I can see it now. You’re sitting in your office, probably just waiting for the day to end and your Christmas holiday to begin. Your team has put in a lot of hard work over the past year, and you’ve hired a lot of drivers for your fleet.
With more trucks on the road than sitting idle, you’re pretty pleased with yourself. You definitely have every right to be. But suddenly it hits you, turnover is upwards of 80% for your fleet. For every 10 drivers you have hired you’re going to lose 8.
You begin to sweat bullets. How are you going to have the Christmas holiday off? For every minute you’re not hiring new drivers, you’re losing them to another fleet! This could spell disaster.
Calm down. Disaster isn’t upon you, you can still take your Christmas holiday off, and you CAN get more trucks back on the road next year.
Let’s look how you can relax and improve your driver recruiting in 2015.
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1. Focus on Retention
Driver turnover is a big deal for both big and small fleets. Even worse, as the economy improves, drivers are even more likely to leave their jobs to explore new opportunities with other fleets.
This can be bad for fleets which are already struggling with high turnover rates.
There are a number of ways you can work to improve your driver retention rates. You can even repurpose some of the recruiting and marketing methods to work in your favor.
For instance, content marketing is a great opportunity to improve your driver retention rate. You can use a blog or video series to highlight what you’re doing to improve your employee experience with your fleet. You might also use a whitepaper or longer form blog posts to talk about how your wage or benefits packages exceed industry standards.
It’s also important to benchmark where you are in comparison to your competition. Remember, you’re competing to keep your drivers (and every other employee at your company). Creating more competitive wage and benefits packages or asking for employee input go a long way to improve retention.
By focusing on driver retention, you can improve your overall recruiting efforts.
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2. Develop an Employer Brand
Employer branding is an important, yet overlooked, part of recruiting. Much like branding in terms of marketing, fleets looking to recruit top talent can benefit from having a strong employer brand. This differentiates you from the competition by making prospective hires recognize you as THE fleet to drive for.
A great example of a company with a powerful employer brand is Google.
There are a number of ways you can build a powerful employer brand in the trucking industry. Creating a company career website, outlining the organization’s values, culture, accomplishments, and benefits is a great place to start. Beyond that you can create YouTube videos which outline your corporate officers and values, driver employees, and an overview of positions you commonly hire for.
These videos can then be pushed out to other social networks and be embedded on your website.
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3. Plan for Generational Shifts
In 2013, 2.8 million people received new Social Security benefits. This number is up 200,000 people from 2011. The number of people retiring each year is on the rise, and that can be scary for a recruiter.
This is especially disconcerting for the trucking industry, where the average age for different driver demographics usually push into the 50 year mark or older. As driver populations continue to age, more and more drivers will be leaving the workforce.
This means you need to plan for generational shifts.
Unfortunately, you can’t keep doing what you’ve always done. With thousands of younger drivers replacing their retiring counterparts, you have to be prepared to update your recruiting. This means a greater focus on digital marketing methods and introducing a content marketing program into your recruiting efforts.
You have to update your recruiting to accommodate media usage of younger truckers.
You can improve your driver recruiting in 2015. Sure, it can be tough and there is a lot on your plate. But by implementing these initiatives you can improve upon your previous successes and get your trucks back on the road.
