When it comes to recruiting in the trucking industry, it’s incredibly easy to get started off on the wrong path. One incorrect move and your team can spend unnecessary time, money, and resources digging your processes out of a very deep hole.
The best way to ensure your team stays on a path to success is to set the tone early on for how your recruiting process will work on an internal level and how your team will engage and communicate with driver leads and candidates.
Here are some key factors to keep in mind when developing your tone for success in the CDL driver recruiting world:
Take a proactive approach to recruiting
With so much competition in the industry, there are ample opportunities for drivers to simply abandon the application process halfway through (or even after just a few questions). While this may cause some recruiters to simply move on to the next applicant, recruiters who are truly focused on long-term success should be prepared to take a confident, proactive stance.
If you’ve gathered at least the applicant’s contact information, driver recruiters have the opportunity to begin communication. And instead of letting driver leads sit in a CRM platform for weeks at a time gathering dust without any outreach, recruiters can send targeted drip campaigns and newsletters reminding them of your messaging, branding, and differentiators.
There is too much riding on these prospective drivers for recruiters to sit back patiently while candidates make decisions about who they’ll work for. Luckily, there is plenty of technology on the market today to help recruiters engage with these untapped candidates, even if they haven’t made it all the way through the application process.
Create a valuable, personable applicant experience
To build a long-term strategy of success, driver recruiters must be willing to invest the time and resources necessary to create a valuable, personal applicant experience. There are a few things to consider when setting a personal tone for success with your driver recruiting process:
- Creating a strong, mobile-friendly online presence
- Building an easy-to-use, intuitive application process
- Treating every candidate as a valuable, one-of-a-kind asset
Smart and successful recruiting begins with the application process, and how a driver candidate engages with a prospective employer in the beginning will dictate how they perceive that company down the road. Bad applicant experiences can leave lasting dents in the talent pipeline and can severely impact your credibility as well as your bottom line.
Retention is the key to recruiting
To quote industry icon Dan Baker, “The best way to recruit drivers is to keep the ones you’ve got!” This is invariably true, and as the industry becomes even more competitive, this sentiment will become even more important. As most recruiters have probably already experienced, almost every driver interview conversation will include some sort of question regarding driver retention and turnover rates.
Obviously, drivers will look at companies with high turnover rates and immediately realize there is something wrong. Drivers don’t want to constantly look for new driving jobs, and they enter into ever new opportunity with the possibility of long-term employment. It’s the company that has the potential to turn the relationship sour.
The trucking industry isn’t as large as some recruiters would like to think. Drivers aren’t a dime-a-dozen. Drivers participate in their fair share of gossip and intel on various trucking companies, and if your team doesn’t treat drivers the way you should, it can make a sizeable dent in your reputation. Recruiters and managers should keep a steady pulse on the sentiment of drivers to stay on top of critical issues or red-flags before they grow out of hand.
Build a successful recruitment process
Even if your organization has been notoriously behind the times when it comes to creating valuable recruiting experiences, it’s never too late to turn the tide and set a new tone of success. At the end of the day, it comes down to providing drivers with the tools, experiences, and support they desire and that makes them feel like a valued member of the team—from that first website visit to three years of employment.
Driver recruiters must be able to work smarter and operate more efficiently to increase new candidate wins and grow retention rates. With DriverReach, the modern recruiting management solution, recruiters can break down barriers to get more drivers in trucks and more trucks on the road than ever before. Let DriverReach help your organization set the tone for recruiting success – request your demo today!
