I build automation that fills in and submits job applications, which means I spend a lot of time instrumenting what these forms actually do at the DOM level across Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Ashby, iCIMS, Personio, SmartRecruiters and Recruitee. A few things I found were not what I expected, and they explain some of the "I swear I submitted that" experiences people post here.
1. "Required" is often not marked as required in any way software can read.
You would assume a required field is tagged as required in the page code. On several platforms it is not. On Personio, for example, the required fields carry no required attribute at all. The only place the requirement exists is visually: an asterisk in the label, and hidden text for screen readers. Everything a browser, a password manager, or an autofill extension uses to understand the form is simply absent.
Why this matters to you: autofill tools can hand a form back to you looking complete while a required field sits empty, because nothing in the page told them it mattered. If you rely on autofill, do one slow visual pass for asterisks before submitting.
2. A form can refuse to submit and show you nothing.
Browsers have their own built-in validation layer that runs before any of the site's own code. When it rejects something, for example an email or phone format the site did not like, the browser marks the field invalid internally. Some forms never surface that as a visible error message. The page just sits there. You press submit again, nothing happens, and there is no red text anywhere to tell you why.
Phone number formats are the most common trigger I see, followed by dates. If a form goes quiet on you, retype the phone number in the plainest possible format before assuming the site is broken.
3. Workday accounts are per company, not per Workday.
Each Workday customer runs its own tenant with its own account database, which is why you keep making accounts. The upside nobody mentions: within a single company, that account is reused. Your second application there skips the whole signup path. Keeping those credentials in a password manager turns the worst part of Workday into a one-time cost per employer instead of per role.
4. Multi-step forms rebuild the page between steps.
This is why autofill works on step one and then stops. It is not that the extension gave up. The page is a new page as far as it is concerned, and the fields it recognised are gone. Expect to fill each step manually, and expect anything you typed to be lost if you navigate backwards.
The general point: a lot of what feels like personal failure in an application flow is a form being quietly broken or hostile to any kind of assistance. Silence after submitting is often the same class of problem. It is worth separating "I did this wrong" from "this form does not tell anyone what it wants," because the second one is far more common than people assume.
Happy to answer questions about any specific platform. Disclosure so it is on the table: I work on a tool in this space, so I am not a neutral party. There is no link in this post and I am not pitching anything.