Surfaces · Shiftly
A manager describing a gap, a staff member considering it and a manager recovering from a callout need different views of the same requirement. This page explains those jobs. The roster board and K-12 substitute-coverage skin are early access, so these descriptions are an evaluation map, not a menu of live applications.
The manager begins with a gap: a role in a place for a particular window. The useful output is a requirement another person can read without calling back for the missing building, date or qualification. Keep the brief narrow enough to act on. A request for general help is different from a shift that requires a specific credential, and the candidate review can only be as clear as the requirement supplied to it.
Use this surface when the central problem is describing and maintaining open coverage. It is not a record of work actually performed. A manager needs to know which shift is still open, which has a proposed person and which has been accepted. During a demonstration, ask how a changed window is represented and whether the earlier proposal remains intelligible. Do not assume that editing a description has already obtained the person's agreement to a different shift.
The next job is explaining who fits. Availability, role eligibility and required credential scope belong together in the review, but they remain distinct reasons. A person familiar with a location can still be outside the required window. A current credential record can still have the wrong scope. Review the refusal as carefully as the proposed candidate: a short list is useful only if the manager understands why it is short.
This is the surface to discuss when managers already have a roster but spend their time repeating qualification checks. Bring one anonymized example where a plausible candidate should be excluded. The expected output of the conversation is a clear account of the represented rule and the unresolved gaps in the early-access surface. It is not a certification of that person or a promise that the site has verified documents with an issuing authority.
A proposed shift is an invitation to make a decision. A staff member needs the window, role and location before agreeing. The manager needs the response to remain distinct from the proposal. That distinction matters most near the start of the shift, when a name in a cell can be mistaken for a person who has agreed to be there. Discuss what the team regards as acceptance before discussing automatic matching.
A marketing page cannot demonstrate that handoff merely by drawing a green status chip. There is no working staff inbox or offer-acceptance action on this site. Ask to see the current state of the actual surface in a guided conversation. If your process depends on a particular notification channel or acknowledgement rule, name it explicitly and ask whether it is supported; a roster description alone does not establish delivery.
The callout surface is for the manager who has just lost coverage. Its purpose is to start from the affected shift and review ranked replacement possibilities with limited disruption. The input is the changed coverage fact, together with the current requirements and candidate information. The desired output is a short decision the manager can explain, not an apparently finished week whose other commitments have moved without discussion.
A difficult evaluation should end with no candidate as well as with a candidate. In that case, the shift remains a management problem to resolve. Keep the refusal visible; do not call the problem solved because the proposer has run. The help page covers that conversation, including expired records and a building requirement that does not match the available pool.
Reused vs early access
The matching primitives underneath shiftly -- availability, eligibility, the credential-gate, and self-healing reassignment -- are the same primitives schedule.software already describes running in production for crew dispatch, re-skinned for a staff shift. The shift-roster board and the K-12 sub-coverage skin sitting on top are new surface, marked early access, not claimed live.
Reused & shipped elsewhere
Checking a person's own stated availability window against a shift's time window is the same primitive already running in production for crew scheduling elsewhere in the fleet. Shiftly re-skins it for a staff shift instead of a crew assignment.
Reused & shipped elsewhere
A shift that requires a credential checks the assignee's credential expiry and scope against the shift's requirement before the assignment is offered -- the same hard-constraint gate schedule.software already describes running on live crew-dispatch assignments (expiry must exceed the scheduled date, scope must match).
Reused & shipped elsewhere
Role and eligibility rules narrow the candidate pool before availability is even checked, so a shift is only ever offered to someone actually allowed to work it.
Reused & shipped elsewhere
When a covered shift falls through, a ranked, minimal-cascade replacement proposal is generated for that one shift -- the same self-heal mechanism schedule.software describes running against real crew-dispatch schedules, applied here to a roster callout instead of a route change.
Early access
The visual board a manager posts, reviews, and covers shifts from is new surface being built on top of the reused primitives above. It is not live today.
Early access
The substitute-specific skin over the same shift/eligibility/credential mechanism -- building assignment, substitute-credential requirement, sub-pool matching -- is new surface being built. Not live today.
A teacher absence is modeled as the same shift object with a school-specific credential requirement: a substitute-teaching credential, a building assignment. Coverage is matched from a pool of eligible substitutes the same way any other open shift is matched — no separate sub-coverage engine to keep in sync.
This flow — the building-assignment field, the substitute-credential requirement, the district-wide pool — is early access. It is not live today.