How Our Clients Are Celebrating This Driver Appreciation Week

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Commercial truck driving is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. It’s also one of the most important, with drivers across the nation responsible for transporting over 70% of the United States’ freight.  

 

Each year, Truck Driver Appreciation Week provides the perfect opportunity to recognize and celebrate the tireless commitment of commercial drivers around the country. Here at Drive My Way, we’ve noticed that many of our clients have found creative and thoughtful ways to uplift their drivers with fun gifts, exciting games, and heartfelt messages. 

 

Keep reading to find out how our clients are shining the spotlight on their drivers this appreciation week, and how to keep the recognition going all year round. 

Goody Bags, Prizes, and More! 

Presents don’t have to be limited to birthdays or the holiday season any more! This September 10-16, many companies will provide their drivers with unique merchandise, useful tools, or fun swagto show their appreciation. A personalized gift is a thoughtful way to reward drivers for their hard work and show that you care.  

Company merchandise is a great way to show drivers how important they are to the mission, such as Go-To Transport’s tumbler.

This year, drivers at Go-To Transport can look forward to receiving a fun collection of company merchandise from display tables set up at their locations throughout the country. A Go-To tumbler, pen, and personal thank you card will be available to every company driver that stops by throughout the week. Drivers will also be able to choose between either a baseball cap, beanie, or a hoodie, depending on supplies.  

 

Drivers for NFI Industries are sure to enjoy choosing from a wide range of fun gear this appreciation week too. With locations across the country and over 4,500 drivers and contractors nationwide, NFI has stepped up by offering company hats, shirts, duffle bags, lunch boxes, and more!  

 

Meanwhile, Schwend, Inc. is utilizing its four locations across the South to set up stations for drivers to receive goody bags and door prizes this appreciation week. Prizes will range from Schwend merchandise to tickets for a weekend vacation!  

At each location, Schwend will also be setting up a breakfast and lunch serving station, where drivers can receive a home cooked meal each day of appreciation week. But for any driver that isn’t able to make it to a company terminal, there’s no need to worry! Schwend will offer to cover a few meals throughout the week for any driver out on the road.  

 

Do Something Nice 

You can never say ‘thank you’ too often. For many commercial truck drivers, they don’t hear it enough. This Driver Appreciation Week, show your team how much you care by sending out a thoughtful message or organizing an exciting event.  

 

The management team at Go-To Transport has been busy working with their marketing division to create a video of thank you messages for drivers to go on company social media pages. Hearing words of appreciation directly from management helps keep drivers invested in the company mission by highlighting the direct impact they have through their hard work.  

 

At NFI, it’s clear they know food is the way to everyone’s heart. Besides offering catered breakfast and lunch throughout the week, the company will be holding BBQ cookouts and picnics with food trucks, snow cone trucks, and raffle giveaways to celebrate their hardworking drivers across the country. 

 

At Schwend, their late summer employee appreciation picnics act as an extension of Driver Appreciation Week each year with cash prizes, CB radio giveaways, games, and more. Held at their Jasper, TN, and Dade City, FL, terminals, the picnics are open for all Schwend employees, but focus on drivers and their families.  

 

Truck Driver Appreciation Week is an annual reminder of the dedication, sacrifice, and commitment of commercial drivers across the nation. It’s a time to recognize and celebrate drivers, and to highlight the incredible contributions they make each day to the economy and our way of life.  

Drive My Way is proud of our clients and the efforts they make each year to acknowledge the hard work of their drivers.  

 

If your company celebrates Driver Appreciation Week in a unique way, or you’d like to be featured in more stories like this in the future, be sure to reach out to us on social media!  

 

It’s a Competitive Market: How to Differentiate Your Freight Carrier

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Thousands of freight carriers exist in the U.S., with at least 750,000 as of April 2023, according to the American Trucking Associations (ATA). To stand out against that level of competition individual carriers must find a way to differentiate themselves, especially when it comes to attracting, and retaining, high quality truck drivers.  

