3 Tips for Your Lead to Hire Process

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Everyone knows the trucking industry is a driver’s market. Drivers get to choose between competing carriers which offer different pay, benefits, and home time. They will also likely choose whichever carrier presents them a good offer the soonest. Drivers will want to be hired soon to get that next paycheck. The carrier which can convert leads to hires quickly has a definite advantage. This is where lead velocity comes in—it measures how quickly you can convert leads into new hires into your fleet. With so much competition for a small pool of drivers, you don’t want to lose leads to other carriers simply because they hired quicker than you. Here are 3 tips for your lead-to-hire process.

Tip 1: Focus on Top Candidates

As a trucking recruiter, you’re usually bombarded with an overwhelming number of leads. Just a fraction of these actually convert to drivers for your fleet. In fact, you know that most of them are going to be unqualified leads. It’s no wonder that some recruiters and carriers take too much time on their lead-to-hire process—they’re spending time on too many unqualified leads!

Try to narrow your focus and limited time on the top leads

You can use landing pages and other automated methods to ask qualifying questions and narrow your leads. Using lead ranking will help you prioritize the top leads first and focus your energies there. If you don’t use lead ranking, you risk losing the best candidates to other carriers while spending time and energy on unqualified leads who don’t convert to drivers.

Tip 2: Automate the Process

We mentioned automating the qualifying questions through landing pages. Similarly, you can automate other steps of the process, especially the paperwork. Instead of taking a few hours for new hires to fill out the paperwork, it should take 20-30 minutes. Use electronic paperwork for new-hire forms such as DOT applications, release forms, I-9, W2, etc. Make sure these forms are mobile-friendly, as many drivers will take advantage of opportunities to complete them on the go. You don’t want to face application abandonment because your paperwork wouldn’t load on their phone!

If you automate certain steps, it frees up that time to spend one-on-one with the drivers during orientation

Take advantage of the face-time with drivers to build relationships in-person, instead of asking them to complete forms that take an hour.

Tip 3: Lead Efficient Orientations

One of the reasons the lead to hire process may take too long for drivers is because of long or delayed orientations. Of course, it’s risky to just breeze through orientation. That time is crucial for onboarding as drivers need to be welcomed to the organization, learn about the culture, meet their dispatchers, and learn more about the company. One trick to getting around this is to offer more frequent orientations so that the soonest one beats out other carriers.

Make sure to offer orientation a few times a week to meet the schedule needs of your new hires

You can even be flexible with the orientation schedule and craft it to fit the schedules of your incoming drivers. Another time-saving method is to move some training items to an online learning system. By automating the less exciting parts of orientations, you free up time to have the important face-to-face interactions. It also makes the in-person orientation shorter, as drivers can complete some learning materials from the convenience of home.

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Ultimate Guide to Truck Driver Recruiting

Current ways of recruiting truck drivers just don’t work anymore. That’s because recruiting isn’t a transaction. This ultimate guide helps carriers recruit for retention.

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Brand Awareness: How It Attracts Great Drivers

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brand awareness: how it attracts great drivers

Your company’s brand is one of your biggest assets in attracting and recruiting great drivers. Or, if your brand is weak, it’s one of your biggest liabilities. Sometimes trucking recruiters are so focused on providing better benefits than the competition, that they forget that their own unique brand is something others can’t compete with. Each trucking carrier can position its brand to offer something valuable and attractive to the best drivers. Having a brand isn’t enough – you need to build brand awareness otherwise it will weaken, and other carriers will be more attractive. Here are some things you need to know about strengthening your brand awareness.

Remember the Driver Lead Funnel

When considering how to build you brand awareness, don’t forget the driver lead funnel. This tool helps you understand the different levels at which driver leads engage with your carrier.

The driver lead funnel starts with awareness, then leads to consideration, and finally to conversion.

Sometimes we forget that there are phases in the funnel before actual conversion! If recruiters focus entirely on conversion, they won’t pay enough attention to the previous steps in the funnel which actually lead to conversion. The risk is that leads aren’t properly cultivated and groomed toward conversion. Thus, they don’t engage with your company’s brand before they send an application for a job. Your company will just be one of several dozen which the lead is applying to. Don’t forget the top of the funnel- and that starts with awareness! If recruiters focus more on building brand awareness as the first step, then drivers will be more likely to consider, and then convert, to that carrier over others.

