Even with the increasing income and job stability within the transport industry, a lot of companies are having a very tough time finding perfect candidates for their driving jobs. Due to the massive shortage of truck drivers, they can’t afford to be picky. This means that recruiters need to work hard and give their A-game to attract potential employees.
A lot of things can influence your driver recruiting results, like having a recruiting budget and making a driver-centric company culture. But most importantly, the recruiter needs to be good at his job. A recruiter must represent your company in high light and persuade truck drivers to become potential employees.
In this post, I’ll help you look deeper into why your truck driver recruiters are failing.
Let’s dive in.
The Wave Of Retirement
While retention issues are already a concern in the trucking industry, driver retirements are also becoming a big problem. Experts are saying this is one of the biggest contributing factors to the current driver shortage problem.
With an aging workforce and a diminishing interest in the profession, recruiters struggle to recruit suitable candidates for their company. Whereas the current economic growth calls for more trucks.
While many open positions are available, there aren’t enough drivers to fill that space. Because skilled drivers tend to jump from one job to another for better pay, conditions, and benefits. So there’s always a void of class-A drivers, creating problems for companies.
To tackle this problem increasing wages and giving comprehensive benefits are key.
Trucking Industry Image Problems
Apart from a driver shortage and retention problems, there’s another problem plaguing the industry. And that’s its horrible public image. When you think of truck driving, you think of long hours spent sitting in the driver’s seat, away from home and family. Especially in families where both parents are away from home for long periods. This also presents a challenge in hiring.
And long hours in the driver’s seat, messed-up eating schedules, and the difficulty of maintaining a healthy life, people are reluctant to join the industry. And the ones that are already here are leaving. You can’t exactly hire people who don’t even want to join.
To tackle this, the trucking industry’s image needs a makeover, and they also incorporate a healthy work culture. Offering a strong work-life balance, sufficient benefits, and health compensation is a great start for solving this issue.
Lack Of Proper Communication
A lot of companies fail to recruit new drivers because of the team’s lack of communication. If your recruiters fail to represent what your company stands for, what benefits you offer, and the working condition – if you fail to give them the reason to join your company – they’ll just skip to the next one.
Proper communication with your driver is the key to keeping your driver happy. Effective and open communication also ensures your drivers get fair treatment, get up-to-date equipment, and offer an income and working conditions that they can happily accept. These assure that your worker will stay happy and be with your company for days to come.
If the team struggles to communicate properly with the drivers, then consider automating a few of your outbound touchpoints using nurture campaigns. This lets your team regularly check on your drivers without sacrificing manual resources. Here are a few ways you can communicate with your drivers:
Difficulty Recruiting Millennials
Millennials hardly consider trade skills as potential career options. This is making it tough for companies to recruit and employ millennials for those positions. As millennials are taking over the workforce, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach younger workers which are heading toward other industries.
Companies need to get the word out about what opportunities they can offer young workers. They can go to college campuses to attend job fairs and hold seminars. They should inspire young workers to join their industry.
By creating interest in skilled trades and, more specifically, trucking, this issue can be resolved. But as things are now, the millennial problems seem to be a real concern.
Underqualified Leads
Although you can find highly skilled drivers even during this massive shortage issue, almost 50% of your leads won’t be very feasible.
You can’t just randomly pick someone up and hire them for your company. Recruiting is something of a matching game. You need dedicated workers who share the same values and visions as your company.
But when you sort through all the applications, you’ll find a lot of candidates that are inexperienced, underqualified, uninterested, or just not fit for the job. While going through all those candidates, you’ll have blown recruiting budgets and wasted precious time on dead leads.
Recruitment Budget Allotment
There’s only so much money you can expend on recruiting. You need to plan and strategize where you’re going to spend that money. This is a problem plaguing all truck driver recruiters.
Nowadays, there are massive recruiting channels, more than ever before. And companies want to spread as wide as possible, stretching out to as many drivers as possible. If you send money on inefficient recruiting methods, you’ll just be wasting money.
Measuring the effectiveness of your recruiting strategy is a crucial task. This will help you understand how to allocate your budget effectively, stretching out to more drivers and saving money.
High Turnover Rates
While dealing with a massive driver shortage, recruiters also have to deal with insanely high turnover rates. Even if a company recruits a highly skilled driver, retaining them is another tough task. Most often, drivers jump from company to company for better pay, conditions, benefits, and compensation.
At this point, companies are losing more drivers than they’re recruiting each year. Companies can offer sign-on bonuses, but that still doesn’t do it. To retain your drivers, you need strong recruiting.
Only hire drivers that are a good match for your company and its values. Do a survey on your drivers to evaluate if their values and needs align with your company’s.
This will increase the chance of retaining your employees. But the best course of action is to create a healthy work culture that nurtures loyalty among the workers.
Recruitment Frauds
The transportation industry is no stranger to recruitment fraud. A lot of drivers are offered fake sign-on bonuses, which don’t get paid in the end. And sometimes, they don’t even get their promised wages.
All these contribute to tainting the trucking industry’s image. Making it hard for people to join.
Closing Thoughts
An accumulation of a lot of problems like driver shortage, retirement surge, high turnover rates, and improper budget allocation contributes to recruiters’ challenge of hiring truck drivers.
Some issues like communication gaps and improper budget can be fixed by properly training your recruiters.
