You Can "FIX" Your Driver Shortage. Rethink Your Recruiting Process

• Norris Beren, CEO - Risk Reward Consulting, Inc.

In a sense, all of us “fix” the weather, not by changing it, but by adapting to the conditions that the weather presents and continuing with our lives every day. 

In the case of the driver shortage, carriers and shippers similarly adapt by using whatever resources that they have every day to move the freight they can, when they can.

When the driver shortage is mentioned, the obvious conclusion is that there are too many trucks sitting without drivers and too many loads not picked up from shippers when they are ready.

The real issue is that turnover creates a shortage, company by company. You hire drivers and then they leave. But isn’t it interesting that carriers are still hiring drivers continuously at some level. The concern is that you keep losing them out the back door, too often in greater numbers than you bring in. Nothing new here. What if you had a strategy and could execute it to reduce that gap between drivers in and out that would always be on the plus side?

Of course, that is the right idea. As a result of providing guidance to many carriers over the years, we believe that unless the CEO and the rest of his team make a business decision to rethink their recruiting process, they will never close this gap. We have shown carriers that unless they start bringing in the right drivers, in the right way, and prepare for the time it will take to get the necessary complement of drivers that is needed to cover their loads and actually increase their capacity, they will never close the gap.

You need to adapt to change to a new style of recruiting that will match up with the driver attitudes, wants and needs of today, not last year or even five years ago.

How many recruiters have had any formal training in marketing, interviewing, selling and closing the sale to prospective drivers? Recruiters need to be sales people and not answering phones and acting like a call center. They need to be trained how to be a recruiter. Improving their skills and knowledge of what a professional recruiter needs to know and do to change the game. Then they can hire more drivers that stay and keep more from leaving because drivers made the right decision to join your company, not for the bonus but because both the driver and recruiter believe they are a good fit for each other.

We provide a unique type of formal training for recruiters, as well as retrain other staff members who come in contact with drivers so that the company as a whole is a good fit for each new driver acquired, employee or operator notwithstanding.

Recruiting properly is a process that needs to be learned, fine-tuned and improved on regularly.

Have you ever thought about training (or retraining) your recruiters? There is probably no shortage of professional general business recruiters currently because there is such a talent shortage in many companies due to the low unemployment environment. Good news, bad news. Companies are adapting to their talent needs. But these people are trained thoroughly to be recruiters.

Learning to become an effective recruiter is much more about the process of recruiting than just asking questions about experience, lanes, pay, tickets and driving record. It is more than just knowing the tools to use to find applicants or answering questions or making a lot of calls to drivers.

• Consider using an outside trainer to help your company stop doing what you are doing because it is not working to get and keep drivers.
• Consider learning new approaches that resonate wih what is important to today’s driver.
• Get help to rethink your whole interview process to become more effective.
• Teach your recruiters how to ask better open-ended questions that will establish rapport with prospective drivers and will drive them to come to work with you and not shop many companies.
• Develop a recruiting process, including proper screening of drivers to reduce hiring your turnover

Consider using an outside coach for phone training or onsite training in six key areas of Driver Recruiting. Learn how to give driver prospects the information they need. Drivers will probably only remember 20% of what they hear from your call. Learn how to make that 20% the most important information they need to decide that your company is the right place for them.

Training recruiters to become more effective will provide a significant return on investment considering the cost of hiring one driver today costs $3000 to $5000 or more considering all of the financial impact that high turnover has on a company profit or loss. Empty trucks, missed pick-ups, later delivery, disappointed customers, and lack of company growth all are part of the cost of getting but not keeping drivers.

Go ahead, you can’t fix the weather, but you can fix your driver shortage/turnover problems.  

Norris Beren is Risk Reward Consulting’s Chief Executive Advisor who provides guidance to trucking CEOs. He is author of the book “How to Create an Intelligent Driver Retention System” and strategic resources such as The Driver Turnover Assessment and The Secret Sauce to Get and Keep Drivers.