Create Brand Encounters

Okay, so building brand awareness is an important prelude to driver consideration and conversion. But what’s the best way to do that?! Consider that the average worker has at least 8 touch points of contact with a company before they take an actionable step toward conversion. Those are 8 opportunities for you to connect with drivers and have them engage with your brand.

The best way to build brand awareness is to create opportunities for “encounters” with your brand.

In fact, you need to make sure that you’re creating more frequent or more memorable encounters than your competition. These encounters can be created by strategic and engaging content through your channels. Maybe the average driver encounters a Facebook post by you, then reads a blog post from you. A month later, perhaps this driver follows you on Instagram and starts liking your content. The following month, this driver visits Glassdoor and researchers your company, clicks on a driver testimonial video, or asks your company a question on Facebook. Sooner or later, this driver will be looking for a new job. It’s only after all these encounters that this driver will be more likely to have your carrier at the top of their mind and convert to your fleet. You can use many channels to build brand encounters.

Ask yourself, “how many content touch points are we providing potential drivers today?”

Follow the Data and Trends

While the strategy of brand awareness is perennial, the tactics may change with time. The tactics really depend on the data that you have available on your company’s performance, and the trends which are popular at the moment. If you’re maintaining a strong marketing and recruiting operation, you’ll have data on key performance indicators like cost per hire, conversion rate, etc. While those two are metrics regarding conversion, don’t forget metrics for awareness and consideration! Key performance indicators for those phases include how many impressions or clicks you received, the click-through-rate, session time, bounce rate, etc. These data can help you answer questions like which social media channels to use for brand awareness, what types of content is more popular, and what time of day you should post.

Don’t forget some trends that can also inform your brand awareness. For example, 85% of social media traffic is mobile. Additionally, 72% of drivers say that they use a mobile device to fill out a full job application. This tells you that you really need to optimize your mobile interface to make it more user friendly! If not, you’ll see higher rates of application abandonment. Similarly, the data and trends tell us that video is still content king.

If your carrier releases video content for engagement purposes, it will be more successful that photos or text.

Another popular option is user-generated content. This will draw more traffic since truck drivers are incredibly interested to read or see what other truck drivers have to say. Use these insights from data and trends to strengthen your brand awareness!

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Driver Rehires: 3 Reasons to Focus Here

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Driver Rehires: 3 Reasons to Focus Here

Recruiting for retention is an important strategy for any trucking company. Some might argue it’s the most important strategy when hiring new truck drivers. But sometimes, even with a true driver-centric culture, good drivers leave. Rather than letting that be the end of the story, it can give you an avenue to focus on for hiring in the future. When looking for new drivers, consider your former drivers. Here’s 3 reasons to have driver rehires as part of your overall hiring process.

1. Driver Rehires are Already Familiar with the Company

Driver rehires are already familiar with your company, your culture and your policies. If they left on good terms, they might have just been testing the waters for a better salary. Or looking for a newer fleet of equipment to use. When that didn’t pan on for them, they start looking again for their next new trucking job. That can be a short trip back to your company. Their onboarding can be a lot more efficient, as they only need to learn what’s new, vs. starting from the beginning. If they apply again, and you know that they weren’t terminated or otherwise had any issue while employed, it could be an easy conversation to get them rehired.

2. Saves Money on Recruiting

It’s cheaper to rehire a driver than to find and hire someone brand new. If the driver worked for you already, you are almost certain to be on their radar if they start looking for a job again. They might be following your social media or the job boards that you use to post opportunities.

With the driver shortage not getting any better, having a pool of qualified and experienced employees to call on for rehire can be a valuable resource. Make sure the people you want to come back to work for you know they are welcome back.

You don’t have to spend any incremental dollars to get them to see what you’re already doing, because they’re following you already. Compare this to what it takes to find a brand-new lead. Then nurture that lead through your channels to get them to apply for your open trucker job. Instead, just go back to your list of former (good) drivers, and reach determine which ones might make good driver rehires. This can be a good cost saver, as well as a time-saver in getting your open seats filled.

3. Part on Good Terms

If a good trucker is leaving you, plant the seed that you’d look forward to hearing from them again in the future. Let them know you’ll be willing to keep in touch in the future. And that you’re happy to share future driver postings with them. If they indicate that they’re okay with that, mark them as eligible for rehire. Then keep them on your marketing list for newsletters, social media invites, etc. You can let your current marketing budget help them be aware of any news or job postings.

