Recruiting is all about building, maintaining, and nurturing personal relationships. In this uncertain time, there’s one counterintuitive rule to remember. Even if you’re not hiring truck drivers, keep recruiting. Doing so will help you smoothly transition back to hiring drivers when your fleet is back to normal.
Maintaining your recruitment efforts may seem like the last thing you’d want to do when you’re downsizing. Don’t be lulled into complacency. If you only focus on your plans for the next few weeks, you will be too late. Continuing to nurture your pipeline is critical to your company’s long-term health, but your strategy may have to change as a result of the global health crisis. Uncertain times require improvising, adapting, and overcoming obstacles. When you’re not actively hiring truck drivers, focus on building relationships in your recruitment pipeline. Here are a few best practices.
1. Don’t Lose Interested Applicants
As HR professionals know all too well, recruiting isn’t a faucet that you can turn on and off. Leads that are not consistently nurtured will turn cold and disengage. Even when you’re not hiring truck drivers, it’s important to develop your relationships for future employment.
Consider that consumers typically take three to nine months to make a decision. In this case, your jobs are a product, and applicants are your consumers. Most people spend the majority of our waking hours at work, and making a job change is a really big decision.
It’s too early to predict when freight demands will increase and hiring will resume, but you need to be ready. Continue to build a relationship with interested drivers. Found out what is important to them and whether you are a good fit. Then, when the time comes to bring in drivers, you’ll be prepared to quickly fill your open positions.
2. Stay Visible
Example Campaign from Drive My Way
It’s important to stay top of mind for drivers even if you’re not hiring right now. While more drivers are in the market for a new job now, the competition remains very high for experienced, high performing drivers with exceptional safety records. A lull in recruiting is a good time to promote marketing campaigns. Highlight your current drivers with tasteful video campaigns.
There is no better endorsement for being a great place to work than one from current drivers who are happy that they joined and chose to stay. You can also take advantage of social media trends like #thankatrucker. Provide resources for current and prospective drivers to increase brand awareness and strengthen ties to your company.
As a recruiter, it’s important to keep your energy high even when working from home. Continue making calls to drivers. Cultivating relationships in a hiring slowdown will make you an obvious choice when drivers are changing jobs in the future. Drivers are not shy about sharing their experiences with others. Employers will be remembered for the actions they took and how they treated drivers during this difficult time.
3. Fine-Tune Your Message
With uncertainty rippling through the trucking industry, clear, positive communication is more important than ever. As a fleet, the best strategy is to be transparent about your position.
If you are not hiring new drivers, be honest with applicants. Even if you are not able to offer jobs right now, be a resource to drivers.
In recruitment conversations and all other company messaging, strive to acknowledge the current hardships, be authentic, and offer valuable, curated information that drivers can use. This is also an opportunity to optimize your outreach with video campaigns and a mobile-friendly interface. Setting the appropriate tone helps drivers respect and relate to your brand and will foster relationships with potential hires.
4. Seek Out Opportunities That May Be Available in a Few Months
A hiring lull is the perfect time to look toward the future. The strategic recruiting plan that you laid out in early 2022 may or may not be the right fit for your company going forward. As you approach hiring for 2023 and beyond, do you anticipate your hiring needs changing? What is different about the drivers you need to recruit and how will your company meet those demands? Use the Drive My Way Ultimate Guide for Truck Driver Recruiting to create a comprehensive recruitment plan for the months ahead.
It is more important than ever to understand what drivers prioritize in a job.
Previously, drivers may have been asking for local jobs or flexible rider policies. Now, their focus may be on PTO policies for sickness or your truck cleaning standards. Listen carefully to what drivers are looking for and shape your marketing and recruiting efforts accordingly. This recruitment slowdown is also a great time to offer operations experience to recruiters to help your whole team align with current drivers’ experiences. Pairing a recruiter with a dispatcher or terminal manager may give them a perspective on drivers’ needs.
5. Prepare for Continued Remote Processes
Slowly but surely, companies are re-opening and finding a new normal. The widespread shutdowns due to COVID-19 will continue to ease, but the effects of the pandemic are likely to linger for far longer. With millions of Americans becoming remote workers overnight, virtual recruiting and onboarding have become the norm for many companies. Even as restrictions on in-person work environments are relaxed, prepare to manage your candidate lifecycle virtually.
While the circumstances have caused us to adapt and be distant, that does not mean that we have to lose the personal connection. In recent years, several companies, including Luma Brighter Learning, have started offering online Learning Management Systems (LMS) for onboarding truck drivers. It’s a strategy that is effective for both companies and drivers. We spoke with Luma Brighter Learning CEO, Gina Anderson, and she shared her perspective on why synchronous online learning is a great option for trucking fleets.
“The carriers are saving time, they’re saving money, they’re becoming more efficient, and they’re making their drivers happy.” Gina continued, “There’s not one way to train people. That’s why it’s so valuable to be able to provide mixed methods of training [using platforms like Luma]. You don’t have to get rid of synchronous (same-time) training — you can do it online. Drivers can learn any time, any place.”
Gina Anderson went on to add that it’s no longer a question of whether or not to implement online learning systems for drivers. Drivers still value real-time connections with peers, mentors, and trainers, so companies should be asking themselves how to make virtual onboarding possible. Asking drivers to complete the basics in a synchronous online environment is a cost-effective strategy to streamline your onboarding process while still complying with social distancing restrictions and engaging your driver community.
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.
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.
Comprehensive CDL Recruitment Solutions
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?
1. Hiring Drivers
Just as you are sacrificing time to attend these events, so are drivers. It’s fair to say, most drivers have reduced availability to attend events like these, as they are often on the road with limited hours.
Megan Andrews is a Customer Success Manager at Drive My Way. She worked for a National Recruiting Agency prior to joining the Drive My Way Team in early 2021. During her time with her previous employer, she worked with small mom and pop companies up to Fortune 500 companies to find the best talent across all industries. 
Almost every carrier has some sort of Facebook presence by now. Whether that Facebook presence is actively helping you reach drivers is the bigger question. 
The most important part of strong communication with drivers is good listening. This means you actually take time and effort to hear drivers’ concerns and then address them. Good listening isn’t just reactive. Don’t just wait for drivers to come to you with their concerns. Be curious enough to inquire about their needs and questions.
Sometimes, the medium is the message. Choosing the proper communication method can make the difference between having successful conversations with drivers or leaving them frustrated. Some issues are too long or complicated to discuss over text or email. Calling drivers’ cell phones is the most popular way to communicate with drivers for a good reason.
The concern that female truck drivers have over equipment is two-fold. First, consider the ergonomics of a standard semi-truck cab. Generally, they’re built to fit the physical size of a larger man. It can be difficult for some women to reach the controls or get the seats adjusted into a comfortable position while keeping their feet on the pedals. 
The issue of safety is one that female truck drivers of all ages and backgrounds are aware of. Safety from physical harm or the threat of sexual violence is important for all women but affects female truck drivers in unique ways. 
It’s not breaking news that print media is on the decline. While ads in newspapers and magazines may have been the primary advertising channel decades ago, readership has gone down significantly. 
You’ve seen these ads everywhere: Ones with 20-30 bullets listing out every facet and minute detail of a job. But the more information available for prospective hires, the better, right? Think again. In that very early stage of the job search, driver candidates are usually just looking for a few pieces of key information so they can decide if they want to learn more about the position. 
To simply call social media popular anymore is a gross understatement. It’s become so entwined with people’s lives that we almost can’t imagine life without it. This is why it’s important for carriers who are looking to reach more drivers through their job ads to build up a presence on these social media sites. 
