Digital Arrow vs Workable: ATS, Video, HR and Time Compared

Answer first: Digital Arrow and Workable both manage jobs, candidates and configurable pipelines, but Workable publishes a broader recruiting stack and optional HR package. Digital Arrow is a compact ATS beside questionnaires, project time, leave, contracts, onboarding assignments and branded client invoices built through manual timesheet import. Choose Workable when sourcing, talent CRM, interview kits, scorecards, automation and employee HR are central. Choose Digital Arrow when a smaller recruiting or services team values its direct pipeline and specific operating modules.

Reviewed July 26, 2026. Workable facts were checked against current Workable-owned pages. “Unknown” means the cited sources do not establish the capability; it is a demo question, not proof of absence.

Who each platform is for

Digital Arrow is designed for recruiters, staffing teams, agencies and growing businesses that need structured public jobs and a visible process per opening. Its wider modules record project hours, handle leave, prepare documents and create invoice PDFs.

Workable presents a complete hiring and HR platform. Its official feature catalog covers sourcing, distribution, careers pages, talent CRM, candidate management, scheduling, evaluation, offers, reporting, onboarding and employees. Its pricing page separates Recruiting, HR and combined packages. Compare the proposed package, not the name alone.

Dated capability comparison

Capability	Digital Arrow	Workable
Applicant tracking	Native: structured public jobs, registered or guest applications, candidate profiles and a job-specific visual pipeline.	Native: searchable talent CRM, resume parsing, candidate records, custom pipelines, automated actions and reporting are published in the feature catalog.
Job distribution and sourcing	Native, narrow claim: publishes Digital Arrow job pages. It does not claim automatic multi-board syndication or proactive candidate sourcing.	Native: Workable publishes broad job-board distribution, careers pages and sourcing tools. Actual board access and usage terms remain plan questions.
Interview workflow	Native: teams move candidates and review questionnaire answers, and interviews are scheduled against connected Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook accounts with busy time merged across both. Scorecard templates per job are filled in from the board, with other interviewers' scores hidden until yours is submitted. No live interview room is claimed; invitations are sent as iCalendar attachments.	Native: interview self-scheduling, kits and scorecards are listed. Live calls use integrations such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.
One-way video screening	Add-on: timed browser-recorded answers inside screening questionnaires, opened later for human review. No transcript, AI video score, live room or candidate ranking.	Native premium tool, tier-dependent: Workable’s official video overview documents questions, timing, takes, sending and team evaluation. Its premium-tools guide explains that access or capacity depends on plan or purchase.
Offers, onboarding and e-signature	Native, separate modules: rich-text or PDF contracts with multiple parties, plus PDF/video onboarding assignments and quizzes. They are not automatically attached to applicants or hires.	Native, package-dependent: recruiting supports offer and agreement templates; full onboarding workflows, tasks and employee documents require the applicable HR package. Workable’s onboarding guide documents workflows and e-signature steps.
Time tracking	Native project time: manual entries or timer, projects, task notes, summaries, PDF and read-only sharing. Ordinary entries cannot be approved or rejected.	Native with HR package: Workable documents clock and manual attendance modes, policies, reminders, manager review and reports. Its public material frames this as employee attendance and payroll preparation, not client-project billing.
Client invoice generation	Native with manual import: select a person, date range and entries, enter an hourly rate and add editable rows to a branded PDF invoice. Nothing is generated automatically.	Unknown: Workable’s cited feature and package pages do not disclose a client-invoice generator or selected-attendance-to-invoice workflow.
Roles and permissions	Native, preset: Manager has full company access; Employee has that person’s own time and time-off tools. No granular role builder.	Native, tier-dependent: recruiting roles and permissions are customizable at specified tiers, while broader custom permission sets have their own eligibility. See Workable’s roles guide and confirm the contracted tier.

What Digital Arrow does today

Digital Arrow publishes structured jobs. Candidates apply with an account and stored CV or as guests using a CV file or LinkedIn profile. The team creates, renames, colors and reorders stages per job and moves cards manually. Search finds existing applicants. There is no claim of automated board distribution, talent CRM, AI matching or ranking, automated decisions, scorecards or synchronized email history.

Questionnaires support text and choice responses. Recorded video is an add-on question type with a prompt and maximum duration; a human reviews the browser recording. Digital Arrow does not provide live interviews, scheduling, transcripts, AI video analysis or rating rubrics.

Managers may inspect time entries but cannot approve or reject them; leave requests have a separate decision state. Invoice import is manual: select a candidate, dates and rows, type the hourly rate and review editable lines. Contracts and onboarding are separate from applicants, time and invoices. Manager is full company access; Employee is own time and leave.

Where Workable goes further—and where to check the package

Workable publishes deeper sourcing and hiring workflow: distribution, talent CRM, automation, self-scheduling, interview kits, scorecards, offer templates and analytics. One-way video sits in the candidate workflow, but inclusion is tier-dependent; live video uses meeting integrations.

Workable also offers an HR package. Its time policy guide describes clock or manual modes, reminders, editability and optional location controls. The manager guide covers reviewing and editing attendance. Do not treat attendance as client billing unless demonstrated. Confirm onboarding, documents, permissions, video capacity and premium tools in the quote.

Decision checklist

• Do you need broad sourcing, job-board distribution, talent CRM, interview scheduling and scorecards, or a simpler applicant pipeline?
• Is the time requirement employee attendance for payroll preparation or project/task records for agency services?
• Must selected time entries become editable client-invoice rows? Digital Arrow does this manually; verify any alternative in Workable.
• Which Workable package and tier includes your required HR, onboarding, video and permission capabilities?
• Is recorded video an optional screen, and do you need live calls, transcripts or structured interviewer scoring as separate functions?
• Do you require granular roles? Digital Arrow’s Manager and Employee presets are a hard current boundary.
• Do not assume Digital Arrow automatically links applicant, contract, onboarding, timesheet and invoice records.

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

Is Digital Arrow a complete replacement for Workable?

No. Digital Arrow covers applicant tracking and selected operating modules, but it does not claim Workable’s sourcing reach, talent CRM, interview scorecards, scheduling or recruiting automation breadth.

Does Workable include one-way video interviewing?

Workable publishes a native one-way video tool, but its availability and capacity are plan- or premium-tool-dependent. Confirm the proposed tier rather than assuming unlimited inclusion.

Does Digital Arrow use AI to score video?

No. Its recorded answers are reviewed by people. Digital Arrow does not claim AI video scoring, automatic transcripts, ranking, live video or interview scorecards.

Can both products track employee time?

Both publish time features, but the workflows differ. Digital Arrow tracks project time without entry approval. Workable’s HR-package documentation focuses on attendance, policies, manager monitoring and payroll preparation.

Can Digital Arrow invoice from timesheets?

Yes, through a manual import. A user selects entries and dates, enters the hourly rate and reviews editable rows. It is not automatic invoicing from approved time.

Does Workable publish native client invoicing?

The official Workable product sources used here do not establish that workflow. Treat it as unknown and request a demonstration if client billing is required.

Which permissions should buyers test?

Test recruiter, hiring-manager, candidate, employee, finance and document access. Digital Arrow has only two preset company roles; Workable’s customization depends on tier and permission type.