In today’s competitive landscape, attracting and retaining skilled truck drivers is more critical than ever. Our recent webinar, “Driving Success in Truck Driver Recruitment,” tackled the pressing challenges of recruitment within the trucking industry. We also explored innovative strategies to enhance hiring practices.
This transcript provides invaluable insights from industry leaders that can help your organization navigate the complexities of driver recruitment.
Join us as we delve into the key takeaways from this engaging webinar.
Carly Miller
Hi everyone, and thank you for joining our webinar, “Driving Success in Truck Driver Recruitment.” I’m Carly Miller from TrackFive, and I’ll be your host today.
We’re super excited to have you all joining us and thrilled to continue the conversation we started almost a year ago. We have some fantastic panelists who are back to share their insights once again, as well as some new faces that we’re excited to have join the squad.
If you missed out on that webinar back in November, no worries! We’ll be touching on some of the same topics today from a fresh angle so there’s still plenty to learn. And if you’re eager to give that one a watch after today’s session, you can check it out on our YouTube channel at TrackFive.
I want to give each of our speakers an opportunity to introduce themselves and their companies but first off, I just wanted to quickly go over some logistical details. This webinar is being recorded and will be available to all registrants afterward. We also have a live chat going, so we encourage you to participate in that. If you have questions throughout the webinar, don’t hesitate to type those in the chat. One of our awesome team members here at TrackFive is monitoring those and will be throwing questions over to us to cover at the end.
Now, I’ll go ahead and hand it over to our CEO, Oliver Feakins, to give a little background on who we are at TrackFive and AllTruckJobs.com, and then we’ll jump into some introductions with the rest of the panel. So, Oliver, whenever you’re ready.
Oliver Feakins
Awesome. Hey, everybody! So, I just want to say thanks for joining. We’ll keep it short here. My name is Oliver Feakins. I’m the CEO of TrackFive. We own AllTruckJobs.com and several other platforms in different industries.
We’re really happy to have everybody here. Really happy to talk some driver recruiting. I know it’s been a tough couple years for probably everybody logged in here as far as the market. So, I think we’re excited to share some things that we’ve seen, some things we’ve learned, and also what we see coming forward.
So, with that being said, I’ll pass it back to the next person to introduce yourself. I’ll kick it over to Sam. Go for it!
Sam Elitzer
Hey, Sam Elitzer. Owner of TruckersReport. We’re an online community for truck drivers. We also own Hammer, which is Google Maps for truck drivers. It keeps them away from low bridges and off of roads that an 80,000-pound vehicle shouldn’t be on.
Who am I passing to? Darin, go for it.
Darin Williams
You make me follow the guy with the best voice on the whole thing. Seriously? We should’ve talked about this. My name is Darin Williams. I am the president at CDLJobs.com, and 2024, we are celebrating our 25th year in business, which means I’m older than everybody else on here, including Katie, who I haven’t seen in a hundred years.
Katie, how are you? Introduce yourself.
Katie Signa
I know, it’s been a while. I’m Katie Signa and I’m filling in for Natasha Hammack. I mainly work on the corporate marketing strategy side with the team, but I do help out with the sales side with the sales team at Hiremaster. Happy to be here. Carly, thank you for sending me everything over so quickly. I appreciate it.
And yeah, it’s good to see some faces I haven’t seen in a while.
Carly Miller
Happy to have you, Katie.
Katie Signa
Thank you!
Carly Miller
Mats, do you wanna go next?
Mats Holmbäck
Sure, I’m Mats Holmback, one of the co-founders and CEO here at Lanefinder. Haven’t been around as long as Darin, but super, super excited to be here and learning alongside all of you.
Carly Miller
Alright, Sean!
Sean Horton
Oh, I think they save the best for last, but Darin’s already gone. But, Sean Horton. I am the vice president of sales and business development with JobsInTrucks.com, a business unit of the JobsInLogistics.com group. Very much happy to be here. Looking forward to learning and sharing with some of the great colleagues as we take on driver recruitment 2024.
Carly Miller
Woo, great! Thank you all so much for sharing. You guys are a fun group. I like that little popcorning action we had going. But with that, we’ll dive right into our discussion.
So, I want to start with a reflection on the past year. Since our last conversation nearly a year ago, what significant changes have you observed in the driver recruitment industry?
And whoever wants to hop in first, you can go ahead.
Sam Elitzer
I’m gonna go for it, guys. Compensation is the key change. There was some movement that we were seeing last time we talked. Was it a year ago? Nine months? I’m sorry, Carly, I’ve already lost track of time. But, it’s now a clear, broad switch. We’re seeing a drop in pay across the board, typically in the range of 4, 5, 6 cents per mile.
We’re also seeing sign-on bonuses affected as well. Companies that were offering like $4,000, $5,000 are now offering $1,000 or $2,000 and the ones that were already at $1,000 or $2,000 have mostly stopped offering sign-on bonuses at all.
