How and When to Use Technology to Recruit Truck Drivers

It seems that we can’t escape technology in our lives, especially in the workplace. As a recruiting professional in a challenging and fast-paced industry, you’ve probably read about how using the latest technology can help you recruit truck drivers. However, having a keen skeptical eye, you also know that using technology cannot solve all problems, and can’t replaced good old-fashioned recruiting methods. In reality, both these things are true. You must use technology for recruiting, but you can’t rely on it blindly either. The trick is learning how and when to use technology to best aid your recruiting efforts.

Enhance and Complement with Technology

It’s true that technology can play a part in all functions of your recruitment efforts. It can help allocate your budget, optimize marketing, capture and manage leads, and onboard new hires. However, if you use technology blindly, that may be worse than not using it at all! You could end up hurting tried-and-tested methods that have worked for ages.

The secret to how and when to use technology is to always have it complement your human efforts, instead of hamper them.

There will always be some disadvantages to using technology, but thankfully your human efforts will be strong in those areas. Similarly, there are areas where humans tend to make more mistakes. Here is where technology can aid or accelerate your process. This way you’re always using technology to enhance your already strong human recruitment efforts.

The Strengths of Technology

Knowing how and when to use technology depends on a good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. You’ll soon recognize that these usually complement human strengths and weaknesses. For example, one of the weaknesses of human effort is a limited capacity. You only have a limited number of recruiters, limited budgets, or limited time.

Thankfully, technology excels at using limited resources to scale up operations that lead to better results.

Similarly, using human effort leads to low accountability. Bill thought Joan was going to complete that task, while Joan thought Adam was accountable for it. Assigning tasks to technology means that the tasks are track-able and measurable. Human effort can sometimes lack consistency and accuracy. We understandably feel tired, bored, antsy, or unmotivated when tackling repetitive tasks. These are perfect tasks to outsource to technology. Unless it breaks down, it reliably completes the same task repeatedly until you instruct it to stop.

And the Weaknesses

However, don’t be fooled into thinking that there are no disadvantages to relying on technology. One of its weaknesses is that technology will be subject to bugs and glitches. This is when the human touch helps. When your automated systems suffer a technical error and don’t function as expected, you can ask recruiters to step in and cover the missing pieces.

Technology also needs constant monitoring and frequent technical support. Instead, people can be autonomous!

You don’t need to constantly monitor their actions or call in a repair crew when they make an error. If you empower your staff, they are capable of constantly self-adjusting. This is in contrast to technology, which is limited in its programming. If you instruct an algorithm to send a message to contact new leads, it will continue to attempt doing so until you tell it to stop. On the other hand, humans are adaptable. We can see when something isn’t working, and instead of making the same mistake repeatedly, we can flexibly adapt our behavior to fit the situation.

Pair both human effort and technology toward their strengths to efficiently recruit truck drivers.

As you can see, humans and technology both have strengths and weaknesses. Usually, the strengths and weaknesses complement each other. This is the secret to how and when to use technology.

Use Technology to Enhance Human Effort

1. Budgets

As we’ve written about before, you can use data to inform decisions about where to allocate your recruiting budgets. Technology can tell you which recruiting methods are successful for which jobs in which locations. At the end of the day though, recruiters have to use human judgment to make decisions about budget strategy and planning and sell this plan to supervisors to get their approval.

2. Finding Drivers

Recruiters sift through the carrier’s jobs and decide which characteristics are important for each job. You need human effort to decide which candidate looks like an ideal match for a particular job. Technology can then help you target the right candidates and meet them where they already exist online. You can also use lead scoring, or matching services like Drive My Way to funnel the top matches into your recruiting pipeline.

3. Contacting and Securing Leads

Contacting leads quickly is crucial to converting them into hires. Technology can help you automate methods of contact and frequency of contact. Mobile-friendly applications and applicant tracking systems are tools you can use to gain contact information or other important data. But there is a danger in overusing technology here. Nothing can replace the human effect. Once you’ve identified top leads, contacting them with a personalized message adds the much-needed human touch.

4. Onboarding Drivers

You can use technology to measure lead velocity and other metrics to help optimize your truck driver onboarding process. However, once you’ve already converted leads to hires, you don’t want to risk alienating them. Human skills here are essential. Listening to newly converted drivers and meeting their needs with your solutions will go a long way toward maximizing retention.