Leads, leads, leads! When it comes to driver recruiting that seems like all anyone ever wants to talk about. How many leads can I get? How much will it cost me? And to be fair those are good questions to ask, but they’re not the only questions you should be asking. For instance, are those leads converting into drivers?
It’s one thing to get your hands on leads, but more important than gaining leads is what you actually do with them. Who cares if you get a ton of great leads, but you fail to do anything with them. Are you any better off? Successful driver recruiting is more than just getting leads. It comes down to converting leads.
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Are your leads converting into hires?
If you fail to convert your leads into hires, you are never going to be able to reach your recruiting goals. If you’re reading this right now you probably have a vested interest in converting as many leads as you can. And if you’re like most fleets out there, you have empty trucks just sitting in a lot somewhere. Why is that? More than likely it isn’t because you have a lack of leads, but rather you are failing to convert those leads. What’s holding you back?
What keeps your leads from converting into hires?
There’s a lot of things that could be holding you back from reaching your full recruiting potential. Below are four of the most common and frequent reasons we hear from fleets who are having trouble converting leads to hires. Any one of these could stop you from taking a valuable lead and converting them to a driver.
- Driver doesn’t meet your qualifications
- Driver is not satisfied with offered pay
- Driver requires more home time
- Recruiting team failed to contact lead
All of these can contribute to a lack of success in recruiting. The first three can all be addressed with more accurate targeting and elimination questions on your forms. But I’d like to focus on the fourth reason. Failing to contact the lead. This is one of the most frustrating obstacles fleets face today. It’s one thing to miss out on a lead because you can’t come to terms over pay or they don’t meet your requirements. It’s something else entirely to never even have a conversation.
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Stop missing out on leads
If you want to reach your recruiting goals you need to start by taking advantage of every lead you get. You must never let valuable and qualified leads sit and grow cold.
How can you avoid letting leads go cold?
Start by taking a look at your numbers. How many leads do you have coming in? How many recruiters are working them? Are your recruiters being overwhelmed by the volume of leads coming their way? Maybe it’s time to add some more recruiters. If you need more help figuring out if you need more recruiters you can check out our previous article, What is the Right Number of Recruiters for Your Fleet?
After looking at recruiter capacity to make sure you’re operating efficiently, look at the leads themselves. Once you have a lead, are you taking advantage of it? The longer a lead sits, the less likely you are at converting them to a driver. A big part of this comes down to speed to contact. According to research, after just 5 minutes your chances of actually reaching a prospect drops exponentially.
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Source: Leadresponsemanagement.org
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More leads isn’t the answer if you’re not converting the ones you already have.
It’s tempting to assume the reason you’re failing to generate the number of drivers you need is that you’re not getting the leads you need. But before you go too far down that path it’s important to look at what you actually have.
Is the real reason you’re not getting the drivers because you don’t have the leads? Or is it because you’re not taking advantage of the leads you have? Those leads that slip through the cracks and go uncontacted could be what’s holding you back. Review your numbers and see where you actually stand. Make sure you have the recruiter capacity to actually field the leads you have coming in. Do everything you can to make sure the leads that make it to the recruiters are actual quality leads and not a waste of time.
And last, but certainly not least, get to the leads you generate as quickly as possible to keep them from growing cold. Of course not every fleet is able to reach a lead within 5 minutes (or even close to that time), but reducing that lag in speed to contact time could be the difference maker for your recruiting. If you need help in this area consider reaching out to a specialist like Smart Rhino Labs.
Their data-driven approach has helped Smart Rhino Labs develop unique ways to help you optimize your approach to how you handle leads. You tell them what area or areas you’re struggling with and they work with you to figure out the best solution for you. For instance, maybe you have problems establishing contact with leads in a timely manner. As pointed out earlier, the longer you wait to contact them the smaller your chances of a successful conversion become. To help remedy this, Smart Rhino Labs can work with you to find out exactly which method of contact works best for you in your recruiting. Once that’s established they can set up texts, emails, calls, or a combination of the three to automatically engage with a lead once their information is received. This drastically cuts down on speed to contact time and helps keep quality leads engaged with your recruiting process.
Or maybe uncontacted leads isn’t your problem. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of leads you struggle with but you can’t justify bringing in more recruiters. To help with something like this Smart Rhino Labs has developed methods to pre-qualify leads to help alleviate the strain on your in-house recruiting team. They can even help walk prospects through your recruiting process and transfer the hot leads directly to your recruiters. All of this is designed to help keep your team on task and eliminate wasted time and extra effort on their part. No what matter area you find yourself struggling with, chances are they can offer insight and solutions to your problems.
The big takeaway from this should be, no matter what you decide to do or how you move forward, do everything you can to take advantage of the leads you have. Stop letting potential hires grow cold and leads go wasted.