We’re also seeing those contract periods for those bonuses being typically a full year now. Before, they might have been three, six months. And we’re also seeing some pullback from companies on non-financial benefits like pet or rider policies. And I could yak about that for a bit, but it’s a tangent. I’ll let you guys go.
Darin Williams
Well, I think something that ties into that a little bit. And I think, whereas a lot over the course of the last several years, five to 25. Recruiting has been done as a blanket. We’ll take anyone from this area. We’ve seen a lot more pinpointed, targeted markets as opposed to blanket coverage over the course of the last 9 to 12 months.
Carly Miller
Anyone else want to hop in there?
Mats Holmbäck
Sure, I’ll take a stab at it as well. Mirroring a lot of what Sam said, actually. I think that that coupled with, from the driver’s side, their expectations. They haven’t followed with the same, so on an individual driver level, they’re going to look longer on the site. They’re going to spend more time trying to find the jobs that are still up there, but yeah. Significantly lower across the board. Not as many offering sign-on bonuses and the driver expectations haven’t really changed as quickly.
But even though they’re getting there, they’re not as quick to adapt in the mindset of it. So, unfortunately, it’s been a tough year, I’d say, for a lot of the small to midsize carriers that we have. A lot of them are struggling and one of the things we noticed a few months back is, if you look a couple years ago or even a year ago, it was more, if you find that perfect driver that’s a perfect fit for you, you might go out and buy a truck, probably a year and a half, two years ago. Today, if they lose somebody, they’re opting in to fill that truck, but not necessarily growing their fleets.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I’d also jump in from the carriers’ perspective too. Budgets have been slashed. Recruiting staff has been slashed. We’re seeing a lot of carriers really invest into leaning out their recruiting tech stack, if you will. You know, implementing things like re-engagement, automation, just to try and bridge the gaps there. So taking funds into more of, how can we do, with what’s in our database, how can we do more with less? How can we automate some of this?
And I think that has taken a lot of the focus away from candidate sourcing so to speak. It’s more of candidate re-engagement in some cases. I think the trucking companies are also learning how to do not more with less, but less with less in a way. And, I think they’re very pinpointed and strategic in what they want to do. I think it was Darin’s point about kind of smaller pockets of hiring versus blankets of hiring. Everyone’s looking for that needle in the haystack within a 5-mile radius of X and that’s what they need. And there’s some general inefficiencies and costs there as well to get that granular. So, it’s just more expensive to secure that specific driver in that specific area than it is to blanket, coast-to-coast. So, expectation setting is huge there as well.
Katie Signa
That’s what I was going to say. They’re so much more strategic right now with their budget – they’re not just throwing everything there. They’re really picking apart their media plans and their strategy to break down like you said. It’s no longer, just throw it at the wall and see what sticks. They’re doing different re-engagement campaigns with their leads from years ago because they’re thinking, well, we can’t spend anymore so we got to be more creative. That’s what I’ve seen on my end. People are much more asking, so what’s a re-engagement strategy? Versus, okay, what’s new and working? That’s been a difference for sure.
Sean Horton
Definitely, definitely. And I’ll get my participation award here in the first round here. But, not to get Darin started on retention, but I found myself battling what everybody has touched on at this point in time. But really, finding myself looking to craft and understand how we can look to gain talent that’s going to stick around. I feel as though retention has always been a flavor of the month, the year, what have you, but many of the recruitment teams that we’re working with are truly sitting down to partner and understand what drivers are sticking with us and how do we effectively message and attract in drivers, even if it is lower pay, lower sign-on bonuses. But, how can we invoke that culture, and what else we have to work with, in order to bring in guys that are going to stick around? So, it’s been quite interesting.
Carly Miller
Yeah, retention is a hot topic, and we’ll touch on that later. But, I did want to touch on what we’ve been discussing about strategy, because that leads into our next question. So, I wanted to ask, given all of the changes we’ve seen in the past year, what new tactics and strategies have you seen emerge in 2024 for driver recruitment differing from what we’ve been doing for the past several years?
Katie Signa
I can’t remember who said the insane bonuses. I think it was Mats or Sam. But we’ve seen those go away. Like during COVID, it was crazy, the offerings and how much was going out there, but those have really completely rolled back. And we’re also not seeing like the constant pay rate increases where it was just every other week, a new client or new carrier saying, hey, we have a new pay increase. And it kind of just got washed out, you know, everyone was doing it. We’ve seen that kind of pullback from years past. From some of the surveys we do and some of the stuff we see with comments, it’s more about, not necessarily what the carriers are offering. It’s what the carriers appear to be focusing more on the work-life balance with the retention strategies like you said, Carly.
That’s a big thing right now. I think people are pulling back with, hey, here’s how much we pay you, but in other ways saying, this is what we do for you and your family in the future because I think people are becoming more aware of longevity.
Darin Williams
Yeah, and as far as the strategies that the companies are doing, we’ve seen a lot more carriers that are getting more proactive in their campaigns. As opposed to hiring a website and reacting to the leads they get, they are doing re-engagement campaigns, using text blast messages and email messages—more proactive things to start revolutionizing the process a little bit and getting the ball going again. And again, going back to the doing more with less philosophy.
