How to Create Open Shifts
Create shifts for employees to claim
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 app such as the shift’s location, special instructions, and attached files.

Open shifts will help you build your Job Scheduler a lot faster. These are shifts which you the admin schedule and your employees can claim them on a first-come-first-serve basis. Using open shifts means that besides scheduling the open shifts you don’t need to do any more scheduling!

In this article will go over:

How to Create An Open Shift

In the Job Scheduler, you have 2 ways to create an open shift.

1. Position yourself on the shifts without users row and hover your mouse over any day, then click the plus icon (+) to add a shift:

Screenshot of plus icon in Connecteam's Job Scheduler admin dashboard

2. Click Add shifts on the top right of the screen, then click Add single shift:

Screenshot of add single shift in Connecteam's Job Scheduler admin dashboard

Complete the shift details: date, time, title, job, location, shift notes, and tasks. Select ‘Enable users to claim this shift’ and choose the number of available spots. Click save and publish. Take a look at how this looks below:

GIF of adding an open shift in Connecteam's Job Scheduler admin dashboard

Now your open shift has been published!

Did you know? You can use the import shifts option on your Job scheduler to add multiple open shifts via CSV file by adding the number of open shifts in the 'number of users' column.

How Do Open Shifts Look in the Scheduler

Open shifts appear in the shifts without users row and will have a blue square with a number on the left upper corner, indicating how many spots are left to fill.

Screenshot of shifts without users in Connecteam's Job Scheduler admin dashboard

Open shifts are assigned on a first-come-first-serve basis. Once an employee claims a shift, the shift will be added automatically to the employee's schedule.

Please note that the open shifts are published and available for claim only for users who are qualified for the job specified in that shift.

Repeating Open Shifts

If you have shifts that reoccur, you have the ability to create repeating open shifts! You can set an open shift to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly and when to end the series of those shifts. Simply check off the repeat shift option and choose the frequency:

Screenshot of repeating shift details in Connecteam's Job Scheduler admin dashboard

Pro-tip: Share this article with your employees so they can learn how to claim shifts.

Want to Learn More About Open Shifts?

If you want to have more control over who gets which shift but still want to use the open shifts capability, you can set an admin approval for the open shift. This means your employees will be able to claim shifts, but you get to decide exactly who gets what shift. Here's a guide that will show you use the open shift approval capability step-by-step.

*Open shifts are available from the Basic Operations Plan. The repeating shifts capability is available from the Advanced Operations plan and above.*

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