Why Did They Leave in the First Place?

As a side note, when working on your retention strategies, keep track of the reason that drivers are leaving you. Look for patterns or consistent reasons for leaving. Then work to adjust and seal-up any gaps in the future. Even better, keep a good pulse on what your drivers are thinking, and then be proactive with changes.

Keeping driver satisfaction high is a great way to ensure your drivers stay with you. Recruiting for retention is a great overall strategy to keep your fleets full and your drivers happy.

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Ultimate Guide to Truck Driver Recruiting

Current ways of recruiting truck drivers just don’t work anymore. That’s because recruiting isn’t a transaction. This ultimate guide helps carriers recruit for retention.

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3 Reasons to Stop Texting Drivers From Your Cell Phone

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Texting can be a great way to communicate with family and friends. After all, Americans send over 26 billion text messages each day! But when it comes to official company business, using your personal cell phone for text messaging can lead to issues if you’re not careful. These issues could cost you time, money and ultimately qualified candidates over time. If you’re texting drivers from your cell phone, here are 3 reasons to stop.

The average American checks their phone about 50 times each day. 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes. – techjury.net

1. Consistency

Using personal phones to send business texts can create branding issues for a company. Setting clear rules as to who can send texts, and the content they should contain should be a priority for any company using text messaging as an official communication practice. Much like having standard email templates in place for business communications, having text message templates for texting drivers is a good idea.

2. Timing

Using a messaging app from your personal phone could make you seem available 24/7. Though you might curb your overall business communications with candidates to your normal business hours, drivers might not be able to check their phones until you’ve gone home for the day. Once they’ve responded, you might not respond until the next morning. This type of time delay devalues the benefit of text messaging in general. Having an SMS system in place that’s truly a 24/7 solution, will allow for the best execution of this type of communication with your drivers.

3. Tracking Old Messages

If you and your team are all using your personal phones to connect with candidates, there’s plenty of room to lose track of what’s been sent. You could be sending duplicate messages, or worse, conflicting messages and confusing your potential drivers. Without a dedicated system to track all texts from one source, you could be inadvertently sending negative messages to candidates. This might make them decide to look for work somewhere else. And with no tracking system in place, there’s no way to get any usable metrics to find out how well texting drivers is actually working for your company.

As part of your overall communication strategy with your drivers, text messaging can play an important role. But in the recruitment process, texting from your personal cell phone is not always going to be the best idea. Hopefully the 3 things to consider when using text messaging from a hiring perspective will help your team recruit well.

Lastly, if you’re going to use text messaging in any capacity to connect with potential drivers, you need to let them know about it. This will reduce any confusion that might arise when a candidate gets a text message from an unknown number. Additionally, you should have your candidates opt-in to the text messaging system as part of the application process. This way they will know that the texts are coming, and who they’re coming from.

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Ultimate Guide to Truck Driver Recruiting

Current ways of recruiting truck drivers just don’t work anymore. That’s because recruiting isn’t a transaction. This ultimate guide helps carriers recruit for retention.

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Why is Converting Truck Driver Leads So Hard?

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truck driver leads

Everyone on your hiring team is always busy. You seem to have a good stream of leads flowing in for your posted jobs. In general, these should be a very good thing for a hiring team. However, you’re just not seeing the conversation rates you’d like. Team members are frustrated because they have to start all over every time a new driver is needed. And your trucks are still sitting empty. In this challenging time where you’re doing everything you can to hire drivers as fast as possible, why is converting truck driver leads so hard?

What’s Your Current Lead Conversion Process?

Do you have an effective lead management process in place? Or even any structured lead management process in place? If yes, that’s great! If no to both, this is certainly the place to start when trying to determine how to better convert your truck driver leads. You can quickly find an online guide to help your team map out a simple lead management process, that you can then tailor to your company’s unique needs. Once you’ve got that figured out, work to follow the stated process. Every. Single. Time.

Once you know you have a great process in place, what are you doing to optimize your process? And what tools are you using to alleviate pain points or roadblocks in the process?

