Show HN: Staffjoy Flex – Marketplace Scheduling for Contractors
staffjoy.com
staffjoy.com
The key difference is that, with Flex, we implement a marketplace for scheduling. So, contractors pick the shifts they want - rather than being assigned them. This helps with IC compliance for businesses, while at the same time giving workers long shifts and flexibility.
Staffjoy Flex is the result of our research into how contractor-based startups schedule hourly workers. We found that engagement by contractors falls off with each additional step necessary. Collecting availability doesn't scale, and we found that contractor availability changes quickly. With Staffjoy Flex, contractors pick from available shifts, then immediately know whether they are working.
This approach scales to thousands of workers without significantly changing the time it takes to schedule. Staffjoy Flex is used to schedule the agents behind a popular chat bot, to manage food delivery logistics, and to manage on-call rotations.
The core is Staffjoy’s proprietary algorithms. We match the contractor levels to business demand. This means that a courier company can scale labor to match peak demand for lunch hour, then drop off staffing levels right afterward. We do this while offering configurable shift lengths.
We also opened our API this week (docs.staffjoy.com). If you have any questions, we are here to answer them!
I used to be a retail manager before I was a programmer full time, their IT skills on average are terrible so knowing something is easy to use would make it a lot easier to recommend.
Here is a short overview video that we showed at a conference booth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iNoNLYmcQI
How is this better than a notebook and or an excel file?
That's what the people I know use (for years) and they hardly have issues with shifts. I even looked into building them a "better solution" because I thought I was smarter than them. But nothing I did was better that their own system.
By the way, I'm not grilling you publicly! Just really interested in what you came up with. :)
For this product Flex:
1) Automation. We automatically generate shifts that match demand. Early users have seen costs decrease up to 10% by preventing overscheduling. Most contractor environments have highly-variable needs throughout the day. (Stay tuned - we'll be releasing some integrations with popular workforce data sources to do this even more automatically).
2) Communication. You get race conditions as large workforces try to claim shifts. We handle all of that, and we notify workers about new / changed / available shifts. This doesn't work on a spreadsheet. Plus, workers find out which shifts they are working immediately - there's no waiting on emails or texts.
3) Attendance - we detect truancy for users of our Timeclock. For contractor workforces at scale, seeing who missed a shift is hard.
4) Timezones. We have distributed workforces using Staffjoy, and our app localizes shifts to times. So, agents in the Philippines doing work for US-based bot companies can more easily understand when they are working.
For employees, on our Boss plan, the big added advantage is:
4) Compliance. We do rule-based scheduling to enforce many factors of compliance, such as the number of hours per week somebody may be scheduled.
Also, do you have re-selling opportunities?
* Managing the agents behind "AI Bots". They routinely have to staff contractors (e.g. Amazon Turk / Upwork) to do basic tasks.
* Managing couriers. We have app-based food services internationally that use Staffjoy to schedule bike, scooter, car, etc drivers based on order volume. They like that our algorithms vary staffing levels to match order volume.
* Managing on-call rotations, e.g. for support. We had one user "stress test" a video game by scheduling contractors 24/7 to play it.
Edit: oops, already reported by someone else