Frequently Asked Questions

Sign up, then read the walkthrough. Give it fifteen minutes.

The getting-started guide takes you through the whole thing. You sign up, add yourself as your first worker, send yourself a test shift, and see the actual SMS arrive on your own phone. Then you swap yourself out and add your real team. Fifteen minutes if you take your time over it.

Yes. In fact that's how we recommend you start.

Add your own phone number. Add a friend's if you can talk one into it. Send yourself a test shift and reply Y. Try again and reply N, so you can watch the offer walk over to your friend on its own. When you've seen enough, deactivate the two of you and add the people who actually work for you. It's real SMS the whole time, not a simulation. The walkthrough in the docs takes you through every click.

Canada today. The United States is next.

We're a Canadian company sending carrier-approved SMS across Canada right now. The United States is coming as soon as our 10DLC carrier vetting is finished, which is the process that keeps American carriers from silently filtering your shift offers before they ever reach a worker's phone. If you're a US operator, drop us a note at hello@shiftrobin.com and we'll tell you the day we open.

No. Never.

Your worker gets an ordinary text message. They reply Y to take the shift or N to pass. There is nothing to install, no password to invent, no account to log into, nothing to download. It works on their flip phone. It works on the cracked screen your line cook has been meaning to replace since April. If they can read a text, they can take a shift.

Any time. One word.

STOP is the standard SMS opt-out keyword and it's honored automatically. When a worker replies STOP, they're marked opted-out across every roster they're on, any pending offer to their number is cancelled, and they receive a single confirmation text. They will not receive further SMS from us. This behavior is required under Canada's CASL and by the CTIA carrier standard for A2P messaging in North America. UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, OPTOUT, ARRET, and ARRÊT are recognized as STOP. START and UNSTOP opt back in. HELP and AIDE return contact information. No manual action is required from you at any point.

No. ShiftRobin sleeps when your workers do.

By default, offers pause between 9 PM and 7 AM in your local timezone. A dispatch you started at 5 PM that hasn't filled by nine holds the next offer and picks it up automatically at seven the next morning. Nobody gets woken up at 1 AM because someone else's response timer happened to expire. Try to start a dispatch inside quiet hours and ShiftRobin asks whether you really mean it: one click to send anyway, or wait. You can move the window, or switch it off completely, in Settings, under Dispatch. What you can't do is quietly text your prep cook at 2 AM and then wonder why they're not on your roster next month.

Reliability first, fairness second. Override any shift by hand when you need to.

ShiftRobin ranks your workers automatically every time you dispatch. Reliability comes first: their accept, decline, and no-show record from the last thirty days. New workers get the benefit of the doubt until they've been offered a few shifts. Among workers of equal reliability, the one you haven't bothered most recently comes first, so nobody gets burned out being everyone's first call. When one specific shift needs a different order (the senior mover for the piano job, the bilingual server for the group booking), the shift's cohort page lets you pin the list by hand. Persistent per-worker priority is on the roadmap.

Not yet as a durable roster setting. Per-shift, yes.

Today, the roster page lists your workers but doesn't hold a global priority order. Priority is computed at dispatch time from the last thirty days of accept and decline history, and when you want to override that for one specific shift, you build the cohort by hand on that shift's page. A durable per-worker preference that survives across dispatches is on the roadmap. Ask us at hello@shiftrobin.com if this is blocking you and we'll fast-track it.

Yes. Pick every hat they wear.

A worker belongs to as many roles as they actually play. When you post a shift, ShiftRobin only contacts the people qualified for the role you asked for. Your framing carpenter who also drives on weekends gets the driver call. They do not get the roofing call.

• General Labour
• Framing Carpenter
• Driver
• Forklift Operator
• Event Setup

Yes. If you'd call them personally, ShiftRobin can text them.

The people who help you cover a shift are not always the people on your payroll. They're the students, the part-timers, the fellow who left in April but still picks up the odd shift, the independent contractor you've worked with for years. ShiftRobin works with any mix of individual people you already trust and would call by name yourself.

• Part-time employees
• Casual workers
• Former employees
• Students
• Seasonal staff
• Independent contractors

Yes.

