An urgent job is offered to one tradie at a time. Each gets about a minute to accept. Whoever accepts first gets exclusive access to the customer’s number and about two minutes to ring them. Miss that, and the job moves on.
Why not just alert everyone nearby?
Because a broadcast is a race, and a race has one winner and a lot of interrupted people. Send an urgent job to twenty tradies and nineteen of them stopped what they were doing for nothing. Do that often enough and they stop looking.
It is also worse for the customer. A broadcast produces whoever was quickest to their phone, not whoever was best suited to the job.
Second by second
- The customer describes the job and marks it urgent.
- ReadyTrade works out who is genuinely eligible: the right trade, close enough, and — the part most systems skip — who has said they take urgent work at this hour.
- The best-matched tradie is notified. They have about a minute.
- If they accept, they get the customer’s number exclusively. No one else can see it.
- They have about two minutes to make contact.
- If they do not, the number is revoked, it is recorded against them, and the job goes to the next tradie.
That repeats until somebody makes contact or the list is exhausted.
What happens if nobody takes it
The job does not disappear. It becomes an ordinary job and the customer chooses from the ranked list in the normal way. There may well be a good tradie in there who simply was not next to their phone at the time.
Why the timing is not enforced by a background job
A minute is too short for a scheduler to police. Every time anyone looks at an urgent job, the deadlines are recalculated from the timestamps, so the state is correct at the moment it is read rather than at the moment something last ran.
The scheduled sweep exists only as a safety net for a job nobody is looking at.
What a tradie is actually judged on
Turning an urgent job down costs nothing. Saying no honestly is recorded as a response, because a platform that punishes a straight answer teaches people not to give one.
What counts against a tradie is accepting an urgent job — taking the exclusive lock on somebody’s phone number — and then never ringing them. That tradie had the number in their hand.