When you create a cook profile, you pick the stations you run from the same vocabulary every restaurant uses to describe its line. That list is what the matching engine uses to surface shifts that actually fit you — a grill cook sees grill shifts, a garde-manger cook sees cold-side shifts, a pastry cook sees pastry shifts.
You can run more than one. Most cooks do — a single profile carries both the station mix and the reliability history that develops over completed shifts.
Generic gig platforms treat kitchen work as one undifferentiated bucket. HotShift does not. The matching engine ranks candidates the same way every sous chef already thinks: station fit first, proven reliability second.
Any nearby “kitchen worker” is surfaced as a candidate. No station filter, no reliability data, no-show rate untracked. A pastry cook gets sent to a grill shift. The line goes down at 7pm.
We rank by station match first — the matchScoretells you how well the cook’s declared stations line up with what your shift actually needs. Reliability comes second — the noShowRiskreflects the cook’s recent completion history, so managers see who actually shows up before service starts.
From posting to confirmation is built to fit a pre-service window. The path from “we’re short a grill cook tonight” to a confirmed booking is four steps.
Station, skill level, hourly pay, start and end time — under five minutes.
Station match first (matchScore), reliability second (noShowRisk). The grill shift surfaces grill cooks, not random generalists.
Review ranked cooks, confirm the booking, the cook is auto-notified.
Shift completes, payment is processed the moment the clock runs out — no waiting for Friday.
Cooks build a profile and pick up shifts. Managers post shifts and confirm cooks.