Fill this week's shifts from workers you have already placed

On a professional desk the constraint is depth: you read the resume properly because getting it wrong is expensive. On an hourly desk the constraint is speed. Three hundred applications land against a picking role and the only questions that matter are whether the person can physically get to the site, whether they are free for the shift pattern, and whether they hold whatever ticket the site requires. Everything else is noise until those three are answered.

Bulk import takes a folder of resumes or a job board feed and parses all of them at once, writing structured fields rather than a text blob. The list view then filters on those fields directly. A recruiter is looking at a shortlist of nineteen within minutes of the applications landing, and the two hundred and eighty-one who did not match are still in the database, tagged, for the next role that suits them.

Postcode matching is not the same as travel radius, and travel radius is not the same as whether somebody can get to a distribution park for a six a.m. start. A worker eleven miles away with a car is closer, in every sense that matters, than a worker four miles away with a bus route that starts at seven.

Candidate records carry a home location, a maximum travel distance the worker themselves set, and a transport field: own vehicle, public transport only, willing to use the site shuttle, or dependent on a lift. Search runs on all of them together. A six a.m. shift at a site with no early bus service can be filtered to drivers before a single message goes out, which prevents the most common and most expensive failure on this desk: a confirmed worker who simply cannot arrive on time.

Two roles called warehouse operative can be entirely different jobs. One is a rotating four-on-four-off pattern including nights. One is Monday to Friday, six until two. The worker who suits one may be unable to take the other, and the job title tells you nothing.

Requisitions on this desk carry the pattern as a structured field: days, start time, duration, whether nights are included, whether weekends are included, and the assignment length in weeks. Candidates carry the same field as availability. Matching runs on the overlap. It also means a client who describes a role loosely gets asked the right question at intake, because the field cannot be left blank on a requisition that is about to be broadcast to four hundred people.

Counterbalance and reach truck licences, CSCS cards, HGV categories, forklift refresher dates, food hygiene certificates, right-to-work documents: on an industrial desk these are not attachments, they are the thing that makes a worker placeable this week rather than next month. And they all expire.

Every ticket is a typed record on the candidate: class, issuing body, issue date, expiry date and the scanned document. Expiry generates a reminder before it lapses rather than a discovery on the morning of a shift. Search treats a licence class as a facet, so a request for four counterbalance drivers with a live card returns exactly that, and a card that expired last Tuesday takes its holder out of the result rather than out of the client relationship.

Email response rates on an hourly desk are poor and it is not a mystery why. A picker finishing a night shift is not opening a laptop. They are looking at a phone, and the message they will answer is a WhatsApp or an SMS, usually within minutes.

Surhires treats messaging as the primary channel rather than a bolt-on. A shift offer goes out to a filtered pool as a templated WhatsApp or SMS message, replies land against the candidate record rather than in somebody's personal phone, and a yes moves the worker onto the booking without retyping. The reply handler classifies inbound answers so a recruiter reads the fourteen people who said yes rather than scrolling ninety threads.

Consent and opt-out handling sit underneath all of it. Opt-in is captured on the record with the date and channel, STOP and unsubscribe keywords are honoured automatically, and suppression is enforced at send time. Whether a given campaign is lawful still depends on how you configure and send it, and on your own carrier registration where US SMS is involved.

A worker who completed an assignment for you, turned up on time, and was not a problem on site is the single most valuable record in the database. They are pre-screened by the only test that counts, which is that they actually did the job. Sourcing a replacement costs money; calling them costs nothing.

Talent pools hold these workers by site, by client, by shift pattern and by ticket. Every completed assignment writes back to the record: which client, which site, which dates, whether they finished, and a simple internal reliability marker. When Monday's forty-picker request arrives, the first action is a broadcast to the pool that worked that site last quarter, and it is normal for that broadcast alone to close most of the requirement before any advertising spend happens.

This is also the number an owner should watch. The proportion of fills coming from re-books rather than new sourcing is a direct measure of whether the desk is compounding or churning.

Surhires is recruitment software. It is not a payroll engine, a timesheet and rostering system, or an umbrella company platform. It holds the worker, the booking and the client relationship through to the placement record and the first invoice; it does not calculate holiday accrual, run a PAYE cycle, or price an award.

For most hourly desks that means Surhires sits in front of a payroll or timesheet system rather than replacing it, and the placement record is the handover point. Naming that boundary matters more here than on any other desk, because the compliance and pay obligations attached to hourly work are real and belong to systems built for them.