenhouse application status.
iCIMS
iCIMS gives candidates a Dashboard. Its candidate guide says you can use it to "check on the status of any jobs you have already applied to", and adds in the same breath: "Options available may depend upon the company" (iCIMS).
Behind that dashboard, recruiters move you through what iCIMS calls Recruiting Workflow Bins and Statuses, a list each organization's admins manage and which iCIMS labels in a "Bin: Status" format, with the example "Offer: Background Check Completed" (iCIMS 2025-03 release notes). The candidate sees a translation. Auburn's guide prints both columns side by side, under a heading that defines the candidate column as the "Status candidate can view in their dashboard".
Two details from the employer guides change how you should read silence on iCIMS:
- The rejection email can be a checkbox. Emory University's 2018 guide for hiring managers says that when moving someone to Rejected, "If you would like to send an email notice to the candidate stating they have not been selected for the job, check the box" (Emory). The same guide says candidates in its long-list and short-list statuses "will remain under consideration".
- Rejections can wait for the hire. In Auburn's workflow, the step where the chosen candidate acknowledges the offer carries the note "All disposition emails will be sent". If an employer works that way, the other applicants hear nothing until the role is filled.
One more thing worth knowing if an application seems to be missing. iCIMS documents a Show All Applications setting: when it is off, "the candidate dashboard only displays the candidate's applications for jobs posted to that specific career portal". An employer with several portals may show you only part of your history on each one.
Oracle and Taleo
Oracle sells more than one recruiting product, and "under consideration" turns up in two of them.
Oracle Recruiting Cloud organizes applications into phases and states. Oracle documents that an employer can rename the default phases and states, and that "the new name will be used immediately in all product areas showing the names", such as "when displaying the current phase and state of a job application" (Oracle). In the City of Greeley's setup, a new applicant sits in the New phase in the state "application under consideration". Rejecting means changing the state to "Rejected by Employer", and the guide notes: "Once you reject a candidate, it will automatically email notify them that they are no longer under consideration."
That guide is written for the hiring manager, so it does not show the exact screen a candidate sees. What it does show is that the default state for an untouched application carries the words "under consideration".
Taleo, Oracle's older product, builds hiring around a candidate selection workflow of steps and statuses. Oracle's documentation lists the reference steps as New, Reviewed, First Interview, Second Interview, Third Interview, Testing, Offer, Hired, Rejected, Declined, Pipeline and Inactive, and describes a question mark shortcut button that "changes the status of the candidate to Under consideration" (Oracle Taleo). In other words, it is a holding status a recruiter can set inside any step. The same documentation says workflows are created by the system administrator, so the full list differs between employers. Pitt's definition, quoted above, is one employer's reading of it.
A 2020 Taleo guide from the University of Alabama at Birmingham tells its hiring managers that "Step and Status changes impact the communications sent to Candidates by email and the career site", and that once the finalist is identified, the remaining candidates are moved to a Not Selected status (UAB). That is the same end-of-search pattern as Auburn's.
Oracle's PeopleSoft recruiting product goes furthest: its Candidate Gateway page "allow[s] recruiters to control what status they want to show to the Applicant", with each label limited to 30 letters (Oracle PeopleSoft).
SmartRecruiters
SmartRecruiters is the most fixed of the six, at least in what it publishes for developers. Its Candidate Status API, which it says retrieves "candidates application status from the candidate perspective", returns one of six states: NEW, IN_REVIEW, INTERVIEW, OFFERED, HIRED and ARCHIVED. An archived application carries a substatus of REJECTED, WITHDRAWN_BY_APPLICANT, TRANSFERRED or DELETED_BY_COMPANY (SmartRecruiters changelog).
A related partner endpoint gives one-line meanings for a similar list, including IN-REVIEW as "Candidate is being reviewed by the hiring team" and TRANSFERRED as "Candidate is transferred away from the job to another" (SmartRecruiters).
The phrase "under consideration" appears in neither list. If you see something close to it on a SmartRecruiters career site, the nearest state is In Review. And if an application looks archived, check the substatus wording: a transfer to another job is not a rejection.
No longer under consideration
This one is less ambiguous. It means the employer has closed your application for that requisition. The University of Washington maps Workday's Not Selected to "Candidate is no longer under consideration", and in Greeley's Oracle setup the same words go out by email the moment a candidate is rejected.
What it does not reliably tell you is why. Three situations produce it:
- You were screened out. The ordinary case.
- Someone else was hired. Auburn and UAB both disposition the remaining candidates once a finalist is chosen, so the status can arrive weeks after your application stopped moving, as a side effect of a hire.
- The job went away. UW-Madison shows a canceled requisition to candidates as "Completed", the same label as a decline.
Applications are tied to a requisition, so the status covers that one opening. It is not a note on your profile for the company's other roles.
What to do next
Once you know the label is a setting, the follow-up list is short.
- Confirm you actually submitted. Use the confirmation page or email, not the status. iCIMS, for one, documents a confirmation message at the end of a completed application.
- Check whether the posting is still up. A posting that disappears is an event about the role that you can verify yourself, which no status label gives you.
- Watch for tasks and people. An assessment, a scheduling link or a recruiter's email outranks any label change.
- Ask the employer once. Not the vendor: Greenhouse states that its support "can't see a company's internal hiring decisions or contact recruiters for you" (Greenhouse), and Pitt's HR office says it "does not have access to any additional information" beyond your candidate page.
- Keep applying. A status that has not moved is missing information, not bad news. The time to send the next application is while you wait.
If the systems themselves are new to you, the guide to what an ATS is covers what happens to an application after you submit it.
ApplyEze works on that last step. It watches the career boards of more than 100,000 employers directly, writes a resume for every posting, plus a cover letter when the form asks, and completes applications on 12 platforms, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters among them, in a browser on your own machine that you can watch. It cannot tell you what "under consideration" means at a company that has never published its mapping. It can keep one quiet application from being the only thing you have going.