"Have you worked for this company before?" — what to answer

Short answer: say yes, give the dates and the store or office you worked at, and add one factual line about why you left. This question is a lookup key, not a character test — it exists so the applicant tracking system (ATS) and the recruiter can find the employee record that already has your name on it.

The question is easy to read the other way round. It sounds like a question about loyalty, or about whether you burned a bridge, so it gets skipped, or answered no because the stint was short and unglamorous. Both of those cost you, and for a reason that has nothing to do with honesty as a virtue: a blank answer sends your application to the slow queue, and a wrong one puts a contradiction into a file that a person will eventually open.

The questions that look harmless, and what each one is checking

Screening questions are not all the same kind of object. Some are conditions wired into the workflow, some are attribution fields, some are stored and never read. Knowing which is which changes what you write.

That table is a description of the mechanism, not a promise about any one employer. Every ATS ships this behaviour as configurable, which means the same question can be a knockout at one company and a stored note at the next, and the form gives you no way to tell them apart.

What actually happens after you tick yes

Workday treats the previous-worker answer as an identity hint. The documentation notes that to use the feature an employer can "request one or more of the following: Employee ID, Email, Location, Manager" — the fields that let a system match a stranger on the career site to a person who already exists in the human resources records.

Where a "yes" travels inside Workday

The path from the external career site to a recruiter looking at your old employee file.

1. 1
   You self-identify

   The application wizard shows Contact information, Experience, Application questions, Voluntary disclosures and Terms and conditions. The previous-worker question sits in application questions, near the top.

2. 2
   The answer is matched

   Workday considers the answer when identifying previous workers against duplicate records, using whichever of Employee ID, Email, Location or Manager the employer asked for.

3. 3
   The recruiter sees it

   The job application shows the questions and the candidate's answers, and recruiters use that data to identify previous workers.

4. 4
   The old file is opened

   The job application business process runs from Review, its initiation step, through to Ready for Hire, its completion step. The rehire check happens somewhere in the middle, by a human.

Notice the shape of that path. Nothing in it is automatic judgement — it is a matching step followed by a person reading. The reason a vague answer hurts is that it breaks the match, and a broken match means your application sits in the review pile as an unresolved question rather than moving as a known quantity.

There is a second system worth understanding, because people assume it does more than it does. Workday's automatic candidate merging combines duplicate records when "First Name and Last Name are exact matches and at least 1 of these fields is an exact match: Phone Number, Email Address, LinkedIn URL, X User Name, Facebook URL, Google+ URL." It also states plainly that it does not automatically merge two candidates if at least one of them has a registered Candidate Home account, and that you "can merge duplicate External Candidates or Pre-Hires, but not with Internal Candidates or Workers."

So no, the system does not quietly recognise you from three years ago. Your old employee record and your new candidate record are different kinds of object, and the previous-worker question is the bridge between them.

The two sentences to write

For a Store Manager applying to a chain they worked at as an assistant manager four years ago, in the box that follows the yes:

Yes — Assistant Store Manager, Store #418 (Northgate), March 2021 to August 2022. I left to take a store manager role closer to home; my manager there was Dana Whitfield.

If the previous role ended badly and there is a comment box, the same structure holds, minus the editorial:

Yes — Sales Associate, Store #212, June 2019 to November 2019. Seasonal contract, ended at the close of the season.

Both give the recruiter what the lookup needs: title, location, dates. Neither argues a case. The argument, if there is one to make, belongs in the phone screen where you can hear the question you are answering.

Does the recruiter actually check?

For a Store Manager req, usually yes — the record is one search away and the cost of the search is a minute. What no vendor documentation tells you is how many employers act on what they find, and nothing public measures that.

Why the omission is the answer that ends the application

Here is the position: answering no to a job you actually held is a worse mistake than admitting you were fired from it, and the reason is procedural rather than moral. A firing is a fact in a file that a recruiter weighs against everything else in the file. A no that contradicts the file is a fact about the application in front of them, made this week, in a form you signed the terms and conditions on.

The rehire question is decided by whoever owns that old record. You are not going to talk them out of it in a text box, and you are not going to hide from it either, because the record does not depend on your answer. What your answer decides is which conversation happens: one about a difficult year at Store #212, or one about why the application says you were never there.

The narrow exception is worth naming. If you genuinely never held an employment relationship — you interviewed and were not hired, or you worked on the site for a vendor who paid you — then no is correct and you should not volunteer an explanation nobody asked for.