Our team at Drive My Way regularly hears feedback from drivers about this topic and most often drivers will walk away from a position because the company took too long to respond during the hiring or onboarding process. When drivers want to work, they are ready to go, and a long process to get onboard can really deter them from your company.  

We recommend implementing some of the following practices to best stand out from your competition and retain top talent in the trucking industry.  

Overhaul Hiring Practices: Hiring has become a boring, tedious process that can lose potential candidates’ attention, especially millennials, if it is too long, requires dozens of steps, and lacks personalization. Drivers want to know that you care about them as a prospect, while also having full transparency about key factors of the job such as schedules, PTO, benefits, and potential for career growth. If you think your hiring practices might be dated, they already are, and should definitely be overhauled.  

Give Your Company a Face: Increasingly, candidates are associating the likelihood of being content within a workplace with how that company represents themselves out in the world. By showing the human side of your company through your social media networks and website, you can put a face with your carrier’s name. This makes you more memorable to potential candidates and helps current drivers feel part of a real team.  

Ask for Help: Sometimes the best way to attract top talent is to work with a recruiting partner who understands drivers’ needs and can match them to your available positions. Drive My Way’s team works with drivers to assess their qualifications and personal preferences to match them with specific jobs that offer what they want. If your old recruiting techniques aren’t delivering quality drivers, it may be time to consider other options.  

Remember Retention is the New Recruitment: While recruiting qualified drivers is always the first step in building a solid team, retention has become equally, if not more, important in the grander scheme of things. Benefits play a huge role in showing employees they are valued and that you care about their success in and out of their truck. Anything from health perks to driver mentor programs show how your company cares and goes the extra mile to ensure drivers have the most resources to succeed at their job as possible.  

Differentiating your freight carrier is important to attract top talent when it comes to drivers, but it reflects well on the company in all aspects. As you retain experienced drivers, you are able to stand out against your competitors, allowing you to attract more customers and deliver better results. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. 

For more tips on truck driver recruitment, please download our free guide today!  

Updating Your Recruiting Budget? Leave Room for Innovation This Quarter

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Creating an annual budget for recruitment is hardly the most glamorous part of the hiring process, but it’s an essential step to increase retention rates and maximize quality hires. It’s also an opportunity to allocate resources to try out new, innovative solutions that could ultimately change the way your company recruits.  

 

In today’s highly competitive market, recruiters should always be taking note of which strategies are the most effective, and which need to go. This way, budget planning doesn’t just focus on efficiency, it becomes a tool for fueling growth. Keep reading to find out Drive My Way’s tips to create a budget that will keep you ahead of the curve in this evolving industry.  

 

Where’s Your Money Going? 

A great rule of thumb to remember when creating a budget is that if it can’t be measured, get rid of it. You can’t improve a process if you aren’t able to set tangible goals or measure results. This means that the first step in creating a budget with room for exploratory innovation is to understand your total costs.  

 

Creating a graph, like a pie chart, is a great way to evaluate your expenditures and estimate your cost per hire. You should always be sure to include historic or fixed costs, so there aren’t any surprises later that you didn’t count on. Taking a holistic approach allows you to see which costs are paying off, and which costs might not be worth the investment.  

 

The hiring process is extensive, and you have to consider all the costs along the way when creating your budget. These are some of the categories you might include when analyzing your expenditures: 

 

  • Cost per hire 
  • Jobboard advertising costs (niche and general job boards))  
  • Professional social network hiring costs (LinkedIn) 
  • Recruitment software costs  
  • Recruitment events and networking (such as job fairs) 
  • Branding (promotional company videos, logos, advertisements) 
  • Background checks on potential hires  
  • External recruitment agency fees (if your company uses them) 
  • Interview or onboarding costs (such as recruiter salaries and background check fees) 
  • Training costs (during onboarding and annual development training) 
  • You need to be clear about what is and is not included in all of your costs and be sure to account for the hidden costs in screening through all of the leads and applicants you receive that are simply not a fit.  While that volume may bring your cost per lead down, there are large hidden costs in processing that volume.   

 

Double Down on What Works 

After evaluating your overall costs, it’s important to determine and optimize the return you make on your investments. Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as total offers accepted, net new candidates, and time-to-hire, are all important metrics that highlight the success of recruitment strategies.  