Mats Holmbäck
One thing that we’ve been noticing from a lot of the smaller, midsize-type carriers is that they want to engage more in terms of having their existing drivers speak for their brand. You know, coming to us asking us, how can our existing employees share the message that we have, our brand, and how it is to work here? And so, kind of like what Darin is saying, it’s not like you just hire somebody, you post a job ad and react to the applications coming in. They want to be a part of the solution. You know, in their mind, driving down the cost if they can have drivers speak for them. Essentially, digitalizing the offline referral programs, if you will, so they can get more eyeballs on their current drivers. Been getting a lot of questions like that, on how to move forward with that. That might be touching on some future tactics though, but yeah.
Carly Miller
Thank you. Anyone else want to hop in there on that question?
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I’d say too, going on with the more with less. A lot of these trucking companies are looking at emerging technologies. How can we engage AI to do more with less, how can we get better filtering, how can we get better engagement tracking? A lot of our carriers are really deep-diving into data more than they ever have before. I heard a saying that every company is now a technology company and that kind of holds true today. I mean, everyone has access to technology. They’re able to pull their own data and reports in a way they never did before to make predicted decisions based off fresh analytics. We’re measuring a lot more and our clients are measuring a lot more than they ever have before and once you do that, it really does open up the conversation.
So, taking a data-first approach combined with developing those brand evangelists, those drivers who are going to speak for you. But also managing the cost for applications and the quantity metrics around that as well is kind of what everyone’s focusing in on. So, yeah.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Oliver. We have a question in the chat. I know we had touched on retention and longevity a little bit so I just wanted to ask this question that Linda had asked. She said, “10 years ago, retention was not an issue because we found replacement teams within days or weeks. No, we have trucks sitting for over a year due to a lack of drivers. Do you know what changed?”
Darin Williams
I would guess that’s more of a pocket market situation as opposed to a blanket. I mean, there’s not necessarily fewer drivers, and competition has indeed reduced. So, it’s kind of a hard question to answer without knowing more specifics, I think.
Sam Elitzer
I would agree with Darin that there is definite;y a pocket aspect to it. There might be some individual thing to look at in the campaign. To join it with the question John asked about reaching drivers where they live online. Years ago, the shift to Facebook groups changed the game, landing pages, matched leads, etc. What is new, if anything leading into 2025 for outreach?
And to Linda’s question about retention and replacing these people, there has been, of, course people retiring, right? And as people retire, as new people come in, some channels that were good and reliable become less so. You know, TikTok is a thing now. Facebook groups are still relevant in some cases, maybe in a lot of cases, but there’s always new channels opening up, and these are more heavily used by new entrants into the space.
So, new in 2025, things like TikTok, and Linda, maybe look at whether the channels that you were using are for a demographic that may have started retiring in the past five years.
Carly Miller
Thank you for that insight, Sam. Alright, you know I wasn’t going to let you get away without answering a question about everyone’s favorite topic at the moment which is AI. So, obviously AI is a huge new development that we’ve seen growing and evolving over the past few years, and it feels like nobody can stop talking about it, so I’m going to keep beating the dead horse. But, obviously AI has become a big part of modern recruitment processes and the trucking industry is no exception. So, we’d like to know, with AI now becoming a staple in business workflows, how are you integrating AI into your recruitment processes?
Sean Horton
Better advertising. Anyway, not to jump right in there, but ultimately, on our end, we’ve been looking to implement for a while is just performing and producing much better ad copy. Ultimately, being able to part and parcel the 20 years plus that we’ve been in business against performance data and what we have based off the messages that we pushed out in order to provide better targeting and a better message to the overall candidates that we’re looking to bring in.
Taking it a step further, of course, just being smarter with the budgets that we’re doing, we all know that we have less budgets to work with, I’d say. And our clients are demanding and looking for more targeted approaches. The implementation of AI on both the ad copy and, of course, the targeting and the ability to understand where your target audience is is really looking to reign supreme, and I see that to just continue to increase and get better and better as time goes on.
Darin Williams
AI is a buzzword. It can relate to something as simple, and every website on here, everybody that’s represented here uses AI in their screening process, right? We don’t have individuals looking at every app and deciding who qualifies and who doesn’t. That’s done through AI. Recruiting at the end of the day is always going to be a very personal, one-on-one situation, so as far as AI taking over recruiting per se, as far as the day-to-day, I’m gonna hire this driver, I have a hard time believing that’s going to happen anytime in the very near future. But AI has shaped all of our lives just in the implementation of the websites that we’ve built over the course of the last 20 years.
Katie Signa
Yeah, I think AI is more than just internal recruiting processes. It’s gonna help you with your strategy. It’s gonna help you look at data differently. Maybe more in-depth. Like for digital strategists, I think it’ll help them with their day-to-day pieces and not so manual-driven. So, while it may not be so much right now with recruitment processes, I think if you’ve got internal marketing teams, I think they could benefit from taking a look at certain AI platforms just to help them with their day-to-day tasks.
