Extraskift — a staffing platform that runs itself
Extraskift is a staffing marketplace where restaurants and restaurateurs hire staff by role and city, with matching, booking and last-minute shifts. Nuvid built the entire platform — and just as importantly, it runs largely autonomously. Demand comes in organically via search, without an ad budget: the programmatic role×city pages rank and bring in employers on their own. Matching, reminders, invoices and new pages then roll on via scheduled jobs, without anyone having to key it in by hand.
Quick overview
In short: Extraskift is a staffing marketplace (built by Nuvid) where employers hire staff by role and city. What makes the case special is that the platform is built to run itself — matching, booking, reminders, payroll and invoices are handled by scheduled jobs on serverless infrastructure, around the clock.
How it works, in brief:
- Programmatic role×city pages rank organically and bring in demand via search (SEO/GEO) — without an ad budget.
- An employer posts a shift — the system invites matching staff and closes unbooked shifts automatically.
- Reminders, payroll and invoices are triggered by time, not by a person.
Impact: frees up an estimated 18 hours per week of manual staffing and administration (matching, follow-up, invoicing) — an estimate, not a measured figure.
The challenge
Staffing in restaurants and events is fundamentally a problem of pace. A shift may need filling the same evening, an employee calls in sick two hours before their shift, and the staff lists are scattered here and there. Do everything manually and it becomes a full-time job just to ring around, chase confirmations and keep track of who is working when.
On top of that comes the administration: payroll data, invoices to clients, following up on reviews and simply showing up when someone googles "hire staff" in their city. Each of these things doesn't take long — but they recur every day, for every shift, and the total adds up. The challenge was therefore not just to build a marketplace, but to build one that doesn't require a person at the keyboard to keep running.
What Nuvid built
Nuvid built the whole of Extraskift as a single staffing marketplace: a place where employers post shifts and hire staff, and where staff find and book extra shifts. At its core is a match between shifts and available staff, with booking, confirmations and last-minute shifts when things get urgent.
- Marketplace for shifts: employers publish shifts by role and city, staff book what suits them.
- Matching and invitations: the system automatically invites matching staff to new shifts and closes unbooked shifts that have expired.
- Urgent staffing: a last-minute flow for when a shift must be filled quickly.
- Booking and reminders: confirmations and reminders (e.g. 24 hours and 2 hours before a shift) are sent automatically.
- Payroll and invoices: payroll data and invoices are generated automatically once shifts are approved.
- Programmatic pages: bespoke landing pages for every combination of role and city, so the platform shows up in search.
The whole point of the build was self-running operation. Most of what would otherwise fall to a coordinator to remember is instead built in as a scheduled job. If you'd like to see other examples of this kind of build, there are more under our solutions.
How it's built — APIs, automations and infrastructure
Extraskift is built on serverless edge infrastructure, and it is that architecture that makes running itself possible. Here are the parts, concretely:
- Infrastructure: the platform runs as a serverless, server-rendered app with static pages and media distributed close to the visitor, a database for all data and object storage for images. Scheduled triggers drive the recurring jobs.
- Automations and cron jobs: two standalone scheduled services handle operation. One runs every 15 minutes and triggers the staffing job — inviting matching staff, sending 24h/2h reminders and closing unbooked shifts — and runs payroll, invoices, offer mailings and review follow-ups daily, plus a daily ingest of open jobs and weekly news/reports. The other runs every 2 minutes and drives a pipeline that finds new employers and fills in contact details, step by step.
- APIs: the automations call the app's own endpoints (e.g. for staffing, payroll, invoices, mailings) as protected, idempotent jobs — so the same job can be re-run without anything being duplicated.
- Third-party connections: email (bookings, payroll and invoice emails), SMS/one-time codes, an AI assistant for visitors, plus sign-in and review fetching via an external identity and map provider.
- SEO/GEO: programmatic role×city pages (e.g. "hire {role} in {city}") plus bespoke city pages, with structured data (schema) so the pages can be interpreted by both search engines and AI answers. This is the part that brings in demand organically: every combination of role and city becomes its own entry point that can rank in search, without paid advertising.
- Design: a consistent interface for both employers and staff, with profiles, booking views and an admin for anyone who wants to follow up.
It is deliberately split so the jobs are small and resilient: each call does one bounded thing, and if something is re-run it doesn't matter — markers and duplicate checks make re-runs free. It is that detail that lets the platform be left to run without supervision.
How much time it frees up
Most of what would otherwise be a coordinator's day is built into the system here. Matching against a new shift happens without anyone ringing around, reminders go out on their own, unbooked shifts close by themselves, and payroll and invoice data are created when the shifts are done. A person doesn't have to sit and press the buttons — the jobs are triggered by time.
Below are the manual tasks that otherwise recur every day, and how the platform takes care of them instead. The time figures are estimates of how much manual effort disappears, not measured values.
| Manual task | How we solved it | Time freed up |
|---|---|---|
| Ringing around and matching staff to new shifts | Automatic invitations to matching staff when a shift is posted | ~6 hrs/week |
| Chasing confirmations and reminding ahead of shifts | 24h and 2h reminders sent automatically | ~3 hrs/week |
| Closing and clearing unbooked shifts that have expired | The system closes expired, unbooked shifts by itself | ~2 hrs/week |
| Creating payroll data and invoices | Payroll and invoices generated once shifts are approved | ~4 hrs/week |
| Finding new employers and gathering contact details | An automatic pipeline finds and enriches candidates every 2 minutes | ~3 hrs/week |
Altogether it lands at an estimated 18 hours per week — nearly two working days — that no longer need to be spent on manual staffing and administration. But the time freed up is really only one half. The other is the business value: when matching happens automatically and the programmatic pages bring in new employers organically, more shifts get filled, more bookings and more matches — without the staffing work growing in step with the volume. The time left over can instead go to looking after clients and staff, the thing that actually builds the business.
Results and next steps
The result is a staffing platform that both brings in demand and does the work in the background. New employers find their way in organically via the role×city pages that rank in search — without a single krona spent on ads — and once inside they get shifts filled while staff get shifts booked, without anyone sitting in the middle coordinating by hand. The recurring tasks — matching, reminders, payroll, invoices and new pages — are handled by scheduled jobs, around the clock. The business value is that more bookings and matches can be handled without the workload growing at the same pace; the platform is built to be left to run and grow with more roles and cities.
The next step for that kind of build is to broaden the pipeline and switch on more automations as the need arises — all on top of the same resilient foundation. Want to build something similar, a platform that runs itself rather than requiring constant supervision? Take a look at our solutions or get in touch and we'll look at your case together.
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