Want your most senior employees to get first refusal on open shifts? You can set open shifts to be offered to employees in seniority order.
The most senior employee is notified first and has a set amount of time to accept or decline the shift.
If they accept, the shift is automatically assigned to them.
If they decline, or don't respond within the time limit, the shift moves to the next most senior employee.
This continues until someone accepts the shift.
Note: Employees can decline an open shift whether it's offered by seniority or to everyone at once.
1. Turn on seniority-based open shifts
An administrator needs to enable the setting before you can offer shifts by seniority.
Go to Settings in the main menu
Select Scheduling
Under the Seniority section, toggle on Offer open shifts by seniority
Set the response time limit and click Save.
What's the response time limit?
This is how long each employee has to accept or decline the shift.
If they don't respond within the time limit, the shift is automatically offered to the next most senior employee.
2. Offer an open shift by seniority
Once the setting is enabled, you can offer an open shift to employees in seniority order.
Go to the Rota tab
Create a new shift in the Open shifts section
Add the shift details, such as the start and end time, branch and position
Add any other details you need, such as a break or note.
By default, the shift will be offered by seniority.
Need to change who can receive it? Click Manage audience:
From here, you can:
Exclude employees in an overtime situation
Allow employees with conflicting shifts to apply
Manually exclude specific employees
Don't want to use seniority?
Turn off By seniority when managing the audience.
The shift will then be sent to everyone you've selected at the same time. Employees can volunteer for the shift, and you'll choose which employee to assign it to.
You can still:
Exclude employees in an overtime situation
Allow employees with conflicting shifts to apply*
Manually exclude specific employees
* Employees can apply for open shifts that are in conflict with their rota setting must first be enabled by an administrator. You'll find it under Settings → Scheduling → Approval.
Finish and publish the shift
Once you've chosen your audience and settings:
Click Save
Click Create
Publish the shift.
The assignment process will then begin. If you're using seniority, the shift will be offered to each employee in turn until someone accepts it.
A note about seniority
This feature uses hire date to determine seniority.
If you've chosen to calculate seniority based on hours worked in your organisation's settings, that won't apply here. Hire date takes priority when offering open shifts by seniority.