Oliver Feakins
We see a lot of AI in the applicant tracking system space, the Tenstreets of the world and things like that. You’ve got to be careful how you use AI. It’s one of those things that we view as an efficiency and kind of accelerant so we’ll use it in job matching when we, for example, target signal analysis of our users that are using our platforms, what jobs they’re looking at and when, where, how, which ones they didn’t, which ones they skipped, and we use AI to essentially analyze that type of pattern to be able to find when someone’s looking for a new job, what they might be interested or not interested in to get better matching so they’re better. More hireable.
We’ll use it for data compression to be able to pull the right data into their ATS and jobs out if they’re missing things. And one of the problems we face and I’m sure some of the people on this webinar face is, clients, love them, but they don’t always give us the data in the way we need it, right? So, sometimes it’s, here’s a big pile of XML. Figure it out. And it comes on the site, and if left unchecked, it looks like crap and no one applies to it and people wonder why they do or don’t get results. So, we use AI to help pull out some of these different schemas and make sure everything’s organized.
But our clients can really use AI, and where we’re seeing it is, basically not replacing recruiting, but replacing everything from lead acquisition to recruiting. So, for example, you can use AI to search resume databases, source candidates over a specific criteria, even send them or email them specific job copies or intro emails. You can use it for job descriptions, job postings at scale. You can do thousands of these in relatively minutes. It’s not too difficult right now especially with the ChatGPTs, and Amazon has a product, and there’s tons of these AI products now that you can tie into to really make what used to take hours and hours of work from a recruiter to do very quickly.
So, it’s all about using AI to kind of create efficiency. It’s not to use AI to be some sort of magic pill that’s going to replace hard work. And I think as more platforms tie into it and offer more options there, it’s going to be more democratized and just easier to be accessible for the small to medium-sized carriers as well. But, yeah, there’s a lot of things you can be doing today which would help save a lot of time using just a simple GPT AI.
Mats Holmbäck
To follow Oliver there, I’m gonna steal that word from you. That was gonna be my intro, Oliver, which is democratizing. And I would say even the infrastructure needed in order to be good at recruiting and hiring drivers. A lot of the smaller and mid-sized carriers, when they started their business, they didn’t also realize that they essentially needed to be the best recruiters in the world.
So, me personally, I have a background working with an applicant tracking system in 40 countries, every industry, vertical out there. And I can say by far, hiring and recruiting truck drivers, out of all those industries, is by far the hardest, and specifically, because most companies, unless you use a well-established applicant tracking system and you have the manpower in your team and that infrastructure to handle 100, 200 driver leads coming in. You need to have that infrastructure.
Most small to midsize carriers don’t have that, and that’s where I see a major shift towards smaller, medium-sized carriers to being able to grow into the future as well, to where essentially as soon as you’ve had a phone call with the driver, the AI already knows you agreed upon following up tomorrow. They’ve already requested your driver’s license. This is the MVR check that has been ordered. So, basically packaging the whole thing for the carrier so magically, an hour, two hours later, the heavy lifting is done.
That’s where we really see AI talking about workflows coming in, besides all the other amazing points mentioned that was hit on before from the driver’s perspective.
Sam Elitzer
Speaking from the carriers’ perspective, we’re seeing a lot of adoption of AI in that middle point of the workflow when drivers are looking at the landing pages, the application pages. Previously, the way that companies stood out was that the very largest companies would have these extremely slick videos, drone shots, these high-production value videos that stood out from all the static images.
And in the past few months, past year, we have seen smaller carriers, instead of spending the $20,000 that they truly can’t afford on these high-production value videos, they’re spending $20 on a ChatGPT or a Canva subscription and turning out a lot of variations of different images of trucks. Think marketing their company in maybe; I don’t want to say edgy and make it sound unprofessional, but just kind of pushing the envelope on graphic design and quickly trying a bunch of different versions of these graphics to see what gets people applying and then continuing to refresh that. So, that’s kind of a maybe obvious, very simple way that AI is making an impact and again democratizing the recruitment process.
Carly Miller
Thanks, everybody. I really like that we got a wide variety of perspectives there. And, Sam, I’m a marketer. So, Canva. Speaking to my soul here. But, we have a question in the chat that actually leads right into our next question which is another kind of hot topic – the pandemic. Everyone’s still talking about how things are going post-pandemic. But, like every other industry, trucking saw some major changes during the pandemic and is still reeling with some of those impacts even several years later, so how has the trucking industry’s post-pandemic landscape changed the way that you source driver candidates?
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, so, I’ll jump in on that one real quick. So definitely, we’re focusing more on quality metrics. Before, when there was just a volume need, it was just coast-to-coast, as many drivers as possible. I mean, that’s kind of where everybody was heading, right? Not that we weren’t focused on quality, but we had a mass amount of volume to deliver during the pandemic for a lot of clients. And one of the benefits of the market kind of shrinking down is it’s really given us the opportunity to focus on closing that loop of placements and quality and engagement and how to hire those drivers who stay on and stay long-term.
