HotSchedules vs 7shifts: Which is a better fit?

Sean: Hi, I'm Sean. I'm a lead bartender reviewing HotSchedules, and I give it a five stars out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. We used HotSchedules at my bar for anything like scheduling, all the staff would check their schedules on there, and even things like swapping shifts between employees. And it really helped us to just manage who we had on the floor, any given day. The best thing about HotSchedules is just having the power to check your schedule, switch shifts, really do anything, on your phone. The phone app was probably my favorite extension of the HotSchedules' system, and it just made working a little bit easier. The one thing that was a little bit rough about HotSchedules at first, was just getting all the staff trained up. It's one of those things where it was just handed off to the front of house staff, and we were expected to work with it. I think we probably would've benefited from a little bit of a training for some of the lower tech knowledge staff members.

Allie B.: Hi. My name is Allie and I am manager and owner of my family's pizza restaurants. We have five locations and just about 100 employees overall, and I would have to give 7Shifts a rating of four out of five. Before 7Shifts, honestly, we were doing pencil and paper. We've had 7Shifts for well over five years now. It was just really hard to catch everybody's schedules and make sure everybody knew about their scheduled shifts, and also we were really lacking the communication aspect that we were able to have through 7Shifts too. Since having 7Shifts, we've also opened up other needs that we didn't realize that we had so it's been a really good experience overall. I love 7Shifts, most importantly because I love the aspect that our employees can individually put in their time off requests and their availability settings. The main reason I love that is because with us managing five locations it's not realistic for us to have everybody print off their school schedules, their sports schedules. We deal with a lot of students, and so that is my number one favorite thing about 7Shifts. Also, being able to digitally put their schedules online on an app. Even with reminders of their shifts, it just eliminates that excuse that I didn't know I was supposed to work today. I also really love the communication aspect where we can send announcements to our staff and they can also communicate with each other what ever they need, maybe some time off, someone to cover their shift or they have a question with us. And then lastly, I really love the new onboarding feature where we can have all of our onboarding documents previewed, viewed, and signed. That's just honestly been a really nice component of it too that we didn't really sign up for but we really love that they have that now. 7Shifts was very easy to get started with. If you know how to work an iPhone, if you know how to work an app, it's pretty self-explanatory. This is something that we have our managers use on a weekly basis as well. And so, teaching them and training them how to do it literally takes no more than 15 minutes and that's really important for us because we are handling a lot of different things at once and just having this be so easy is just such a relief. My best advice if you're going to sign up for 7Shifts is definitely look at all of the features that it has to offer. It has a lot more than we actually use but it does offer more than just scheduling and I think those things really came in handy for us. I also recommend that whenever you're dealing with your employees, just on an onboarding side, take the time to explain everything to them. We always put in the point that if your name's on the schedule it's your responsibility. With 7Shifts, it makes it so easy for them to do that because they can trade shifts, they can put in their time off. And so, I show them how to do those things and after that it's out of my hands. I definitely recommend having the conversations with your staff that this is such a great tool, and if they are not taking advantage of it they're kind of putting themselves at a disadvantage with their employment with you.