Under the hood

The engine that finds your swap.

ShiftHawk reads any shift calendar — from any scheduler, in any industry — boils it down to three simple variables, and runs it through a proprietary matching formula that finds the trades that actually work. Here's the whole journey, minus the secret sauce.

Step 1 · The insight

Every shift calendar is just three variables.

Hospital board, restaurant roster, firehouse rotation, plant schedule — strip away the branding and every one of them says the same three things: what kind of shift it is, when it runs, and who works it.

Type

What kind of shift is it?

D Day N Night I ICU

Timing

Which hours does it cover?

Day07:00 – 19:00

Night19:00 – 07:00 ⁺¹

ICU08:00 – 20:00

Personnel

Who's working it?

AODr. Amara O. · Attending

BKDr. Ben K. · Attending

PSPriya S. · RN

Because every calendar reduces to the same three variables, one engine serves every industry — the formula never needs to know whether "Night" means an ICU night or a closing shift at the bar.

Step 2 · Getting your calendar in

An adapter for every calendar out there.

Schedulers all speak their own dialect. ShiftHawk ships a shelf of adapters — one per source — and the right one clicks in automatically. Tap a source to slot its adapter in.

Workforce schedulers

Everyday calendars

Paste a calendar link Snap a photo of the board Type it in yourself

Adapter bay

Pick a source The matching adapter will slot in here.

Feeds identify themselves — ShiftHawk detects the source and picks the adapter automatically. No setup screens.

Don't see your scheduler? The universal adapter reads any standard calendar feed.

Adding a brand-new source is a new adapter on the shelf — the engine itself never changes.

Step 3 · One clean calendar

Work + life in, one ShiftHawk calendar out.

Your work roster and your personal calendar flow through the adapter and come out the other side as one clean, unified ShiftHawk calendar — same shape, every time, whatever went in.

Work + life calendars

Different sources, different shapes, different dialects.

Your ShiftHawk calendar

One clean, unified shape the engine can reason about.

Normalization happens on your phone — the adapter reads the calendar export those tools already provide. No employer integration, no rollout.

Step 4 · The matching formula

The part we keep in the vault.

Your clean calendar, your teammates' calendars, your rules and the shift you need off all feed into ShiftHawk's proprietary, copyright-reserved matching formula. What comes out is a list of candidate swaps — including multi-person chains no one would ever spot in a group chat.

Your ShiftHawk calendar

Your pool's calendars

Your rules & priorities

The shift you need off

Two-way with AlexYou take Tue, Alex takes your Fri

Three-person chainYou → Sam → Lee → back to you

Favour from DanaDana covers; you return one later

Step 5 · From many to the best

Hard gates first. Then the best rise.

Every candidate swap runs a two-stage gauntlet: hard criteria are must-pass gates that delete unsafe or impossible swaps outright; soft criteria then rank the survivors so the best trade sits at the top. Tap any gate to see what it does.

Hard criteria — must pass, or the swap is deleted

Fail any one of these and the candidate is gone — it never even reaches ranking.

Soft criteria — survivors get ranked, best first

Nothing is deleted here — the survivors are simply ordered so the best swap is the first one you see.

That's the engine

Three variables. One adapter. One formula. Your day off.

The whole pipeline runs in about a second — and it runs for every industry that trades shifts.

Get ShiftHawk Connect your calendar