It’s really kind of shrunk our window a little bit for us to really focus on that aspect which is kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time. Again, also, we’re seeing a lot of shift to thought content leadership, brand building, really good storytelling, whether it be visual or auditory, whether it be videos, podcasts, social groups, thinks like that, social media. It’s really allowed us, at least, to focus on the smaller quality issues that we weren’t able to do when we were delivering firehose volume to hundreds of trucking companies. So, it’s been a blessing and a curse at the same time, I’d imagine.
Katie Signa
I was just gonna say, I think we kind of touched on this, but the ad copy changes since COVID. Instead of carriers saying “we’re paying the highest cent per mile”, or pushing their highest annual salary average. You know, just money, money, money, we had a lot of. And we see people doing more so the home time and benefits and more wanting to know guaranteed pay, what they’re actually taking home versus what the top 10% earn.
I think that’s a big difference for maybe what the, like we were talking about, people retiring and new people coming in want to know what they’re actually going to be earning versus the potential. Because I think when you get to the company, then you can know your potential, but as a newbie you want to know, okay, what is my paycheck? So, I think the whole “take-home pay” versus “the top drivers earn up to” has changed a lot in our ad copy from COVID.
Sam Elitzer
Carly, do you want us to answer questions as they come up in the question chat, or do you want to save them for later?
Carly Miller
We’re going to save some for later. If there’s one that’s relevant, you can totally pop it in and answer it now, but we’ll also save some time at the end. So, is there a question you wanted to answer, Sam?
Sam Elitzer
Heidi, maybe. I think it’s probably more relevant for us to answer at the end, but good question.
Carly Miller
Perfect. Okay, so we’re gonna go back to driver retention, which was a hot topic that we got to chat about in our last webinar and I’m excited to learn a bit more from you about, maybe, what has changed with your processes or any other valuable insights you have.
So, given that you all have so many collective years of experience and expertise in this industry, you know that driver retention has been an ongoing challenge. And we’d like to know, what strategies are you implementing to improve driver retention? And what can the industry do, as a whole, to help fight the retention issue?
Darin Williams
Well, I guess, first and foremost, we’re in the lead generation business, right? But retention is always – it’s an issue. And it’s on everybody’s mind and it’s been an issue for the 30-whatever God awful years I’ve been doing this. Katie wasn’t even born yet when I started.
But, so we’ll post content quarterly if we can get to it that tries to explain to drivers how much better off they’re going to be by staying at the job they’re at right now. And that’s strictly a financial standpoint. Just showing facts and figures about how much better off you are to stay where you are than jump the jobs.
But, if you go back and you look at – so there’s a company called PDA that puts out quarterly reports and they do surveys on why drivers leave companies and for the last – if you go back and look the last three, four years. It’s the same. It’s pay, equipment, and communication. Consistently pay, equipment, and communication. It might be, number one is always pay. Equipment and communication go back and forth with two and three. And communication includes, I need to be home Saturday, and you don’t get home Saturday. So communication/home time, and it’s the same things over and over again. So, I mean, if you can tackle those three things. I think ideally, communication would be first and foremost in anybody’s mind because it encompasses the other two, but it’s a tough task.
And I’ve said it before, and I caught some grief for it, but these are nomadic individuals by nature. And the opportunity to change jobs presents itself every day. I don’t know that it’s ever a problem that we’re going to get to zero. Now, can we combat that? Can we try to educate? Can we try to help? Absolutely. And I think people like the PDA putting out these surveys and talking to people are an excellent way to get the ball rolling and take a look at that data and start making movements on those.
Katie Signa
Yeah, I was going to say, to Darin’s point, internally, you’ve got to focus on improving the work conditions and benefits. If you can’t help with pay, because sometimes you just can’t. We had a client maybe a year ago that said “we can’t increase pay, we can’t get new equipment, what can we do internally?” and we kind of gave some off-the-wall ideas just to see if they were open to them and they were. Like something as simple as like chaplains and therapists and quiet spaces and urgent clinics onsite and anonymous write-in systems that the drivers felt like they could talk a little more freely.
And it drastically – I mean, I can’t remember exactly the percentage of – I think they were around 20. I think it went up by 20% like how much it improved just by making – because the drivers felt like they were investing in them. Even if they couldn’t do that with a paycheck. So I think it’s one of those things you just maybe need to get creative internally or just listen to your drivers if they have a certain – can be something as simple as their little cafe where they meet, little food mart, if there’s something they want. At least they feel like you’re listening.
Like Darin said, they jump ship so quickly because whatever their trigger was that day, they’ve got a thousand other possibilities to go and say yes to. So, you’ve just got to help them not be so triggered to jump ship when one little thing comes after them.
Sean Horton
I have two carriers just kind of thinking outside the box. And I appreciate that. That’s definitely an area I see just being a huge player as far as retention or recruitment when the day is done. But I have two carriers and I’ve been bouncing this idea off of others that I speak with but in the overall recruitment process, in the starting stages, bringing in the stakeholders. So I have a carrier that actually brings in significant others, wives, spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever it might be, in on the conversation.
