Recruiting Evolution -Part 1

Recruiting and Retention Problems? Are your Sales and Operations limited by the human resources that you can attract and keep? Yea. We used to have that problem too.

There's nothing magic, no silver bullet to solve the CDL Truck Driver recruiting and retention crisis. But there are some lessons our team has learned along the way while dramatically improving our results so that we could meet sales and operations at the finish line for overall success. I'm so excited to share our learnings in this series because it will serve as the lead-up to our next 'evolution' for 2020. ***If you're not in the trucking industry, read on. Many of the concepts here are universal.

Our recruiting team's 2018 victories were incredible: 40% headcount growth with a 31% turnover reduction. SERIOUSLY - they wrote news stories about us. When we talk about this, we talk in terms of the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to our company's bottom line (it's the most effective way to talk to the C-Suite). Staffing par excellence!

But it felt bittersweet knowing that 2018 marketing strategy and tactics would not yield the same results in 2019. We knew that we needed to step up our game to keep pace with the increasingly complex and ever-fluctuating business needs.

As our team reflected on record-setting 2018 applicant flow with our President / CEO, we agreed on a seemingly strange GOAL: To stop many (even most) people from applying to our jobs. Proper credit to Bryan Adams, CEO/Founder of PH.Creative who has been preaching the *repel* talent message for some time. If you geek out on topics like this, Bryan's Co-Author, Charlotte Marshall just announced their forthcoming book "The Give & Get".

These days, CDL Driver Recruiters in the US can feel pressured to cast an oversized net to keep up with staffing. But like every other industry, the vast majority of applicants Don't. Get. Hired. 20 years ago, my manufacturing friends would have called this type of Over-Production 'MUDA' (a Japanese term for 'wasteful' used in the 1980s & 90's LEAN manufacturing). And if we wanted to optimize resources and run a LEAN recruiting shop, that MUDA had to GO!

Our team is blessed to have leaders who understand that the company's ability to attract, engage, elevate, and retain the right people can mean organizational life or death. Consider Hundreds of trucking companies have folded in 2019's "bloodbath". Some of you may be reading the Trump headlines and thinking that the economy is all rosy, but Trucking is a leading indicator of an economic boom or bust. Think about it: we all need raw material to make our products (delivered by trucks in the US), we're ordering more than ever online (trucks), we ship our finished products (trucks), mail (trucks), food (trucks), medical supplies and equipment (trucks), fuel, clothing, everything. Trucks. Trucks. Trucks. When the economy is going to take a dip, trucking execs see it first.

Our Execs recognized that if we wanted to keep our name out of bad news "bloodbath" type articles, we needed a talent strategy that differentiates our company. And over the last 4 years, our strategy included investing in our "employer brand" meaning that we actively manage our reputation as a place to work. According to LinkedIn,?75% of candidates research a company’s employer brand before applying for a job. This was just not so 10 years ago. Job-seekers have evolved. We needed to keep up.

Breakthroughs in psychology and brain science have shown that people are emotional decision-makers - this according to Emotionomics author, Dan Hill. To marketers, Dr. Hill offers this: “Differentiation from rivals doesn’t by itself deliver anything on behalf of your target market. In Latin, “motivation” and “emotion” have the same root meaning 'to move' or 'to make something happen'. Without emotional engagement, you're dead." This is important!

From the time I met Caroline Stokes of the "Emotionally Intelligent Recruiter" podcast, she had me thinking about how to bring Emotional Intelligence into the male-dominated gruff-n-tumble oilfield trucking industry. So, taking Dr. Hill's advice and gleaning what we could from Caroline's message, our recruitment strategy team set out to mobilize our employer brand through emotional connection (cause them to feel, cause them to do). Seriously, we read Dr. Gary Chapman's "5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace". With the employment market stakes so high and the technology so robust and accelerating, ERE's Dr. John Sullivan calls today the "Golden Age of Recruitment".

An employer brand is intangible and may be perceived differently depending on 1) which brand touchpoints someone has encountered, and 2) how effectively the company's Employee Value Proposition (EVP) shows through those touchpoints. Special thanks to Bryan Chaney, James Ellis, and the Talent Brand Alliance for pouring this knowledge into our team.

