How do you download your resume from a Workday application?

First, work out which Workday you are in

Two different products get called "Workday", and the answer to this question is different in each.

The external career site is where you applied: an address like company.myworkdayjobs.com. Your account there is created with that employer and belongs to that employer — Workday's own documentation describes candidates registering "an account on your external career site", one per employer (Workday, Steps: Set Up Candidate Home Accounts). There is no single Workday login that spans the companies you applied to.

The internal employee Workday is a different thing entirely, and if you already work somewhere that runs Workday, your question may really be about that. It is covered further down.

The steps: what to click in Candidate Home

Sign in at the same myworkdayjobs.com address you applied through, then open Candidate Home.

To see your applications, use the My Applications tab, where you can "view the status of your applications, view draft applications and submitted applications, and withdraw your applications" (Eastleigh Borough Council, user guide for external candidates). One company's applicant FAQ puts the same thing in its own words: "To view the status of an application, review the 'My Applications' section in the Candidate Home" (SCI Shared Resources, Workday Recruiting FAQ for Candidates).

To reach the file itself, open the Attachments tab. Eastleigh's guide describes exactly what you can do there: "To upload a new version of your CV or delete the file, click on the document to show a preview of the file. Click on 'Upload New Version' to replace the existing file with the new file you wish to upload. To delete the file, click on the down arrow and click on the 'Delete'."

So the documented actions are preview, replace, delete. A preview will show you what you sent — which is often all you actually needed — and it is worth reading carefully, because it is also the fastest way to see whether the file that arrived is the one you meant to send.

One thing you can genuinely download is an offer letter, if you have reached that stage: "Clicking the 'Review Document' option under 'Your Tasks' will allow you to pull up a PDF version of your offer letter" (SCI FAQ).

The limits, stated honestly

There is no documented download action for your own resume. Workday's own list of what a Candidate Home account is for covers completing questionnaires, providing additional information, scheduling events, signing electronic documents, uploading IDs and taking assessments (Workday) — retrieving documents you uploaded is not on it. We could not find a candidate guide that describes one either. That is documented absence rather than a vendor statement that it is impossible, and an individual employer's site may differ; but if you go looking for the button and cannot find it, you are not missing something obvious.

Once you submit, the attachment is usually frozen. Ohio State tells applicants that "once you have applied for a specific job requisition, you cannot change the attachments you uploaded", while "new attachments can be added for each new job requisition you apply to" (Ohio State University HR). Washington and Lee states it more broadly: "You cannot change your application after submission" (Washington & Lee University). The SCI FAQ agrees: "Once the application is complete, the attachment can no longer be edited."

The Attachments tab and the application are not the same place. Eastleigh notes that a CV uploaded to Attachments "will be attached to all vacancies you apply for", whereas Washington and Lee says "The My Experience page is the only place to upload documents" for an individual application. Replacing the file in Attachments therefore does not rewrite an application you already sent.

How many files you get differs by employer, which is the clearest evidence that these screens are configured rather than universal: the University of Miami tells candidates "You can upload up to five documents (5MB max per file) under resume/CV in the 'my experience' section" (University of Miami HR), while the SCI FAQ says "You can only upload one attachment (such as a resume or CV) per application."

If you already work there: the flow runs the other way

If you are an employee looking to "export my Workday profile as a resume", the documented direction is the reverse. A typical employee job aid walks you from your profile photo to View Profile, then Career, where you "Select Add to manually enter your information for each heading or select Upload My Experience to upload a resume to populate your profile" (Montgomery College, Manage Your Career/Talent Profile, revised October 2024).

In other words, Workday is designed to read a resume into the profile, not to write one out of it. Some organisations enable printing a profile; that is a tenant setting rather than a standard feature, so the answer for any given employer is a question for its HR team.

What to do instead

1. Keep your own copy of every file you send. One folder, named per application. This is the whole problem solved, before it happens.
2. Use the preview in Attachments to confirm what arrived, and screenshot it if you need a record.
3. Ask the employer. They hold your application; a recruiter can usually send back what you submitted. If you are applying in the EU or the UK, data-protection law gives you a route to request a copy of the personal data an employer holds about you — ask their HR or privacy contact rather than Workday, which is running the software on the employer's behalf.
4. Rebuild rather than retrieve. If the resume is gone and the employer is slow, it is normally faster to rebuild the file from your own history than to wait — and a rebuilt version tailored to the next role is worth more than the old one anyway.