When we can’t change many of what continue to be the challenges overall, how can we together work as a group to provide an offering or whatever it might be that is going to align with the entire family, right? All those three bucket list items are, of course, the driver right here right now, pay, of course, affects a bit more of the entire family, well-being, etc. But what else also takes into effect? Heck, I even heard one carrier, they’re putting in childcare. They’re going to start having a childcare facility outside one of their terminals just to meet the need. Which we all know, right now, childcare is a big challenge for anybody regardless of what you’re doing. So put your money where your mouth is there. So, outside the box, Katie, I love it.
Mats Holmbäck
That’s pretty interesting there, Sean. Putting a childcare, yeah. That sounds like a really good idea. That might be a filter we should put in. I was just about to jump in there, so here at Lanefinder, we’ve taken a stab at it a little bit differently. We made it super tough on ourselves, I think sometimes. But way back, when we started off as a third-party recruiter, we contracted 40 different carriers and we were constantly recruiting for them. And the funny thing was that we always got the same questions from the drivers over and over and it was a span of a couple hundred questions.
You know, “can I bring my dog?”, “how often am I home?”, “what kind of freight am I going to be hauling?” And to us, we figured that, well, if we can answer that upfront so the driver – because a lot of times what the drivers will do is they’ll call 20, 30 carriers and they forget who they spoke with. They’ll call whatever job ad was like, okay, well this one is hitting on seven out of my ten key points, so I’m going to pick up the phone. I’m going to call.
And then on the other line might be somebody really good picking up the phone, talking back to the driver, selling that image. That’s where you want to hit them with, kind of what Sean was talking about, to really capture that good feeling if it’s true, as well. Otherwise, if reality doesn’t meet expectations, obviously there’s going to be a retention issue.
I also think that it’s kind of tough to put – if you’re mainly providing leads, I think that it’s a very though thing to ask for top funnel to solve retention which is a little bit further down in the funnel. Then you get into softer values and yes, I mean, we’ve even taken a stab at not charging top-funnel, so we only charge for at the end of the funnel when somebody’s been hired. So it’s in our interest that they do stay. And so that’s one approach that you can take. That’s the road that we have taken. But it all depends on the business models and what kind of, where you’re at.
Oliver Feakins
I think, too, just to jump in. Primarily, most of us are the candidate sourcing side, right? So lead-gen. One of the things that we’ve been asking ourselves over the last couple years and we’ve been doing a lot of research and making changes specifically in testing, is what part do we, as lead generation providers or marketplaces, play in the retention game?
So, not so much, kind of what Darin was saying where it’s like, we’re not on that side of the funnel. But we kind of are in a way, right? Like, if you know, I’ll give you an easy example. If you know somebody applies to a carrier through one of our marketplaces or job boards or whatnot, and we’re immediately blasting those people with other opportunities 30 days in, 60 days in, 90 days in, showing them more rates. We’re somewhat culpable. Now, I know that’s not a standard practice, but that’s a good example of maybe a part of the responsibility as lead generators that we share in the retention game.
So we’ve been asking ourselves, as a business model, as a marketplace, where do we stand on that? We obviously want to re-market and engage a community of drivers, but on the same hand, we want to do so responsibly in a way that doesn’t pluck a driver away from someone who’s there. But we also want to be there when they’re looking and when they’re ready. So, it’s a really really thin line, and what we’ve been doing is kind of using closed-loop data from the ATSs to basically figure out where do they go, when do they come back on the platform, what has happened in between there, what do they apply for, is it different, what was the main differentiator, was there anything there we can do? It’s a lot.
The data’s not really accessible in a way that we really need it because there’s a lot of gray there, but we are asking ourselves that question. When is that right time? Like how do we engage a large community of drivers, professional drivers, without stepping on the toes or luring them away from somewhere we’ve just placed them or vice versa. I think we probably would all – there’s no right answer there. It’s all different for everybody. But it is something to consider.
Mats Holmbäck
Oliver, one interesting data point – I don’t know if it’s interesting for anybody to know – but one thing that we saw that I thought was pretty interesting was if a driver is hired with one of the companies that’s on Lanefinder, if that driver visits the app, on average, 37% of the time, they’re going to quit their employment within ten days. So, that might be an interesting data point for you guys, also. If you’re not tracking that, I’m assuming it should be fairly similar across.
Sam Elitzer
I’d love to take a second to advocate for change. Tagging on to what Oliver was talking about where as advertising companies, we want to get you not just a lead or a driver, but the highest-quality driver. Somebody that is going to stick around. We know that’s something you guys think about in terms of what’s the retention rate on applicants hired through this source versus others. And we’d really like to see more data sharing coming back to us from ATS providers.
We’re not trying to use that data to do anything untoward. We really just want to do it to sharpen up our own matching algorithms and how we are figuring out who to put you with. We already do this on the stuff that we can control like making sure that we’re not sending you applicants that haven’y given permission to text or just don’t seem to be high intent, high-interest job seekers.