One very important part of a lead management process is scoring the generated leads. Your process should include fast turnaround on scorning (if that’s not already being done for you), and then a quick hand-off to the person/team that contacts the drivers. An effective scoring process helps you focus on the most qualified truck driver leads first. And the those less qualified leads later. Getting leads already qualified from your marketing efforts is a best practice here. That saves so much time sifting through potentially useless lists that should never have been matched with your postings.

hiring truck driversWhat are your lead contacting best practices? How quickly are they being contacted? Once a lead comes in, you need to contact them quickly. If a driver just applied for your job, they’re expecting to be contacted immediately. This way you’re sure that you’re doing your part to get the relationship off to a good start. This also helps to avoid losing top candidates to your competition. Making sure that you have a great contacting and nurturing process for your truck driver leads is a key component in getting the best candidates hired. This is also a great place to augment your manual processes with technology to automate the lead contacting (and recontacting) process more efficient and productive.

Tired of Struggling to Convert Leads?

Then it’s time to take a totally different and personalized approach! One way to improve converting your truck driver leads is to start thinking about the process in a completely different way. Like we do here at Drive My Way. Truck drivers aren’t just leads. They’re people. We have a driver-centric platform that provides matches instead of leads. We focus on matching employers with drivers for each unique job based on the driver’s professional qualifications and personal lifestyle preferences. Unlike traditional job boards, we match at the individual job level. We don’t deliver unqualified lead lists. We focus on quality matches. Which makes the most sense for you, and the drivers.

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How and When to Use Technology to Recruit Truck Drivers

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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.

ultimate guide to truck driver recruiting

Ultimate Guide to Truck Driver Recruiting

Current ways of recruiting truck drivers just don’t work anymore. That’s because recruiting isn’t a transaction. This ultimate guide helps carriers recruit for retention.

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Is Your Driver Onboarding Process Efficient?

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One of the challenges facing recruiters is that many fleets are looking to hire the same drivers you are. You’re in competition for the same small pool of candidates. In general, the quicker you recruit, the more likely you are to catch the top drivers. The slower you are, the more likely it is that rivals will scoop up your preferred candidates. A quick and efficient onboarding process is one of the factors which will help you have the edge over your competitors. Onboarding involves the lead to hire process, which is what you implement once you’ve identified a viable candidate willing to sign with you. An onboarding process that isn’t efficient could be costing you drivers.

Lead Velocity

To improve your onboarding process, it’s important to understand a concept called lead velocity. Lead velocity is a way to measure the length of your onboarding. It is a metric that tracks the average number of days it takes to turn a lead into a hire. Lead velocity is different across industries. According to research by the DHI Group, it takes about 25 days to convert a lead into a hire for the transportation industry. This may include employees who aren’t truck drivers, so the number might be a bit skewed. Your own lead velocity might end up being longer than that, depending on your budget and resources as a recruiter. Lead velocity will also vary based on driver type. For example, it’ll take longer to hire an owner-operator than to hire a company driver.

Whatever challenges you face, it’s important that you do everything you can to make sure your lead velocity is as low as possible

Shortening Lead Velocity

Think about what you are doing as a recruiter that is unnecessarily adding length to the lead velocity. Perhaps you’re taking too long to contact leads? Or waiting on drivers to submit their applications? If you have too many leads and not enough recruiters, it can add to lead velocity. Similarly, if you have too many unqualified leads, you’ll lose time searching for the diamond in the rough.

What you really need is a stronger screening method and matching system to help sort through unqualified leads and an overwhelming lead volume

Another solution is to take phone applications. Drivers are understandably pressed on time and will find it difficult to find time to fill lengthy paper or online applications. Consider going through the application with a driver over the phone and even filling it out for them. This shortens your lead velocity if you’re waiting for the ball on the other person’s court.

Onboarding and Orientations

Once your drivers are further along in the recruiting pipeline, there’s still more you can do to ensure onboarding efficiency. Sometimes lead to hire time is affected by a slow orientation process.

Try to schedule orientations often, to allow your hires more options to attend the soonest one

If your closest orientation date is too far away, drivers will be tempted to sign with someone else because they don’t want to wait long to get to work. You can also time your orientations on days of the week that are more convenient for hires. For example, if you notice you sign many drivers on Mondays, then Wednesdays or Thursdays are good days to hold orientation—perhaps both! The very next day is too soon and you must respect that drivers may already have plans. Waiting until the next Monday is probably too late and risks losing that driver to a rival carrier. Offering two orientation dates per week also gives your hires flexibility since they may be unavailable on certain days of the week.

You should also conduct a review of your onboarding process every few months or so. Are there bottlenecks holding the process back? Too many forms to complete or too much time spent on the application? Identify the problem and try to shorten that step. Use metrics to compare lead velocity over different months, different types of jobs, and different locations. Lead velocity is an important component of an efficient onboarding process. Do whatever you can to shorten the lead velocity and you’ll be able to hire more drivers faster.

