You applied, the portal says "Under review", and it has said "Under review" for a while now. Most candidates read that label as a report on what a human is doing with their file. It usually is not, and knowing what each status is actually wired to will save you a lot of refreshing and a fair amount of worry.
One caveat before anything else: status labels are not standardised. Each applicant tracking system ships its own defaults, and each employer can rename, merge, hide or skip them. What follows describes common patterns, not rules. Treat your own portal as one specific configuration of those patterns.
Your status lives on your record, not on the recruiter's screen
The single most useful thing to understand is where the label sits. It is a field attached to your application record. The recruiter, meanwhile, usually works in a different view: a list of candidates for one requisition, a pipeline board, a shortlist, a folder of people to call. Moving you around in that view does not always write anything back to the field you can see.
So the requisition can move a lot while your label stays still. A recruiter can screen forty files, book three phone calls and brief the hiring manager, and your portal can show exactly what it showed on day one. Nothing is broken. The candidate-facing status is often the least maintained part of the whole process, because nobody inside the company looks at it.
If you want the broader picture of how these systems are organised, our guide on how applicant tracking systems actually work covers the plumbing. Here we only care about the labels.
"Received" and "submitted": the automatic ones
"Received", "Submitted", "Application complete" and similar first labels are almost always set by the system the moment your form goes through. No person is involved. They confirm one thing: the file exists in the database and is attached to the right job.
That confirmation is worth something. If you never see a first status, or you get an error, your application may not have landed and it is worth checking. But once it is there, it tells you nothing about fit, speed or interest. Every applicant for that role has the same label at the same moment.
A small trap: some portals keep this first label for the entire life of the application. The employer simply never configured anything to change it. On those portals, "Received" at week six and "Received" at minute one mean the same thing, which is nothing beyond "we have it".
"Under review" and "in progress": the most misread labels
This is the label that causes the most anxiety, and it is the one that carries the least information. Depending on the setup, "Under review", "In review", "In progress" or "Being considered" can be triggered by very different events:
- a recruiter opening the requisition, even without opening your file
- a bulk action applied to everyone who applied before a certain date
- the posting closing to new applicants
- an automated step, such as a knockout question or a screening questionnaire, being completed
- a person actually reading your CV
Only the last one is what candidates imagine. You cannot tell from the outside which of these produced your label. Some employers also set this status manually for the whole pool and never touch it again, so it can persist long after a decision has been made.
The practical reading: "Under review" means your application has not been closed. That is all it reliably means. It does not mean a person is weighing your file today, and it does not mean you are on a shortlist.
"Interviewing" and "in consideration"
Labels further along the pipeline, like "Interviewing", "Interview scheduled", "Assessment" or "In consideration", are more likely to be set by a person, because they usually follow an action someone took on purpose. They also tend to lag. Recruiters book calls by email or phone first and update the system later, or never.
That lag cuts both ways. You may already be scheduled for a call while your portal still says "Under review". And you may finish a final interview and see the label stay on "Interviewing" for weeks, simply because nobody moved the record after the debrief. The conversation you had with a human is always better evidence than the label.
"In consideration" is the vaguest of these. On some setups it is an advanced stage; on others it sits right after "Received". Read it in the context of what has actually happened to you.
The closing labels: not selected, filled, closed
The end states are where labels become genuinely informative, with a few caveats.
- "Not selected", "No longer under consideration", "Unsuccessful": a decision about you. Sometimes it arrives with an email, sometimes only in the portal. It is final for this requisition, not for the employer.
- "Position filled": someone else accepted. Some systems apply this to every open application automatically once the role is closed, so it may be the first and only update you ever get.
- "Closed", "Withdrawn", "Cancelled": the requisition itself ended. The role may have been paused, budget cut, or reposted under a new ID. This says nothing about your profile.
Rejected candidates are sometimes kept for other roles, and our article on talent pool ATS explains how older applications get looked at again. A closing label on one job does not erase you from the system.
Which changes mean something, and when silence is information
Not every transition deserves attention. A rough sorting:
Noise, most of the time: "Received" to "Under review"; flips between two in-progress labels; a label that changes the same day the posting closes. These are frequently bulk or automatic.
Meaningful: a move to an interview or assessment stage, especially if it comes with a message; any closing label; a status that jumps backward or disappears, which can mean the requisition was reopened or reposted.
Silence is harder. Silence right after applying is nothing; the role may still be collecting applications, and early versus late review is a separate question we cover elsewhere. Silence after a real human step, a call or an interview, is information, and it deserves a follow-up. Silence with the posting still live and reposted is also worth noting, though our pieces on ghost jobs and on why recruiters go quiet deal with that in depth. The label on its own will rarely settle it.
The portal status tells you whether your file is open or closed. What happens between those two states mostly happens somewhere you cannot see.
What to do instead of refreshing
Checking the portal daily does not change the outcome, and reading meaning into every flicker is tiring. A calmer routine works better:
- Check on a schedule. Once a week per active application is plenty. Set a reminder instead of opening the tab whenever you feel uneasy.
- Keep your own tracker. Log the date you applied, the label you saw, the date it changed, and any real human contact. Your tracker becomes more reliable than the portal, because it records events the portal never shows. If you do not have one, our spreadsheet tracker guide gives you a template.
- Separate human contact from system events. In your tracker, mark which updates came from a person and which from the software. Decisions about follow-ups should rest on the human column.
- Follow up after a human step, not after a label. A status that has not moved is not, on its own, a reason to write. A call or interview followed by silence is. When you do write, our follow-up guide covers timing and tone.
- Keep applying. Nothing on a portal is a reason to pause other applications. Keep your CV current so each new one takes minutes; if your LinkedIn profile is already up to date, a tool like Postulit can turn it into a tailored CV quickly.
The short version
Read "Received" as "the file landed", "Under review" as "not closed yet", interview labels as "probably true but late", and closing labels as the only states that settle anything. Your label reflects your record, not the recruiter's work, and the two drift apart all the time.
This week, open your tracker, add a column for "last human contact", and fill it in for every live application. That column, not the portal, is the one that tells you where a follow-up is due.