And I’ll say that the ATS providers in our industry are making steps toward this. And I would say if you can encourage them to continue taking those steps and giving you the option of sharing this data with us in order to make your campaigns more efficient and higher long-term value for you, that’s something we would very much like to see happen. I think it’s better for everybody in this space that there’s more access to data when given permission to view it.
Oliver Feakins
And I’d also jump in there too and encourage. I would say a fair amount of you work with advertising agencies as well. I would encourage your advertising agencies to release that information to us as well. Oftentimes, they’re able to get it and it’s not always shared back to us as sourcing providers and it’s extremely helpful.
We have a couple agencies that are really transparent with the data that they have and it’s really helpful for us. But it’s sometimes really difficult to get either representatives of companies or their agencies on the phone to talk about retroactive data. It’s not exactly high priority for them in their perspective, and to us, it kind of is. We need that data to be able to make corrections and we need that data to improve so, yeah, I would advocate not just for the ATSs but I would say any stakeholder in the organization or agency as well.
Carly Miller
Great, well thank you all for sharing and I really appreciate your willingness to kind of dive in on driver retention again. So, now I’d like to touch on industry consolidation. We can see that the trucking industry has seen its share of consolidation lately and we’d like to know, how has that industry consolidation impacted how you work with clients?
Katie Signa
I may not understand this question correctly, but I took it as like, in the past, it was very, this is the client, I’m the sales rep, that’s our relationship. Very business-driven. Very, you know, weekly calls, nothing much more to it. And now I feel like over the past couple years, it’s been much more of a partnership and relationship. Like you develop a personal relationship with these people and you really get invested.
Like obviously you want them to succeed and your product to work and to hire drivers and everybody be happy, but I feel like the relationship-building part of it. You’re no longer just stuck on these weekly calls, but you’re texting them, in daily calls from your personal cell phone, and discussing ideas and off-the-wall ideas and speaking more freely. I feel like people have let their guard down a good bit over the past couple years because we kind of had to.
We had to get creative and really brainstorm and know that we were all in the same boat and just trying to help, and so I feel like the last couple years, you’re just trying to build the relationship because you’re invested in it and you care a lot more versus just maintaining the account and doing the norm. I guess you’re kind of stepping it up a notch and being a little more personal.
Sean Horton
Agreed. Feel like I’m a W-2 with some of the carriers that I work with at this point in time. Utlimately, should be when the day is said and done. But again, all across the board, whether it’s recruitment or it’s retention, as lead generators and those looking to consult and advise in what we’re industry experts on, it takes every step of the way and it really does take that close relationship.
I think I’ve shared with this before, I’ve talked in the past. And transitioning into the transportation industry, I served many different industries when I was with Career Builder and I’ve been here for ten years and it was shocking to find myself working with HR and recruiters on non-driver roles and then safety and recruiting on driver roles. It was just a new overall concept to me.
Well, now, I almost see the gap being bridged as well, or now I’m being inserted on both sides of the coin because not only am I needing to be much more involved with what recruitment and safety teams are doing, but what the organization is doing holistically, whether it’s tackling recruitment and attraction or whether it’s taking on the retention problem.
So, yeah, definitely much more minute. Much more relationship-building. And a much more focused and humanized process overall. It’s almost like a reverse in a certain sense. When we talk about AI and we talk about technology, now here I am whether it’s through Zoom or whether it’s tried-and-true office phone, very much being a part of the team. W-2.
Sam Elitzer
Yeah, this consolidation of the market, I think has been quite positive even though in the short-term, there’s pain to it. As everybody else said, it went from kind of a very transactional, hey, email me your pricing, we’ll get back to you, and now people want to have a conversation. They want to see us, to use our consultative viewpoint on this from having worked with, at any one point, hundreds of carriers, so the questions are now, is my ad compelling? Is my pay competitive with other carriers hiring in this area for this equipment type? And the end result is that we get more efficient with the campaigns.
The more information that you can share back and the longer conversations you can have with your recruitment advertising providers just helps all of us sharpen your ad. It’s not a, post it once and then you get what you get. The difference between the first month that you post and the third month that you post as you’re having these iterative conversations is incredible. It really does take a few months of cooperative work and that’s happened a lot more now with the consolidation.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I’d also throw in there too, as far as consolidation, like as far as roles. During the pandemic and kind of coming out of it, we see a little bit of the convergence between, call it ATS, generic platforms, even advertising agencies, where the lines are a little blurry. Whether there be an ATS opening up a job store or certain other providers kind of jumping in the sourcing game or whatnot. Or agencies opening up other avenues for sourcing leads beyond their creative and things like that, so it can become a little bit of a messy process at some point where everyone’s kind of dipping in and then double dipping.