 

Although budget season should be all about planning for growth, it’s important to reinforce the recruiting tools that are working best for your company currently. While reviewing previous budgets, evaluating sources that have been successful in the past based on highest ROI allows you to understand and make predictions about the channels most beneficial to your company.  

 

Analyzing ROI will also reveal the recruiting strategies that are no longer generating success. These should not be viewed as failed solutions, but as opportunities to implement new or experimental recruiting tactics.  

 

Leave Room for Innovation  

It’s always smart to allocate funds for the most successful recruiting solutions, but if you continue to budget the same way each quarter, you’ll get the same results. Carving out 5-10% of your budget for experimentation with new strategies ensures that your recruiting practices stay aligned with market trends. Keep in mind, experimentation means you need to be open to something new and it may include challenges along the way and some failures. It’s all an important part of the learning and experimentation process.  

 

With an industry wide 90% turnover rate for large carriers, it’s more important than ever that your recruitment solutions are evolving and innovative. This means trying out new channels, marketing strategies, branding, hiring events, or even introducing new staff. Providing incentives for recruiters and maximizing digital presence are also tools that many companies use today to stay ahead of the curve. 

 

 

In today’s market, there are countless recruiting strategies that all claim to be the most effective. The truth is that every company is different and requires a unique solution. Creating a budget for recruitment is the ideal time to evaluate which strategies are most successful for your company, and which should be replaced by something new. If you don’t leave room to try new things, you’ll continue to get the same old results.  

 

Here at Drive My Way, we believe that experimentation and innovation are key to growth. How does your company budget for recruiting? Do you have tips for scaling your recruiting strategies while remaining true to what’s already working best? Be sure to reach out to us on our social media so we can continue learning!  

How the Semi Truck Shortage is Affecting Truck Driver Recruiting

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semi truck shortageIn the trucking industry, we hear a lot about a shortage of truck drivers and how that’s to blame for a lot of the logistics holdups our country is facing. While hiring and retaining truck drivers is definitely an issue that a lot of carriers are facing, there’s another that’s proving to be just as much of an obstacle; a shortage of semi-trucks.  

Why is There a Truck Shortage?

semi-truck shortageIf you’ve tried to buy a personal car, pick-up truck, or SUV in the past two years, you’re probably aware of the microchip shortage that the auto industry is facing. Unfortunately for fleet managers and would-be owner operators, this is an issue for the trucking industry as well.  

The problem is that there’s a shortage of the microchips that go into almost all consumer and commercial vehicles. These microchips are used to control important vehicle functions including everything from air conditioning to lane assist features.  

During the Covid-19 pandemic when lockdowns were initiated, people started driving less and staying in more, and using personal electronics like phones, tablets, and laptops. The factories that create these microchips started pumping out more and more of these personal electronic microchips while slashing the number of automotive microchips they made.  

Fast forward to today and the demand for new vehicles has returned to pre-pandemic levels. Lockdowns are over and the pandemic overall is pretty much in the rearview mirror in the United States.  

Unfortunately, these microchip factories haven’t caught back up with production of automotive microchips. Thanks to a huge number of factors including incentive to produce more profitable microchips for 5G smartphones, energy usage regulations, and strict ZERO Covid policies still being implemented in China, microchip production is still slowed.  

How is the Semi Truck Shortage Affecting the Trucking Industry?

The two main groups being affected by the semi-truck shortage are fleet managers and owner operators. Owner operators eager to either buy their first truck or upgrade to a new one are finding it hard to do so with limited inventory and skyrocketing prices for both new and used trucks. Many dealers across the U.S were sold out of semi-trucks by the end of January this year. 

Some fleet managers and recruiting teams are getting to the point where they can’t expand the way they’d like to because they’re not able to acquire the trucks they need.  

Jason Kent Crowell

Jason Crowell, Director of Recruiting, CCT

Jason Crowell, Director of Recruiting with Drive My Way client, Custom Commodities Transport is one such person affected by the trucking shortage.  

