Staff a job by skill

Skills are your workspace's own vocabulary: trades, tickets, seniority, whatever you actually staff by. Tag catalog items with what their work requires and teammates with what they can do, and Alpha ranks the right people first every time you assign.

Build the vocabulary

1. Go to Admin → Skills.
2. Starting from nothing, take a starter set: Start with trades (Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC…) suits a multi-trade shop, Start with levels (Apprentice, Journeyman, Foreman) suits a single-trade crew.
3. Add skill writes your own, and walks the whole job in one pass: name it, tick who has it, tick what needs it.

Renaming is safe; everything tagged with it follows. Archive a skill you've stopped staffing by and it drops out of the pickers while staying visible wherever it's already used.

Tag in bulk

• From the skill: Who has this and What needs this on any skill row: one skill, the whole roster or the whole catalog, tick and save.
• From the other end: select rows on Items or Team and choose Add skills. Tags already on them are left alone.
• One at a time: the Skills field on an item's form and on a teammate's detail.

Let it do the staffing

• Staffing → Open work lists every scheduled line nobody is on, and each row says what it needs (Needs Drywall) before you open it.
• Open one to assign and the roster comes back ranked, split into Available and Already committed, with the reason on every name: Has the skills, Missing Drywall, Busy on another job.
• Crew pivots the same window onto people, showing who's under-committed and who's double-booked, and filters down to a single skill.
• The same ranking runs in the work order's own assignee picker.

Getting the most out of it

• Tag the items you staff by, and only those. Materials, fees and equipment have no skill requirement and never will, so nothing is keeping score.
• Keep the list short. A vocabulary people can hold in their heads is one they keep accurate.
• Skip proficiency levels. If hanging and finishing are genuinely different work, make them two skills. More honest, and you can filter by them.
• Tag new hires before they accept. An invited teammate can be tagged and staffed on day zero.