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The Importance of a Truck Driver Career Path

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truck driver career path

Truckers looking into a new job almost always have a lot of questions about the carriers they’re considering. They want to know what things look like in a month, in a year, in 5 years or even in 20 years. Being able to provide that information to a prospective new employee up-front could give you the edge in getting that driver hired today! So with the driver shortage and the hiring process as it is today, what is the Importance of a truck driver career path for your drivers?

Training to Hire

With all of the talk about the driver shortage, there’s much renewed interest in driving a truck for a living. For those completely new to the industry, the first thing they need to do is get training to get their CDL license.

Whether you offer your own training program, or partner with a local truck driver training school, be sure to let all potential drivers know that you’ve got a job for you once you graduate.

Be clear about what you expect and what they can expect. That can take a lot of stress off a trainee knowing that if they work hard and get through the training program, their next steps are already mapped out.

Driving for Life

Incentivize longevity. This can be through anniversary certificates or awards. Or even financial incentives that pay out after certain milestones are met.  You can also provide opportunities for continuous education to keep skills sharp. And training to ensure that your drivers are always up-to-date with current technology and regulations.

Be overt about the amount of possible driving options you have for your drivers. Different phases of their lives could change their preferences about time at home vs. time away.

Equipment preferences can change. Or even how much money they need to make at various stages in their lived. Knowing that you’ve got them covered at all steps, is an advantage to help you retain drivers. And this helps drivers feel confident in their role as a driver for your company.

Non-Driving Roles

Sometimes drivers have a need to pull in off the road for good. For whatever reason. But when they’re a good employee and not yet ready for retirement, what kind of truck driver career path might be mapped out in those situations. Often times good drivers can become the best instructors. Or even move into a role in the dispatch office or operations management.

Letting a driver know that these options are available to them along the way might make those transitions from the road to the office smoother when the time comes.

Paint the picture early for your drivers that you have a truck driver career path formulated for them at every stage of their lives. And advertise this on your website and other recruitment materials. For those new to the industry, be clear about your training programs and what comes next. Once they’re ready to hit the road on their own, give great options that fit their lifestyle at each phase. If they grow weary on the road, or can no longer drive, communicate other options for them outside of the 18 wheels. Doing this can instill an additional sense of loyalty to you from your drivers and help you to retain the best drivers.
truckers.

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Ultimate Guide to Retaining Truck Drivers

You work so hard to recruit the best truck drivers for your fleet. The trick is retaining them. This guide is packed with tips for retaining your fleet.

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How to Hire and Retain an OTR Driver

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otr driver

Hiring and retaining drivers in the trucking industry can be a tricky business. It can be even more difficult to hire and retain over the road (OTR) drivers because you want these drivers to be the best in your fleet. OTR driving represents the most challenging type of driver work, so you want to hire and retain the cream of the crop for this elite cadre. Since it can be a challenge to fill these jobs, you’ll want to think about smart methods to retain them and reduce turnover as well. Here are five tips on how to hire and retain OTR drivers.

1. What to Look For

As we have written about before, good hiring starts with narrowing the candidate pool to those who are the best fit for the job.

There’s no doubt about it: OTR drivers are the best in the business and their work is more challenging than local runs in many ways.

You should look for strong behavioral characteristics that will predict reliability, flexibility, and communication in your talent pool. Yes, these are good attributes for any driver in your fleet, but they suit the OTR job particularly well. Look for someone with strong independence and ability to manage and maintain their own workload and commitments with ease. Demonstration of organizational skills, and the ability to adapt to quickly changing situations is a plus.

Good communication skills are essential, as OTR drivers will be coordinating with fleet managers, dispatchers, and reps from shippers and receivers. Attention to detail is another must, since drivers need to be responsible for reporting their logs with accuracy and consistency. Finally, a knack for learning new skills is especially useful for OTR drivers. Remember, they may have to adapt to quick changes and be adept at mechanical troubleshooting and working with new technology and equipment.

2. How to Conduct the Interview

If you’re interviewing a candidate, they have already passed your first round of evaluation for the job. Clearly, they possess the minimum qualifications and experience, and display some interest for your fleet and the OTR job. During the in-person interview, it’s your job to ascertain whether they are well suited for the OTR runs, or just the other local runs in your fleet. You can start by learning more about their personality and character. Look for the attributes detailed above and ask about specific instances or experiences where they demonstrated those traits.