“We were getting very close to having to stop advertising our jobs because of the semi-truck shortage. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. It’s definitely a very interesting time for the salespeople, the operations people, and certainly for the recruiters.” 

What Can Recruiters Do?

The best thing recruiters can do is nurture the relationships they’ve built with driver candidates even if they don’t have the trucks to put them in right now.  

“What we’re having to do is nurture some of those relationships that our recruiters are making a bit longer, because we may not have the truck capacity at the moment to hire them even if they’re a good fit for us.” – Jason Crowell, Director of Recruiting, Custom Commodities Transport

While it’s not the ideal situation, continuing to check in with quality driver candidates by maintaining regular touchpoints will give recruiters a better chance of landing them once their fleet has the capacity to bring them on.  

Will the Truck Shortage End Soon?

Some reports say that microchip production is ramping back up, but not to the levels we saw pre-pandemic. 

There’s some speculation that even when the supply chain for microchips returns to normal, we still won’t be seeing full lots of semis like we did in years past. Why?  

Through this ordeal, auto manufacturers have learned It’s more profitable and efficient to build only what’s needed instead of having huge numbers of trucks shipped out that may sit on the lot for months. 

The best thing for fleet managers and owner operators to do is to assume this is the new normal for the time being and adjust their plans to purchase new semi-trucks accordingly.

There may be a time when microchip production increases and we have a surplus of semi-trucks readily available for purchase, but that unfortunately doesn’t look like any time soon.

Custom Commodities Transport Partners with Drive My Way for Success

Custom Commodities Transport is the nation’s largest transporter of Activated Carbon. See how they worked with Drive My Way to meet their driver needs.

View the Case Study

New Hours of Service Proposed Rule: Here’s What to Know

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hours of service proposed rule

You may have heard of the recent hours of service proposed rule by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). On Aug 14, the agency issued a long-awaited proposal intended to put more power back in the hands of drivers to make decisions about safety. The FMCSA has been working on the new HOS proposed rules since August 2018. Since then, it received more than 5,200 comments- mostly from truck drivers and carriers asking for more flexibility from the strict regulations which could force them to drive while tired. The agency has extended the comment period until October 21, so you can still chime in with your thoughts. Here’s what’s you need to know:

What Are the Proposed Rules?

  • Flexibility for the 30-Minute Break Rule:

    The new proposal aims to increase safety and flexibility for the 30-minute break rule by tying the break requirement to eight hours of driving time without an interruption of at least 30 minutes and allowing the break to be satisfied by a driver using on-duty, not driving status, rather than off-duty status.

  • Modifying the Sleeper-Berth Exception:

    Modifying the sleeper berth exception will allow drivers to split their required 10 hours off-duty into two periods: One period of at least seven consecutive hours in the sleeper berth and the other period of not less than two consecutive hours, either off-duty or in the sleeper berth. Neither of these would count against the driver’s 14-hour driving window.

  • Allowing One Off-Duty Break of at Least 30 Minutes:

    The new rule would allow one off-duty break of at least 30 minutes, but not more than three hours. It would pause a truck driver’s 14-hour driving window, provided the driver takes 10 consecutive hours off-duty at the end of the work shift.

  • Modifying the Adverse Driving Conditions Exception:

    This change would to the adverse driving conditions exception extends the allowable driving window. An additional two hours will be added to the maximum window during which driving is permitted. This allows drivers greater flexibility.

  • Changing to the Short-Haul Exception:

    The new rule would change the short-haul exception available to certain commercial drivers. It lengthens the drivers’ maximum on-duty period from 12 to 14 hours. In addition, it extends the distance limit within which the driver may operate from 100 air miles to 150 air miles.

What Stays the Same?

  • The proposed rules would NOT increase driving time
  • They would continue to prevent commercial motor vehicle operators from driving for more than eight consecutive hours without at least a 30-minute change in duty status

What Now?

The hours of service proposed rule was greeted well by industry groups, including the American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. The comment period has been extended until October 21, with a possibility of being extended past that. Truck drivers and carriers can make their voices heard before the rules become finalized.

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