Applicant Tracking Systems Beyond the Hiring Decision

Short answer: an applicant tracking system normally organizes jobs, applications, candidates, and hiring stages. Products may also offer contracts, onboarding, time, or invoicing, but buyers should verify whether those modules share records, use integrations, or remain separate workflows.

Digital Arrow product information reviewed July 26, 2026.

Where a conventional ATS ends

The core job of an ATS is to receive and organize applications. It should make it easy to see who applied to a role, inspect the submitted information, and move the applicant through a defined process. For many in-house teams, that is enough.

Recruitment agencies, contractor businesses, and services firms may continue working with a person after a hiring decision. They may prepare a contract, assign onboarding material, record project time, handle leave, or create a client invoice. Those are real needs, but placing the modules under one navigation menu does not prove an uninterrupted data lifecycle.

Five questions to ask beyond the pipeline

1. What is the shared entity? Ask the vendor to show whether the applicant, worker, contract, project, time entry, client, rate, and invoice use linked identifiers.
2. Which transition is automatic? A user-selected import is different from automatic generation. Both can be useful if described accurately.
3. Which status is being approved? Products may approve leave, time, expenses, placements, or invoices. Confirm the exact record.
4. Who can access each module? Inspect the available roles instead of relying on “role-based permissions” as a category phrase.
5. What evidence leaves the system? Verify PDF, DOCX, signed-document, or accounting exports your workflow requires.

The current Digital Arrow applicant workflow

The Digital Arrow applicant tracking system lets a company create detailed jobs, accept applications from registered users or guests, search applicants, and configure stage names, colors, and order for an individual job. Applicant cards can be moved between stages with drag and drop.

Guest candidates can apply with contact details and a CV file or LinkedIn profile. Registered candidates can use a saved CV. The current product does not claim AI matching, automated candidate ranking, automated outreach sequences, or an interview scorecard.

Screening is a separate assignment workflow

Recruiters can create screening questionnaires containing text, single-choice, multiple-choice, and timed video-answer questions. A questionnaire can be assigned to an existing applicant or sent through an external link. The team sees pending or submitted status and opens the completed response.

Recorded video is asynchronous and currently uses the Video Interviews add-on. Digital Arrow does not claim live call scheduling, transcripts, AI video scoring, interviewer ratings, or a hiring rubric.

Contracts and onboarding after a decision

The contracts and onboarding page documents two company modules. A contract can start from rich text or a PDF and include multiple parties plus signature, initials, text, date, checkbox, and name fields. Parties can sign or decline through secure links, and the completed PDF can be downloaded.

Onboarding can use PDF or video material, manual or PDF-based AI-assisted quiz creation, a passing threshold, internal or external assignments, and completion results. Neither module is presented as an automatically created extension of an applicant record.

Time, leave, and invoice workflows

Workers can create project time entries manually or with a timer. Managers can review entries and totals, create or archive projects, share a read-only view, and export a PDF. Time-off requests have an approval or rejection status; standard time entries do not.

Invoices are created with client, issuer, tax, currency, payment, bank, and line-item details. When a user wants to reuse time data, the invoice flow allows that person to choose an applicant and date range, select entries, and enter an hourly rate. The rows are added as editable line items. There is no background conversion of approved hours.

When separate modules are still useful

A company may still prefer one account for several modules even when the records are not fully linked. Fewer logins, consistent navigation, and a shared vendor relationship can reduce some administrative overhead. The buyer simply needs to price in the remaining selection, entry, and verification work.

For an established company with payroll, accounting, identity, and HR systems, specialist integrations may be a better fit. For a smaller team, separate workflows in one account may be easier to adopt. The decision should follow the demonstrated process, not an “end-to-end” label.

Evaluation checklist

• Demonstrate job creation, guest application, and stage configuration.
• Submit every screening response format the team expects to use.
• Open the application, assignment, contract, onboarding, time, and invoice models and identify their links.
• Test Manager and Employee access in separate accounts.
• Verify the distinction between time-off approval and time-entry review.
• Import selected time rows into a draft invoice and record the manual fields.
• Confirm plan and add-on limits on the current Pricing page.

What Digital Arrow does today

Reviewed 2026-09-03. Every row below is a shipped module in the product, described specifically enough to check in a demo. Where a step is done by a person rather than automatically, the row says so.

