How Scout suggests volunteers

Open an empty slot and Scout puts up to three names in front of you, each with a line of reasoning under it. This page is the whole basis for that order: what Scout read, what it never reads, and where its judgment stops and yours starts.

Where suggestions appear

Three surfaces, all running the same ranker:

• Assign a {Position} on a crew card, or an Assign chip on the Board, opens a panel headed Scout found N matches with up to three candidates and a Stage button on each.
• The Board's Open slots rail shows one top pick per open row with a single reason line under the name. Tapping the tile stages that person.
• Fill this crew on a crew card, and Auto-Fill in a service's Teams panel, take the top pick for every empty slot in scope.

Staging is not asking. Nothing reaches a volunteer until a person presses Send N requests, which is covered in Scheduling volunteers.

Two things that look like suggestions and are not. Find a backup on a declined slot opens the panel with nothing in it, because the slot still holds the person who declined; open the struck-through name, choose Unassign, then use Assign a {Position}. And the team page's What Scout noticed panel answers a different question (who in your church might join this team at all) on a different ranker.

Who Scout will consider at all

Only people who are both an active member of the team and attached to that exact position on the team page. Someone on the roster with no position assignment is invisible here, and so is a person who could clearly do the job but has never been added to the team.

When nobody is attached, the panel reads No team members for this role yet and the rail row reads No team-role members yet. Fix it with Add Person on the position card, described in Setting up a serving team.

Who is ruled out before any scoring happens

Three exclusions, and they are absolute:

• An active hold on the person, either PAUSED · all teams or a pause scoped to this team. Staff pause someone from their profile (Pause serving) or from the dashboard when they follow up on a serving-strain notice; members can pause themselves from churchHQ.
• The person who declined this exact slot, if they declined from the member app.
• Anyone already holding a slot on this same service, at any time and on any team.

Nothing else removes anyone. In particular, CHECK FIRST is a flag, not a block: it means the nightly intelligence run has that person classed at risk, and they still rank, and Fill this crew will still stage them.

One asymmetry to know about: when a volunteer taps Decline in the app, Scout records it and stops offering them that slot. When a staff member cycles a slot to Declined on the Board, nothing is recorded against the person, so Scout may well suggest them for the same slot again.

The three signals, and which way each pushes

| Signal | Weight | Raises them | Lowers them | |---|---|---|---| | Reliability | 40% | Saying yes to recent asks, and having served in the last four weeks | Asks that were declined or never answered. No ask at all in the window scores zero here | | Fairness | 35% | Weeks since you last asked them, climbing to full value at 12 weeks | Being asked recently. Asked this week scores zero | | Fit | 25% | A listed skill whose wording overlaps the position name, and openness set to ongoing or short-term | Nothing listed scores zero |

The window is a rolling 13 weeks, dated by the service, not by the day you built the schedule. Serving history older than that counts for nothing, which is deliberate: three faithful years in 2024 should not make a currently flaky volunteer read as reliable.

Inside that window, reliability is confirmed divided by asked, then damped by how long since they last served (full value inside four weeks, 85% out to twelve, 70% beyond that, and half if they have not served in the window at all). Fairness for someone with no ask on record sits at 75 out of 100, high on purpose, because a name you have never tried is worth putting in front of you. Two candidates within a point of each other are ordered by who was asked longest ago.

What the lines under a name mean

A candidate carries at most four lines, in this order:

• CHECK FIRST means the nightly run classed them at risk. It is a flag rather than a block.
• Skill: Sound means a skill they listed overlaps the position name as text. A skill of "Sound engineering" matches a position called Sound; "Audio" does not.
• Confirmed 4 of 5 gives the raw counts behind reliability, inside the 13-week window.
• 3 weeks since last ask, Asked this week, and No ask on record state the fairness input in words.
• Open to ongoing commitment and Open to short-term asks appear only when there is no skill line.
• Would pair with Ana's first time and 12 serves in this position are the crew awareness covered below.

The rail's one-tap tile shows only the first of these lines, so it is a summary of a summary. Open the full panel when the pick matters.

Seasoning is a count, never a rating

Beside a name you will see First time, 2nd time, 3rd time, or N serves. That is a count of confirmed slots in that exact position, on services before today, minus any the volunteer marked as not served. Move someone to a new position and the count starts again at First time, because it counts the position, not the person. Scout has no skill rating for volunteers and no way to sort a roster by quality.

The count touches ranking in exactly one place. Someone flagged Can train, or with six or more serves in the position, counts as able to train, and Scout floats those candidates to the top of the panel when the crew this slot belongs to is short of one. That is a reorder, not a re-score: nobody is added, removed, or re-weighted.

The crew-level line is a condition about the crew, not a verdict on anyone: "Everyone on this crew is new to their position." It needs all three of a Can train flag somewhere on the team, nobody assigned to this crew being able to train, and at least two assigned people with two or fewer serves. Empty slots are ignored.

Strain, and the three things it needs

The ranker knows nothing about strain. It appears after someone is on a crew: one sentence under their name, a Serving a lot pill on a Board chip with the sentence in the tooltip, and the same sentence in the person modal with the why one tap away.

Strain fires only when all three are true at once:

1. A confirmed serve in at least six of the last eight weeks.
2. Their most recent post-serve reflection is Difficult, or the two most recent are both Fine or worse.
3. Another confirmed serve already on the calendar within 14 days.

It is computed by the nightly run, so a slot you confirmed an hour ago is not in it yet. When one person has both a strain sentence and a rough-reflection sentence, strain is the one that shows.

What Scout does not read

• Blockout dates, holidays, or "I'm away these three weeks". There is nowhere to enter them.
• Who was at church on a Sunday. Scout has no per-person service attendance, and every count on this page is a count of volunteer slots.
• How good someone is at the job. A skill line is a text overlap and nothing more.
• Who works well with whom, who is related to whom, or who has already been asked by text.

Why a suggestion is a starting point

Scout ranks the pool you built, on the history it holds, one slot at a time. You know the rest: that this Sunday is Marcus's daughter's baptism, that you already asked Ana in the car park, that the 9:00 crew needs someone patient enough to stand beside a nervous first-timer, that a volunteer's marriage is in a hard season and the kindest thing is to leave them off for a month.

So treat the order as a shortlist, not a decision. The panel shows the top three of a longer list, and Search all people puts the whole directory in front of you when none of the three is right. Staging someone Scout did not offer is a normal move.

Overriding Scout teaches it nothing directly. What changes the order next time is what actually happened: who you asked, and who said yes.