The job you are applying to, in numbers

First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers (41-1011), the O*NET code that includes Store Manager

$48,520Median annual wage, 2025

1,432,600Employed, 2024

125,100Projected annual openings, 2024–2034

O*NET lists Store Manager among the sample job titles for this code, alongside Department Manager, Shift Manager and Key Carrier — which is a useful thing to know before you fill in the form, because the previous-worker question is often asked about the company rather than the role, and a stint as a Key Carrier at the same chain counts.

The projection matters here too. O*NET puts projected employment change for the code at a decline of one percent or lower over 2024–2034, against 125,100 projected openings a year across the same decade — a shrinking occupation that still turns over heavily. The turnover shows up in the monthly figures: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 625,000 hires in retail trade in July 2026 — a hires rate of 4.0 percent for the month, against 3.2 percent and 5,054,000 hires for total nonfarm employment. Retail hires at a faster clip than the economy as a whole, which is the arithmetic behind a form like this one asking about former employees in the first place. What the survey does not do is break out rehires, so treat that as context for why the question exists rather than evidence about your odds.

If you were laid off from that company

A layoff and a termination for cause are different entries in the same file, and the form does not distinguish between them — which is exactly why you should. Write the reason in the same clause as the dates: "Yes — Store Manager, Store #418, January 2023 to March 2025, position eliminated when the store closed." That sentence does two jobs. It answers the lookup, and it pre-empts the assumption a recruiter makes by default when a former employee reappears with no explanation attached.

What it will not do is settle the rehire question, because that decision lives with whoever holds the record and follows whatever policy that employer wrote. A store closure is the easiest version of this to explain and it still goes through the same check as every other departure. Give them the sentence and let the file do the rest.

If you were seasonal, temp, or on an agency contract

This is the case people get wrong most often, and it is worth a rule rather than a judgement call: if a W-2 came from that company, you worked there. Seasonal hires, holiday coverage and internal transfers all create the employee record the question is looking for. Who signed the paycheck is the whole test, and it splits three ways.

Three ways of having been at the store, and the answer each one takes

The previous-worker question asks about an employment relationship, so the test is who paid you — not whose name was on the door you walked through.

	Seasonal or temp on the company payroll	Placed there by a staffing agency	On site for a vendor or supplier
Who paid you	The company — a W-2 with its name on it	The staffing firm	The vendor
Is there an employee record to find?	Yes: payroll, a badge number, a termination date	With the agency, not the company	No
The answer to tick	Yes	No	No
Where the detail belongs	Dates, store number and title in the comment box	One clarifying line naming the agency, or the employment history section	Employment history, named as the vendor

Agency work is the middle column, and it is different. If a staffing firm employed you and placed you at the store, your employment relationship was with the agency, and the honest answer is usually no with a clarifying line — "No; I worked at Store #418 from November 2022 as a contractor through Adecco." If the form only accepts yes or no with no comment field, answer no and put the placement on your resume where it can be read in context.

If you are applying from inside the company

Then this question is usually not the one you get. Workday hosts internal and external career sites separately, and an internal application starts from a worker profile that already knows your history. Employers also route internal candidates differently on purpose — Workday's guidance describes creating a condition rule for "anyone who is not an internal candidate" so that internal candidates skip reference and background check steps entirely.

The practical consequence for a Store Manager applying to a district role at their own company: use the internal site, not the public posting. The public one creates an external candidate record that then has to be reconciled with the employee you already are, and that reconciliation is the thing Workday's automatic merge explicitly will not do for you.

If the form has no free-text box

Some forms give you the yes and nothing else — no dates, no explanation, no second question. Answer it, then put the detail where it will still be read: the employment history section of the same form, spelled the way the company spells itself, with the store number if you have it.

Greenhouse's application rules are worth knowing about here, because they show how much logic can hang off a single yes or no. Rules are "automatic actions applied to job post questions," and there are three of them — auto-tag, auto-advance and auto-reject — with a single rule able to join up to five custom questions using AND conditions. A form that looks like five casual checkboxes can be one condition with five clauses behind it.

The one thing to get right

Answer yes with dates and a location, in that order, and stop there. It is the only version of this answer that both survives a lookup and gives a recruiter nothing to interpret.

If retyping the same employment dates into every form is the reason your applications stall, the platform answers the screening questions from your resume — including the ones that ask about a company you have already worked for.