To hire the best truck drivers, recruiters need to constantly create a good impression of their carriers. However, there’s only so much you can do as a recruiter to control your brand and reputation. Unfortunately, many advertisements lie, and drivers have good reason not to believe everything that a carrier says about itself. That’s why they’re more likely to listen to other drivers instead. People are more likely to listen to those they trust, and they’re more likely to trust those who are similar to them. The power of peers is so great that people are 4 times more likely to buy a product when referred by a friend. You can harness this power in the trucking industry as well. A potential driver for your fleet is more likely to trust a fellow driver than what you have to say about your fleet.
This is the idea behind creating a driver referral program. Since your reputation as a carrier is going to spread anyway, you may as well use that to your advantage to attract the best candidates.
Research shows that “word of mouth” plays a huge factor for drivers looking for trucking jobs.
According to the 2019 Overdrive Connectivity Report, 26% of company drivers use word of mouth when looking for driving jobs, second only to Internet searches. Meanwhile, it’s the strongest factor for owner-operators, who look to it 39% of the time. A driver referral program will help you harness the power of word-of-mouth and use your company reputation to bring the strongest drivers to your fleet. Here are 3 tips to create a strong referral program.
1. Build advocates
As we mentioned, drivers are already speaking to each other about your carrier. Your company already has a reputation, and you can’t override it by a referral program. Either your drivers believe you have a strong company and culture that values them, or they don’t. You can’t magically change their opinion by using incentives, but you can encourage them to share their opinions with other drivers.
Offering incentives nudges your drivers to make referrals they already believe in.
It just adds the extra benefit that it won’t slip their mind between a busy job and personal life. If drivers already believe in the strength of your company, you’re really building them as advocates for your company, and not simply as referrals.
2. Structure incentives
Many companies use incentives to nudge drivers into making referrals. Most of these incentives are monetary rewards, although they don’t have to be. As we learned in high school economics class, incentives matter.
You have to make sure you’re offering the right incentives, and that they are influencing behavior in ways you want them to.
If you’re offering a vinyl record player as an incentive and all your drivers use MP3 files for their music, you aren’t going to get any referrals even if everyone loves your company! Make the referral worth it for your drivers. If you’re offering a monetary reward, there are different ways to distribute it. For example, a $500 referral bonus can be spaced out- $250 when the referred driver gets their first run completed and another $250 when they’ve been with the company for 60 days. Often the incentive doesn’t begin until the new driver has already joined the fleet. Driver benefits like extra paid vacation time are other referral rewards which many drivers will covet. Find the right incentive structure and distribution mechanism that works for your company!
3. Build Your Budget
It’s easy to think of referral programs as a waste of money if you haven’t used them before or measured their impact. Try to think of driver referrals as an investment into your recruiting budget. The hire you make from a referral program will help you gain back the amount you spent on the incentive or reward. In fact, you can measure the impact of your referral program and calculate the return on investment. If you’re doing it well then you make a significant number of hires which more than account for the budget spent on the referral program. Consider these budgetary issues when structuring your referral program.
If your program is losing more money than gaining, you need to seriously re-think your entire driver referral program.
Which incentives aren’t working? Should the monetary reward be greater? Maybe the rewards need to be spread out more or be delivered only after you’ve converted leads to hires. Don’t forget to account for the hundreds of dollars being wasted on trucks sitting idle in your lot. Investing in a driver referral program might a way to end that loss of value.
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Staff changes are always difficult, no matter what industry or company you work for. Whether you’re dealing with one of your best recruiters leaving the company or trying to train a brand new recruiter on how the trucking industry operates, these situations can have a dramatic impact on your department if not handled correctly. If your recruiting team has recently undergone changes, here are some tips on how to keep the disruption to a minimum. 
From the moment of onboarding, driver recruiters should be trained to look at recruiting as a long game. Explicitly tell recruiters that the company’s mission is to 
If you’re dealing with high application abandonment, try putting yourself in a driver’s shoes. Most drivers don’t want to spend their limited free time filling out lengthy and complex applications. In fact, this is usually 
Since drivers spend most of their time on the road, they mainly search for and apply to jobs using their smartphones. In this mobile-first world, recruiters and fleet managers need to make sure they’re able to communicate and interface with drivers this way. Otherwise, you risk a large number of drivers abandoning your application.
While you, as a recruiter can create what you think is the most efficient, painless, and all-around great application experience, you won’t really know how it is until drivers start applying. Even when they do start, it can be hard to gauge what’s working and what’s not since gathering data around job application abandonment can prove to be difficult.
When speaking with driver candidates, be sure you’re an expert on your company and the particulars of the job. Know what the day-to-day will look like and give honest answers. Don’t sugarcoat things if you know that your company might not have the world’s best benefits or if the pay might not be at the top of the scale. 
This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many recruiting departments lack a cohesive plan for how to bring drivers into their organization. While each hiring plan will vary from carrier to carrier, all of them should have two things in common. They should be measurable and repeatable.
The first goal for any truck driver recruiter is to bring in the best drivers to their organization. The second is to bring those drivers in quickly and efficiently. We’ve talked about how important it is to keep drivers moving through your 
Your recruiting team only has so many hours in the day, and sometimes those hours can get allocated to tedious, clerical tasks that aren’t directly related to hiring drivers. Using recruitment automation technology helps with those tasks so 
Once you have a steady flow of driver applicants for your open positions, what’s next?
We know that recruitment automation can help you find driver candidates more quickly. But what about after you find them? Where can you continue to automate processes with your employees?
For the vast majority of the American workforce, their workday is fixed. Once their shift is over, they’re able to go home and spend their free time with their family and friends and sleep in their own bed. 
For any carrier that is serious about not only recruiting, but retaining top talent, making a concerted effort to offer their drivers a quality work life balance is a must. This means not only offering a blanket home time policy but being flexible with the individual needs of your drivers. 
“We pride ourselves on planning to have our regional drivers home every weekend, as is promised during the recruitment process. As a company, this is very important to us because our owner was a driver himself and understands how vital home time is for our drivers. Additionally, we do our absolute best to tailor home time to the needs of each specific driver, whether it be more/less home time, or being home on certain days of the week.” 
“Our driver managers are trained to understand the importance of work and home life balance. We have programs in place to assure that our drivers get the home time they need. Driver satisfaction has always been important at ARD Trucking since the very beginning. We make home time one of our top priorities.”
No matter how good of a home time policy you have, OTR and Regional drivers still spend a lot of time away from home. A good way to make drivers feel more comfortable on the road is to let them bring a little piece of home with them, whether that’s by offering a Rider/Pet policy, or upgrading your 
Giving drivers a quality work life balance is extremely important, but it’s only one piece of the driver 
“The holiday season, also known as peak season, is typically our busiest time of year. From Thanksgiving through New Year’s, our dedicated lanes usually double or triple in volume and frequency. We find ourselves doing multiple runs to the same locations per day to keep up with the extra freight that is being shipped. We also take on some new pickups/lanes that are seasonal only.”