The Employee Value Proposition (EVP), simply put, is what an employee gives and what an employee gets by working with the employer. PHDs are shaking their heads, but that's how I see it. The touchpoints in the graphic above are not owned by HR. Not by Marketing or Sales or Talent Acquisition. Our touchpoints are governed by an agreed-upon central Value Proposition. (More on EVPs later. I have the distinct honor of working with Brand Strategist, Derrick Daye and plan to know 10X more shortly).

In doing the employer branding work, this touchpoint concept can mean sprucing up your career site to feature company mission and values, using employees to describe how the work fits them, managing and responding to online reviews, communicating your brand messaging through social media, celebrating & displaying rewards for value-centered behaviors, aligning all messaging on the EVP, and myriad more. Charles Gracey of Arka Express insists on keeping those touchpoints personal (up to and including scheduling midnight interviews with day shift Drivers). If you haven't heard Charles Gracey's podcast with Chad Hendricks, I highly recommend listening to his ideas. (Sounds like Mike Ditka, but does the work of a trucking industry Dr. Phil).?Charles says "it is very important that people keep in touch with the simple approaches that have been lost due to automation". Working on the basic touchpoint components truly went a long way to change the perception of what it's like to work at our employer.

The Old Recruiting Funnel: In 2008 before the crash, the economy was hot and industry talent was scarce. Our recruiting team piloted some novel marketing strategies (Video Job Descriptions, social recruiting, Pay-Per-Click aggregators, SiriusXM radio to reach Drivers as they were driving). We kept the pipeline stocked, but the business results were anemic and often came up short for the operation.

Wisdom from a former Trucking Company Executive was to simply deploy more resources to generate more leads. "More at top of the funnel, more come out the bottom". That kinda made sense to me 11 years ago (or at least I trusted that old Exec). But the team wasted an inordinate amount of time (and $$) chasing mismatched leads to get the hire.

Hires back then may or may not have even bought into the real-deal culture of our ice-road trucking gig. My team's recruiting "sales" side was frustrated spinning our wheels with so many wrong applicants, and our recruitment marketing side was utterly discouraged providing more and more leads at the top of the funnel with meager results (...that cost tho!), and the Operations group experienced a surge in turnover - people saying "yes" to the job, but changing their mind in the first 90 days.

Déjà vu. If you were also in the energy sector or CDL Trucking or skilled trades recruiting, 2018 probably felt a lot like 2008 all over again. It did for me.

Level Up Learning: A while back a long term Trucker-turned-Videographer, Tex Crowley helped us understand that our recruitment marketing touchpoints are so much more personal when we focus less on our company and more on our people. (He used Yeti as a how-to example). We worked hard at incorporating the employee perspective - talking about the Driver, not the Company. We moved from asking Recruiters to "sell" the job to asking real employees to "share" the job and how they fit into it.

It was a turning point for us in company differentiation. We began to employ more human emotion and connection in our recruitment marketing and began seeing tangible results. Here's an example with Shane sharing his feeling of truck driving "freedom" in 47 seconds:

Years ago our ads said, "Top pay, Great benefits" This is not that. (Shout out to Katrina Kibben who taught me what a job posting SHOULD look like). This video is Personal (in Shane's own words) + Emotional (freedom) + Real (cold, dirty work) which equates to "Sticky". When we say "Sticky", we mean a brand touchpoint that encourages people to "stick around" longer or stick with us for future interactions (and transactions). These types of touchpoints - with our 2-way exchange Value Proposition built-in - are distributed to Truckers across our hiring geography with a non-threatening Call-To-Action like "More Information". NOTE: we never send viewers to a job application with only one touchpoint.

Two Important Things happened between 2008 and 2019:

1) Candidates?dramatically changed how they look for work, and

2) The toolbox for marketers grew much more powerful reaching deeper into the funnel

Lesson One: We learned to talk a LOT less about the company "selling" the job, and started talking more about the employees, letting them "share" the job and how they fit into it.

We learned that when our message was personal and included emotion and reality, it was sticky.

Personal + Emotional + Real = Sticky

Next Up: Lesson 2: The NEW Funnel.

Message me anytime for help.