The system allows you to send your open shifts in order of seniority, or to select the people you wish to offer the shift to.
When sending shifts by seniority, the most senior employee will be notified first, and will be asked to accept or decline the shift within a set period of time.
If the employee accepts the shift, it will automatically be assigned to them. If they declines the shift, the second most senior employee will be notified and will have the same options and so on, until the shift is assigned.
IMPORTANT: Employees will have the option to decline an open shift whether it has been offered by seniority or to all employees.
Enabling the option to offer open shifts by seniority
The administrator can activate the feature to offer open shifts according to seniority by following these steps:
Click on Settings from the left-hand navigation menu.
Click on the Scheduling submenu.
Scroll down the page to the Seniority section.
Activate the option Offer open shifts by seniority.
Set a Response time limit (See below.)
Click Save to confirm these settings.
The response time limit corresponds to the time allotted to the most senior employee to accept or refuse the shift to be filled. Once the time limit has passed, the shift will automatically be sent to the next one if the employee has not responded.
Offering Open shifts by seniority
To offer an open shift to your employees based on seniority, start by creating a new shift in the Open shifts section under Schedule. You can refer to this article for more details on this.
By default, the option to offer shifts in order of seniority will be activated. If you wish to modify the criteria, click on Manage audience.
You will have the option of excluding employees in overtime situation or manually excluding certain employees.
If you deactivate the By seniority option, the shifts will be sent to all the people selected without prioritizing seniority, and you will have to assign the shift to one of the people who has volunteered.
By choosing this method, which does not prioritize availability, you will still have the following options:
Exclude employees in overtime situation.
Allow employees with conflicting shifts to apply (See below).
Manually remove certain people.
The Allow employees with conflicting shifts to apply setting must have been activated by an administrator for this option to be available. This setting can be activated under Settings > Scheduling” > Approval.
Once you've selected the right options, don't forget to click on Save then Create and finally publish your shift so that the assignment process can begin!
IMPORTANT: only seniority based on hire date is considered for this feature. If you have added the option to calculate seniority based on hours worked in the organization settings, it will still be the hire date that is taken into account.