Departments and roles
Departments and roles are the shape of your staff team. A department is an area of camp, like Kitchen or Waterfront. A role is a job within it, like Lifeguard, and it carries the number of people you need. Together they drive your staffing board, applications, offers, and contracts, so it's worth setting up before you start hiring.
How it fits together
Three layers, each sitting inside the one above:
Department - an area of camp. Kitchen, Waterfront, Office
Role - a job inside a department, with the number of positions you're hiring for
Position - one of those slots, filled by one member of staff
So Waterfront might hold a Lifeguard role with six positions. Hire four lifeguards and you've filled four of six, which is what your staffing board counts against.
Departments belong to a season. Each year gets its own set, so you can grow a department one summer without rewriting history for the last one.
Creating departments
Go to Staff and open your departments. Add a department with a name, and it's ready to take roles.
You can reorder departments, and the order carries through to everywhere they're listed, including the application form applicants see. Putting the areas you most need to fill at the top is a small nudge that costs nothing.
Keep departments broad. A department per area of camp works well. A department per job leaves you with a long list and nowhere useful to put roles.
Creating roles
Add roles inside a department. Each role needs:
Name - the job title staff will recognize, like Lifeguard or Kitchen assistant
Number of positions - how many people you want in this role
Role names have to be unique within their department, so two departments can each have their own Assistant without clashing.
The number of positions is a target, not a limit. Going over is allowed, and your staffing board will show the role as over its target so you can see it happened on purpose. Set the number you're planning for rather than a ceiling you're afraid to cross.
Roles can be reordered inside a department in the same way as departments themselves.
What the structure drives
Once departments and roles exist, they turn up across staffing:
Applications - applicants pick the departments they're interested in, so you can sort by where someone wants to work
Staffing board - your hiring view is grouped by department and role, showing filled against needed
Offers - an offer names the role, which is how someone becomes a position
Contracts - role and department can be merged into contract text so you don't write them out per person
Someone can hold more than one role. A lifeguard who also drives a bus is recorded once with an extra role rather than twice as two people.
Changing things later
Renaming a department or role is safe at any time. The name updates everywhere it appears, and nobody's employment is disturbed.
Deleting is stricter. A department with people in its roles can't be deleted, which stops you removing the structure that someone's employment depends on. Move or withdraw the staff first, then delete the department.
When a season ends, build the next one's departments to match how camp will run. Copying last year's shape is a reasonable starting point, but the roles you struggled to fill are usually worth rethinking rather than repeating.