Bring in your ops lead, your assistant manager, whoever covers your weekends. Everyone sees the same roster, the same shifts, the same history. Anyone you give permission to can dispatch. Every action is signed with a name, so you always know who sent what.

Yes. Export a CSV and drop it in.

Roster page has an Import CSV button. Format is name, phone, tags: one worker per row. Tags can be their own quoted column ("line cook, prep cook") or spilled across extra columns, whichever your spreadsheet gives you. Spaces inside tag names are fine; commas are the separator so they can't appear inside a tag. Phone numbers are cleaned up for you: any punctuation is stripped and ten digits gets a +1 prefix. Bad rows are reported and skipped, good rows still import. Full detail on the CSV import reference. One caveat: CSV import counts as admin-confirmed consent for every row in the file, so only bulk-upload workers you've already asked.

One or twenty. Same flow.

If you need three general labourers, you ask for three. ShiftRobin sends offers in your priority order until three people have said yes or the window closes. You don't split the request, you don't run three parallel group texts, you don't chase anyone yourself. One dispatch, three seats filled.

You set the clock.

Five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. Pick whatever suits the shift. A fast turnaround for the four o'clock callout. A patient window for the shift three days out. Different shifts can run on different clocks.

That is the group-text problem all over again.

Blast the offer out to everyone and whoever taps first wins, which is usually not the person you would have picked. ShiftRobin asks one worker at a time, in your order. That way the seniority you earned, the reliability you tracked, and the certifications you paid for actually count. No double bookings. No fastest-finger contest. And better yes rates from the people you'd rather have on the shift in the first place.

Nothing you have to do.

ShiftRobin waits the interval you set, and then quietly moves on to the next eligible worker. You don't watch a clock. You don't send a follow-up. You don't sit there wondering if they saw it. Read receipts stopped mattering the moment you stopped needing them.

ShiftRobin keeps going.

The moment they reply N, the next person in your priority order gets the offer. No pause. No manager tap on the shoulder. No awkward second try. It's what you would do yourself if you had the whole afternoon to sit on the phone. Only it happens in seconds.

They tell you, you release the slot, ShiftRobin picks up.

Real life happens. Wrong shift, forgot they had something on. They text you back, you release the slot in one click, and ShiftRobin picks up right where it left off with the next person on your list. Nothing is lost from the record. Nothing has to be restarted. Nothing gets scrambled.

Yes, one click.

You cancel, and everyone still pending stops hearing from us. Anyone who already accepted gets a courtesy text, so nobody shows up at a job that isn't there anymore. Your reputation with your regulars stays where you left it.

Every reply is on the record.

You'll see who accepted, who declined, who timed out, and how long each step took. The more you dispatch, the sharper the picture. Reliability stops being a guess and starts being a number you can point at.

The dispatch stops on its own.

The moment the last seat is filled, no more offers go out. Nobody's phone lights up for a shift that no longer needs them. Nobody feels passed over for something that was already gone.

You'll know sooner than you would have.

One clear summary tells you where you landed. If you got the whole crew, good. If you got most of them, you still have hours to do something about the rest. Which is more time than the group text would have given you.

• 3 of 3 workers accepted
• 2 of 3 workers accepted
• No workers accepted

No. And it works alongside yours.

Keep your scheduler. Keep your payroll system. ShiftRobin does the one thing they all quietly fail at, which is getting the right person to say yes when a shift breaks at four in the afternoon. A callout. A new job. An event booked at the last minute. That is where ShiftRobin earns its keep.

Not a bit. ShiftRobin is just automated texting.

We find the person and get you a yes. Everything after that happens exactly the way it does today. They clock in the way they always did. You track their hours the way you always did. Payroll cuts their cheque the way it always did. ShiftRobin never touches your timesheet system, never moves money, and doesn't need to be plugged into anything at all. It's the phone call you would have made yourself, automated. The rest of your operation is left alone.

You pay when a worker says yes. Not before.

Pay As You Go if you only need coverage now and then. A monthly plan if you fill shifts most weeks, in which case the per-placement cost comes down. No monthly fee on Pay As You Go. No per-worker fee, ever. No charge for messages that didn't get you a hire. And the alpha is free while we're in it. See the full pricing breakdown for the numbers.