Staffing
This section covers everyone who works your events: getting them into Herding Cats, keeping their details current, learning when they cannot work, and filling every position on every weekend.
It is written for whoever builds the rosters — usually a coordinator, sometimes the director.
In this section
- Invite and onboard staff — bulk invitations, choosing what onboarding asks for, and approving what comes back.
- Staff availability — how people mark the weekends they cannot work, and how you read it.
- Staff profiles: experience and feedback — a person’s photo, how experienced they are in each position, the positions they’re training in, what they’ve worked, and what debriefs said about those positions.
- Staff an event — assigning by hand, letting Herding Cats suggest a roster, and handling it when someone drops out.
- End someone’s employment — when someone leaves: their upcoming events get replacement checklists, their access ends, and nothing is deleted.
Where staffing lives in the app
| Where | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Staff in the left menu | Your Staff Directory — everyone you work with, with Regular and Freight drivers tabs |
| An event’s Overview tab | The Roster — assign people to positions |
| An event’s Staffing tab | Travel, rooms, and notes for people already on the event |
| Weekend view | One weekend’s events staffed together, out of one pool |
| Season planning | The whole tour staffed in one sitting |
| Approvals | Profile changes your staff have sent you to review |
Import your roster, choose what onboarding asks for, invite everyone at once, then let people mark their own time off. By the time you are staffing an event, the system already knows who can do what and who is away — and the suggestions are worth accepting.
Skip those steps and you are back to doing it all by hand.
Some rosters list people under a heading per event — Bridgewater, NJ - October 25th, then five judges, then the next city. The staff import understands that shape: the headings are not people (they open each section of the review), someone listed under three weekends becomes one person who appears under 3 events, and columns such as Transport, Hotel Needed? and Hotel Notes are marked Event staffing because they describe the weekend, not the person. After the people are saved, a last step — Staff the events in this sheet — matches each heading to the event on that weekend in that city and puts the people under it on that event, with their transport and hotel notes on each assignment: Train means no flight is needed, Car Rental marks a rental car, Yes under hotel needed asks for a night. A heading with no event yet is left unchecked and offers to build the season from the same file.