How long to wait before you reapply to the same company
There's no universal cooldown, but ATS platforms do enforce duplicate-application rules, and they vary by system. Here's what Greenhouse, Lever, Workday and Ashby actually do, and how to time a second attempt.
"Wait six months" is the advice you'll find everywhere, and it's not wrong so much as it's answering a different question than the one you're asking. Six months is a rough average across a wide range of situations that behave very differently underneath. What actually matters is two separate things: whether the system will even let you submit a second application, and whether a human will read it if it does.
What the ATS does, mechanically
Most applicant tracking systems keep a candidate record keyed to your email address, and that record persists indefinitely. What happens when you apply again depends on the platform.
Greenhouse. Submitting with the same email against the same job posting typically surfaces a "you've already applied" message rather than creating a duplicate — but a different posting at the same company, even a similar one, goes through cleanly and lands as a new application tied to your existing candidate profile. Recruiters using Greenhouse can see your full application history on that profile, including past rejections, so the system doesn't block you from applying again to a different role — it just makes sure the reader has context.
Lever. Similar story — one candidate record per email, merged across postings. Lever explicitly surfaces "past applications" on the candidate card, so a recruiter reviewing a new application from you will see the earlier one and the stage it ended at, without having to search for it.
Workday. The most rigid of the four. Because Workday requires a full candidate account (not just an email-linked record), reapplying often means logging back into the same account and starting a new application from there. Some Workday configurations impose an explicit reapplication window — commonly 30, 60 or 90 days from the last decision — that's enforced by the system itself, not just etiquette. If you hit a hard block, that's the number, and there's no way around it except waiting it out.
Ashby. Newer and more candidate-friendly by default: profiles carry forward, but Ashby doesn't typically hard-block a second application. The practical constraint is entirely on the recruiter side.
None of this is a security-through-obscurity claim about any one company's specific configuration — these are default and common behaviors, and any given employer can and does adjust them.
The recruiter constraint, which matters more than the software one
Even where the system lets you back in immediately, a recruiter who rejected you three weeks ago and sees your name again is not going to read the new application with fresh eyes. The realistic minimum for a different role at the same company is "enough time that this doesn't look like the same conversation" — in practice, a few weeks is usually enough if the role is genuinely different in level, function, or team.
For the same role, reapplying only makes sense if something changed: the posting was reopened after sitting stale for months, or you have a materially different qualification since you last applied (a certification, a title change, a referral). Reapplying to an identical still-open posting with an identical profile just adds a second, weaker data point to a record the recruiter already has.
The one case worth timing carefully: late-stage rejections
If you made it to a final round and lost to another candidate, that's the highest-value reapplication case there is — you're not an unknown quantity, and "the other candidate didn't work out" or "a second headcount opened" are common enough outcomes. Three to six months is a reasonable window here, and it's worth referencing the earlier process directly in your application or cover note rather than pretending it didn't happen. Recruiters remember finalists more than they remember anyone else in the funnel.
What we do with this, mechanically
If you're applying broadly rather than to one company you're set on, this whole question mostly disappears — the pacing that matters is across your full list of target employers, not the reapplication clock at any single one. A daily-apply service that keeps a record of every submission per employer won't resubmit you into a posting you've already hit, and treats a rejection at one company as no reason to slow down on the rest of your list.