Apart from the typical behavioral interview, you can also mix it up a bit. You can ask about how they would react in hypothetical situations or what they liked or disliked about previous jobs.

Having an open conversation about career goals, work-life balance, and home-time is incredibly important.

Remember that you’re trying to determine fit and maximize retention. Maybe this candidate isn’t the best for this job if they’re about to start a family, or if they’re looking to move on to a different fleet in just a few months. Consider inviting the driver’s partner or spouse to the interview to discuss important topics openly. Don’t forget to ask about issues which especially impact OTR drivers, like equipment breakdowns or real-time monitoring.

3. Hiring and Onboarding Process

Once you’ve identified a strong candidate, be sure to make a job offer quickly. Remember, the number one reason that drivers decline jobs is because they got scooped by another carrier sooner. You need a quick process for any hire, but especially for the elite OTR drivers. Once you’ve made the hire the story isn’t complete. Your work in retaining that driver starts from day one. Before they start the job, enroll the driver in your orientation and onboarding process. If your fleet doesn’t have formal onboarding, you should really consider implementing one.

Onboarding does a lot more than familiarizing your drivers to company policies and employees. Basically, onboarding will start doing the slow work of embedding the driver into your company’s culture. Remember that most drivers are looking for a meaningful job which speaks to their values and needs.

If your company can start signaling that its values are in line with the driver’s values, it starts to build long-term loyalty and a sense of belonging.

Remind your drivers that they are essential to the success of your fleet and that your company is here to be good to them. Building this relationship will go a long way toward retention.

4. Conduct Employee Surveys

Retention efforts start with the first day but must also be continually reinforced. A great mechanism for improving OTR driver retention is conducting periodical employee surveys. Surveys have a dual function: they help evaluate employee satisfaction and give you the opportunity to give feedback to drivers. Measuring employee satisfaction will give you constant data on what kinds of things employees enjoy and which needs aren’t being met. Include options on the survey for employees to detail their preferences if something isn’t working out for them. Collecting data on employee preferences isn’t enough—you should advocate for your drivers’ preferences as much as you can. Ideally, you’re able to effect some change that impacts drivers. Even if you aren’t, the drivers will appreciate that you tried your best.

While conducting surveys, take the opportunity to pass along feedback to your OTR drivers.

It is a misconception that drivers aren’t interested in hearing feedback from their fleet.

If a driver expresses frustration about negative feedback from the company, it more likely has to do with how that feedback was given. Including positive feedback along with suggestions for improvement is a tried and tested method. Drivers want feedback on their performance to have a sense of accomplishment and to have guidelines and direction for improvement.

5. Training and Professional Development

Retaining OTR drivers means giving them reasons to stick around longer with the company.

Your drivers care about independence and freedom, but also professional success.

If drivers believe they’ll be doing the same OTR run with you for years, they are going to start looking elsewhere. Any retention program has opportunities for further training and professional development. Training could be for more advanced certifications and permits. Maybe your drivers are looking to add hazmat or tanker endorsements to their belt.

In addition, see to it that your company offers leadership and teamwork workshops. These help build strong transferable skills—they benefit any employee regardless of the type of work they do. These opportunities help OTR drivers build more skills that they can use in their current job. Rather than taking these skills from your workshops and then running to a different fleet, drivers will feel grateful that you invested in their professional development. This fosters a sense of loyalty and identity to the company and makes it more likely that drivers will stick around with you longer.

ultimate guide to retaining truck drivers

Ultimate Guide to Retaining Truck Drivers

You work so hard to recruit the best truck drivers for your fleet. The trick is retaining them. This guide is packed with tips for retaining your fleet.

Get the Ebook

How to Combat Truck Driver Turnover

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Trucking carriers and drivers are both intimately familiar with the extent of truck driver turnover that exists in the industry. Many trucking carriers have experienced a “revolving door”—constantly needing to hire new drivers because current drivers are leaving the company. Many drivers have also worked for several companies within the span of a few years and very few find a stable driving job that allows them to build a long relationship with the same company.

Turnover negatively impacts both drivers and carriers, yet it persists in the industry. It isn’t just limited to a few companies either but is widespread throughout the industry. Solving the driver turnover problem is a matter of understanding the causes and implementing a few solutions laid out below. Here’s everything you need to know about combating truck driver turnover.

