Starting Guide to the Job Scheduler

Get to know Connecteam’s job-scheduling, where you can quickly and easily schedule shifts and dispatch jobs

Shoshana Fleischmann avatar
Written by Shoshana Fleischmann
Updated over a week ago

The Job Scheduler makes it effortless to create shifts or dispatch jobs for your team and make sure they have all the information they need regarding their shift right in their mobile apps such as the shift’s location, special instructions, and attached files.

In this article we will go over the following:

💡 Tip: Open up our Educational Sidebar to become a scheduling expert in just a few steps! Find it at the top of any schedule:

A First Glance at the Job Scheduler

The schedule is designed as a calendar board that includes various displays that can be adjusted according to your needs. It includes a daily view, a weekly view, and a monthly view. In the weekly view, for example, you will see the schedule’s assigned users from top to bottom and the days of the week from left to right.

Screenshot of day/week/month views on Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Once you've chosen the desired display, you can also choose to view the schedule by users, jobs, and layers and choose to view or omit additional details such as work preferences, availability status, and conflicts.

Screenshot of viewing options on Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Pro Tip: To learn more about the various viewing options available, click here.

Organize Your Schedule by Jobs or Users

When getting started, we recommend to set up the types of jobs that you'd like to organize your schedule by. To do so, click on the Jobs button in the upper-right corner to set up your jobs.

A Job corresponds to a job in your business, like a customer or worksite, or the different roles your employees should be scheduled for. Each job is represented by a different color.

After setting up your jobs, you will be able to view your schedule by the different jobs you created, ensuring all jobs are staffed and there aren’t any gaps. Click on View Options and choose View by jobs to view your schedule displayed by jobs rather than users.

Screenshot of jobs on Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Pro Tip: To learn more about the Job Scheduler, understanding jobs, and how to use them, click here.

Methods to Create Shifts and Dispatch Jobs

Connecteam’s schedule includes various ways to create new shifts, so you can find the easiest way for you according to your schedule.

Add a single shift

To create a single shift, you can either click on the Add button and choose Add single shift or hover your cursor on the employee's row on a relevant day and click on the + button.

Screenshot of adding a single shift on Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Notice that every time you create a new shift, you can publish it instantly or create it as a draft to publish later, once your schedule is ready.

Add multiple shifts

You can create multiple shifts at once, by just clicking on the Add button and choosing Add multiple shifts.

GIF of adding multiple shifts on Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Import shifts from Excel

Import bulk shifts and jobs using an Excel (CSV) file and save time on your weekly roster.

Pro Tip: To learn more about how to import shifts from Excel, click here.

Shifts Without Users

You can always create a shift and assign it to employees later. Until you assign that shift, it will be recognized as a “shift without users” as long as it's in draft mode, and will be located at the top of the schedule board:

Screenshot of shifts without users in Connecteam's Job Scheduler

When you’d like to assign that shift to your users, you can either drag it to a specific user or click on the shift to edit its assigned users.

Open Shifts

If you’d like to create a shift with spots for your users to claim, you can do that when creating the shift by choosing “Enable users to claim this shift”. That shift will appear as a shift without users with the number of open spots until all spots are claimed by your users.

Screenshot of an open shift in Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Pro Tip: To learn more about open shifts, click here.

Repeating Shifts

Repeating shifts are shifts that are part of a series and repeat based on a selected frequency. These shifts should be used when you know a shift will occur multiple times and you know which employee will be working that shift.

GIF of repeating shifts in Connecteam's Job Scheduler

Pro Tip: To learn more about repeating shifts, click here.

Cool Shortcuts and Tricks

Connecteam’s schedule includes multiple quick actions that will save you a lot of time and effort when creating your schedule.

Shift Templates

Save shifts as templates to schedule quickly and easily by creating shift templates that you can just drag and drop from your templates folder into the schedule. You can create a template for a specific job, time frame, and of course, a mix of those (e.g. Kitchen Morning Shift).

Weekly Templates

Similar to shift templates, weekly templates are readily available to help make schedule planning easier and quicker. As a manager, you can save time and stress while creating your team’s schedule by using weekly templates. In a weekly template, shifts for the whole week are saved and ready to be plugged in so you don’t have to recreate the same schedule every week

Bulk Actions

We have created easy-to-use multiple-shift selection capabilities, that let you edit multiple shifts at once from directly inside the schedule.

Pro Tip: To learn more about how to perform bulk actions for shifts, click here.

Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies in under 5 mins to ANY question.

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