Does the Free Frontline App Notify You When a Job Is Posted? What Frontline's Own Pages Say It Does

Yes, in Frontline's own words. The page for the Frontline mobile app says substitutes can "Get a notification of available jobs right to their mobile device," and a Frontline blog post on mobile apps and fill rates says "Substitutes can get a notification immediately when a job is available." That is close to all Frontline's public pages say. They do not say how long after a job is posted the notification arrives, which jobs send one, or whether you can limit notifications to the schools, positions and days you would take. This post quotes those pages as they read, so you can judge the free app for yourself. It then says plainly what Sub Hero, an independent job alert service for substitutes on Frontline, adds, and what it cannot do.

What Frontline's pages say, word for word

Frontline's page for its mobile app has a short section headed "For Substitutes." It lists three things:

• "Get a notification of available jobs right to their mobile device"
• "Accept available jobs and view job details within the app"
• "Search and view all available jobs"

The page says nothing else about notifications: no timing, no conditions, no filters.

The app is called Frontline Education in the App Store, where it is listed as Free with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 from 81K ratings. The description says: "This app is available for districts and their employees that have added the Frontline Insights Platform." Frontline's Substitute Mobile App quick-start guide calls it "the free Frontline Education mobile app" and says it "provides increased accessibility to job alerts and other job acceptance tools."

The most specific sentence is in a Frontline blog post titled "Talk Data to Me: Does Using a Mobile App Impact Substitute Fill Rates?" It says: "Substitutes can get a notification immediately when a job is available – then filter by school name, job date, or post date." The same post says its analysis covers "over 4,000 organizations where substitutes have been using the mobile app," and that "substitutes prefer to receive absence notifications through a mobile app rather than text message, phone call, or internet browser by a ratio of 4:1." Frontline's product page for Absence Management puts it this way: "Create an absence, notify qualified substitutes instantly."

What the pages do not say

Read those sentences again with a substitute's questions in mind.

• How soon. "Immediately" and "instantly" are Frontline's words for the notification. No page we read gives a measured time between a job being posted and the notification reaching a phone, and we have not measured it either.
• Which jobs. The blog post's filters, "school name, job date, or post date," are described as something you do after the notification, on the list of jobs. None of the pages says the notification itself can be limited to certain schools, positions, days or job lengths. If that setting exists, Frontline's public pages do not describe it.
• Whether you get it at all. The App Store description ties the app to "districts and their employees that have added the Frontline Insights Platform." Whether yours has is a question for your district, not for us.

Two things Frontline's quick-start guide does document. The app's Settings menu is where you "Review district details and user preferences (e.g., dark mode, notification sounds, privacy policy, etc.)," and the Inbox is where you "Review any received web alerts from your district." If notifications are not reaching you, those two screens are where Frontline's guide points.

The phone call is a different thing

Frontline also calls substitutes, and its Substitute QuickStart Guide is precise about when: "If an available job has not been filled by another substitute two days before the absence is scheduled to start, the system will automatically begin to call substitutes and try to fill the job." The guide adds that the system "will call about one job at a time, even if you are eligible for other jobs." So the call is a backstop for jobs still open two days out. It is not a notice that a job was just posted.

Most jobs never get that far. In our look at about 34,000 Frontline postings across 193 districts, 82% were filled more than two hours before they started. So the app notification, not the call, is the thing to compare an alert service against.

Why a notification of every available job is not an alert for yours

Take Frontline's blog sentence at its word: a notification when a job is available, then filters on the list. That means the notification arrives for jobs you would never take as well as the ones you would, and the sorting happens after you open the app. How much that matters depends on how long jobs last where you work.

In our tracking of about 5,600 Frontline postings across 82 districts, 41% of the districts we measured had a median posting lifetime under two minutes. Across everything we tracked, between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, local time, the typical posting is gone within a minute. Where postings last that long, a notification you have to open, read and sort often arrives about a job that is already gone.

This is not about being faster than other substitutes. Everyone books from the same board. It is about not having to watch your phone all day to find the notifications that were for jobs you wanted.

What Sub Hero adds

Sub Hero connects to your Frontline login and watches the jobs your login can see. You set filters on school, district, position, day of the week, start and end time, and job length. When a posted job matches, Sub Hero sends an email and a push notification within seconds of it matching, with the position, school, date and time, and a button to accept the job. On Pro it can also accept a matching job for you, with five automatic acceptances included each month.

The plans are Standard at $6.99 a month, for alerts, filters and booking from the alert, and Pro at $9.99 a month, which adds auto-accept. Pro has a 14-day free trial, one per Frontline login. Standard does not. A free account needs no card and lets you connect your Frontline login and see how Sub Hero works before paying for anything. Before you connect any service to your Frontline login, including ours, read the questions to ask first. For how the other options compare, see the alert options as they stand in 2026.

Sub Hero is not a replacement for Frontline's app. Your schedule, your non-work days and your district's messages stay in Frontline, and the free app is where Frontline documents them. Sub Hero adds the filtered alert and, on Pro, the acceptance.

What this doesn't do

• Measure Frontline's app. We have not timed Frontline's own notifications, and its pages give no figure, so this post makes no claim about how fast they are.
• See your non-work days. Sub Hero cannot see the non-work days you set in Frontline. If a day is off for you, it has to be off in your Sub Hero filters too, which matters most for auto-accept on Pro.
• Win a job someone booked first. If another substitute accepted the job before Sub Hero's acceptance reached Frontline, the job is theirs.
• Anything outside Frontline. Sub Hero reads the Frontline job board for your login and, on Pro, accepts jobs there. It does nothing outside Frontline.
• Unlimited auto-accept. Pro includes five automatic acceptances a month.

Where Sub Hero fits

Sub Hero is independent and not affiliated with Frontline Education. It watches your Frontline account, sends an email and push notification within seconds of a job matching your filters on school, district, position, day, time and length, and on Pro can accept a matching job for you, five included a month. It can't see your Frontline non-work days, it can't get you a job someone else booked first, it can't tell you how fast Frontline's own notification is, and it does nothing outside Frontline.

Learn more: app.getsubhero.com

Plans start at $6.99/month. Works with Frontline Absence Management.