Capability	What it does
Applicant tracking	Native: Structured public job postings, applications from registered users or guests with a CV file or LinkedIn URL, and per-job pipeline stages a team creates, renames, colours, reorders and moves cards between. Stage changes are recorded as events with the stage name stored alongside the id, so renaming a stage later does not rewrite past history.
Interview scorecards	Native: Scorecard templates per job, filled in from the pipeline board. Other interviewers' scores stay hidden until you submit your own, so the first score posted does not anchor the rest. The summary reports the spread and flags a split panel rather than averaging disagreement away.
Interview scheduling	Native: Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook connections. Busy time is merged across both providers, so a meeting in either blocks the slot, and the database refuses two overlapping interviews for one host rather than relying on the application to check. Invitations go out as iCalendar attachments, which is how the invite reaches Apple Calendar without an Apple API.
Screening questionnaires	Native: Reusable questionnaires with text, single-choice, multiple-choice and timed video-answer questions. Candidates record in the browser; reviewers open the response from the assignment.
Candidate email and replies	Native: Each company connects its own SMTP and IMAP, so candidate mail is sent from that company's domain and never from ours. Replies are polled and threaded back to the candidate using the RFC 5322 header chain rather than the From address, so a candidate replying from a second address still lands in the right thread.
E-signature contracts	Native: Rich-text or PDF contracts with multiple signing parties and configurable fields.
Onboarding	Native: PDF or video onboarding material with manual or AI-generated quiz questions, tracking completion, score and pass status.
Timesheets and time off	Native: Manual or timer entry organised by project, date-range totals, PDF export, and time-off requests with approval. Approval applies to time off; time entries are edited rather than approved.
Client invoicing	Native with a manual step: Branded PDF invoices with client, issuer, bank, tax and line-item detail. Lines can be built from a contractor's tracked time over a date range at an hourly rate, but the entries are selected by a person rather than pulled automatically, and invoice status is set by hand.
Placements and margin	Native: A placement records the bill rate charged to the client and the pay rate paid to the contractor, both snapshotted so a later rate change does not rewrite last quarter's margin. Margin and markup are reported by client and by contractor, weighted by the hours actually logged rather than by averaging each placement's percentage — which would give a four-hour engagement the same weight as a four-hundred-hour one.
Careers page and job feed	Native: A branded careers page per company on its own address, server-rendered so the roles are in the HTML a crawler receives. Each company also gets an Indeed-format XML feed to submit to Indeed, Adzuna and Jooble, with closed and expired postings excluded automatically.
Public API and webhooks	Native: Company-scoped API keys with per-key scopes and rate limits, so another system can post jobs in and read applications back. Outbound webhooks are signed and retried, and an endpoint that stops answering disables itself instead of retrying forever.
Recruiting analytics	Native: Funnel counts and time-in-stage from recorded pipeline events, reporting the median next to the mean because a handful of very old candidates pull an average far away from the typical case.
Consent and retention	Native: Consent captured on the application form, retention policies measured from last activity rather than creation date, and erasure records that let you answer whether a named person's data was removed without keeping the data to prove it.
Roles and permissions	Native, narrow claim: Preset roles rather than custom permission sets. A Manager has full company access; an Employee sees their own timesheet and time-off tools only.

What Digital Arrow does not do

Listed because an evaluation surfaces them anyway, and reading them here costs less than discovering them later.

• No LinkedIn Recruiter integration and no LinkedIn job posting API. Both require LinkedIn Talent Solutions partner approval, which Digital Arrow does not hold.
• No sourcing browser extension for capturing profiles from LinkedIn or GitHub.
• No contact database or outbound sequence automation.
• No SSO or SAML.
• No built-in candidate SMS.
• Custom permission sets beyond the Manager and Employee presets.

FAQ

What is the main purpose of an applicant tracking system?

An ATS publishes or manages roles, receives applications, organizes candidate information, and tracks each applicant's hiring stage.

Does Digital Arrow continue one applicant record into invoicing?

No. Applicant tracking, contracts, onboarding, time, and invoice modules are available under one account, but they do not form one automatically linked lifecycle record.

Can Digital Arrow use recorded video during screening?

Yes. A timed video answer can be added to a questionnaire when the Video Interviews add-on is available. Review is human; no AI video score is claimed.

Are Digital Arrow timesheets approved?

Ordinary time entries do not have an approval state. Time-off requests can be approved or rejected.

Does Digital Arrow create an invoice automatically?

No. The user creates the invoice and may manually select time entries and enter an hourly rate to add editable line items.

Who is a broader recruiting-and-operations workspace useful for?

It can fit staffing, recruitment, contractor, and service teams that need several modules and accept the documented manual boundaries.