Causes of turnover

To combat turnover, we first need to understand its causes. There are several reasons for turnover that are unique to the trucking industry. Instead of documenting all possible causes, let’s examine some of the most common and important ones for recruiters and fleet managers.

The Driver Shortage

First, turnover is directly related to the CDL driver shortage.

The shortage means there is increased competition between companies for the same small pool of drivers.

Trucking companies can incentivize drivers with higher pay, sign-on bonuses, and other benefits. Offering these benefits is the best practice for each individual company, as we have written about before, but ends up being bad for the industry as a whole. The recruiting process tends to be very quick. As a result, drivers know they could find work very quickly with another employer.

It may be easy to believe that drivers are simply going from job to job looking for the best quick deal they can find. However, it is important to remember that they are just like any other employees—at the end of the day, they are looking for a great job that also lasts for a long time.

Misattributed Challenges

Secondly, drivers may face unforeseen challenges on the job which they attribute to the company rather than the industry. This may be especially true for newer drivers who haven’t experienced problems like equipment break-down, canceled loads, bad weather, difficulty with shippers or receivers, and a host of other problems every trucker encounters.

It’s easy to blame the company rather than the nature of the job when these obstacles arise, especially if the company hasn’t been supportive or understanding.

At the same time, sometimes carriers really do deserve the blame for the driver’s low job satisfaction. Recruiters may have misrepresented the job details during the hiring process. Maybe drivers didn’t ask the right questions or recruiters failed to mention important details. Perhaps the recruiters over-promised benefits like pay and home time, or the company has been under-delivering. Either way, the result is the same: drivers feel cheated by the company and are motivated to look elsewhere for a better job. It’s important to remember that retention starts with good recruiting.

Combating turnover

While there is no cure-all to rid 100% of driver turnover, there are a number of things your company can do to increase retention and keep more drivers month after month.

First, recruiters need to go after the right drivers.

Yes, you want to find good talent, but it’s even more important to find the right fit.

If you think about it, by relying primarily on financial incentives, rival companies can lure away top talent with enticing pay packages. However, if you find the right drivers for you, they’ll stick around with your fleet longer regardless of what the competition can offer. Let’ say only 35% of drivers you hire in January stay till December. Recruiters and fleet managers need to find out which company characteristics persuaded those drivers to stay.

Get creative with potential solutions. Maybe your company offers daily or weekly home time that works well for younger drivers on regional runs. On the other hand, maybe your company is better at attracting veteran drivers who don’t mind OTR runs with home time twice a month. Whatever the case may be, the drivers that stay with your company are the ones who are a good fit. Find out what characteristics they share, how they match your fleet’s needs, and recruit more like them.

Start with Recruiting

High retention starts with good recruiting. Targeting drivers based on the characteristics that make them a good fit is the first and most important step. With this approach, recruiters won’t need to over-promise benefits which the company can’t deliver. There would be no reason why recruiting wouldn’t be a transparent process. Recruiters should aim to paint an accurate picture of the miles, runs, hauls, and regions needed. Be upfront and honest about pay and benefits, especially if they aren’t as generous as what other companies can offer. Think about it—sooner or later the drivers will know for themselves. When they do, they’ll decide whether they want a better deal or not. Why not save time for everyone and reduce turnover by finding a good match ahead of the game.

Build Company Culture

Finally, you’ll want to build some loyalty by forging the right company culture. Pay, benefits, and home time are all important, but not as strong as identity and a sense of belonging.

If you satisfy a driver’s need to feel important, appreciated, and valued, they may overlook a lower pay grade or weaker benefits package.

Engaging in driver appreciation is something that can be done every day and every week, by every employee of your company. Driver engagement surveys are a great way to discover what’s keeping them happy so you can keep doing it, and to show drivers that you really care about them as people and not just as employees.

Driver turnover is a monumental problem facing the industry, and directly stems from the driver shortage problem. Carriers and drivers both suffer when the employees aren’t a good match for the company. Combat your turnover problem by starting with good recruitment. Target drivers who are the right fit and be transparent about job characteristics and benefits. Build loyalty with drivers through engagement and appreciation.

ultimate guide to retaining truck drivers

Ultimate Guide to Retaining Truck Drivers

You work so hard to recruit the best truck drivers for your fleet. The trick is retaining them. This guide is packed with tips for retaining your fleet.

Get the Ebook