And I think the carriers sometimes lose a little bit of efficiency that way. There’s a lot of times where we’re double dipping between agencies or toolsets or ATSs and I think what we’re really trying to advocate for our clients is to try to bring this all together and be, to your point, Sam, like get a seat at the table with everybody to kind of help drive the campaign together instead of just all working siloed in our individual ways. Because that’s how we feel we’re going to create efficiency. Doesn’t always happen, and I think everyone’s just trying to do the best they can, but it does create kind of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” sometimes in that case. But it is what it is.
Carly Miller
Awesome, thank you! Does anyone else have anything to add before we move on? Perfect, okay. So, I know that we touched on strategy a little bit, but now I want to move on to trends. So, what market trends have you seen emerge in the last 12 months and how do you think that those trends will grow into 2025, or if some of those trends will disappear in 2025?
Sam Elitzer
This might be overly granular, but we are seeing clients, who still have manual transmissions as being parts of their fleets, having an increasingly difficult time filling those manual transmission trucks. And in some cases, if the entire fleet, or the majority of the fleet is manual, then they’ve really keyed in on where they can find these drivers. But for fleets that have just like the last 10%, the last 12 trucks that haven’t gone through the refresh cycle yet, really struggling to get those manual transmission trucks filled.
We’re also seeing some kind of inflection point on SAP drug and alcohol clearinghouse issues, and it’s really a legally thorny issue around that. Majority of carriers are unable, for various reasons, to hire SAP drivers, and there are carriers that are able to, and it would be great if we could find – if the people that are interested in it could get the word out, and we can help them – help those drivers get to carriers that want to hire them, rather than having them continue to bounce off all these “no”s from the majority of the industry that can’t.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Sam. Anyone else want to hop in there on trends?
Oliver Feakins
I’ll just double down on the smaller needs versus the pinpoint searches, right? Also, what we’ve seen too is just some changes in digital landscape. For example, we’ve seen more hires from certain ad sources that typically during the pandemic would have been really really great and normal, so we’re just seeing, also, people shift from out of social a little bit more, moving into more into more transactional search patterns like whether it be Google or programmatic or job aggregates and things like that. So we’re just seeing a lot of kind of a shift in how certain channels are behaving post-pandemic. Nothing seismic but enough to move the needle, and for us to optimize.
And I think having that data source and being able to really tie those back is super super important, as we’re talking about with AI and data normalization, but there are definitely some trends related to how drivers are searching online, how they apply, and also what goes into their criteria for choosing a carrier. And, yeah, it definitely is trending. It’s definitely trending different.
Darin Williams
I think there are trends on who is advertising as well. Five years ago, we all had the big box companies on the websites and that was who we dealt with. We are starting to see a lot more last-mile, delivery-type services, and that’s just due to e-commerce, and that’s not going away. I kind of think that’s also spurred the LTL markets a little bit, where LTL companies in the past didn’t need to advertise and now they do. I don’t see those trends going away anytime soon, either.
Carly Miller
Great, thanks, Darin. We’re gonna ask one more question before we open the floor for audience questions because we’re somehow almost an hour in, but I’m really excited to hear your answers to this question. I think it’s a fun one. So, I want to know where your specific platforms are headed. So, can you all share your platform’s main focus areas for these last five months of the year, and where you’re headed in 2025?
Katie Signa
I can start us off. Obviously, we’re trying to enhance the AI-driven recruitment solution part of the game. Just further refine AI algorithms and better candidate matching and predictive analytics to improve the client strategy and overall marketing, recruiting, planning, so they’re relying on data. In the past, I know, Darin, in the past, we would talk about, you would be waiting on something from me because it was the 30th of the month because we hadn’t had the data yet to look at how things worked out to keep going or not. And so now, with not just AI, but all the analytics everybody sees. You can make changes throughout the month. You don’t have to wait like we used to have to wait almost a month to see how the previous month did.
So, we’re trying to take more actionable steps to even improve that even greater, and like Darin was saying, it’s no longer just the normal audience that we’ve seen in the past that we’ve worked with. There’s so many other little guys that are kind of popping up that – they may enhance the talent pool. And having access to work with them – it may help overall the driver shortage. Maybe, there’s an untapped audience with these other smaller aggregators. May build us up to help us out in the long run. So we’re looking at broadening the reach and diversifying the candidate pool access through Hiremaster AI, so that’s kind of where we’re at right now.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Katie.
Sam Elitzer
So, we take kind of a roundabout way to development of the platform, where our candidates come from using our community and using our navigation tool, so we focus on improving those things and then that has a downstream impact to overall development of the jobs part of it.
But separately from that, it’s gotta be compliance, compliance, compliance. There are a lot of changes coming, that have come in over the past few years and are certainly coming in over the next six months in terms of passing along leads to clients in ways that the FTC has given their blessing on. They’ve made some very big changes in the past half a year that are going to impact a lot of lead purchasing, and we need to be in front of those things and make sure that we are staying on top of compliance and not getting behind.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Sam.
Sean Horton
Driver experience, and the driver as a whole, is really a strong stance that we’ve taken. Really, I’d say, stemming from last year rolling on into this year, and of course on the bucket list for 2025 improvements. But, overall, just the driver experience. There is so much in our world that we know all and understand, whether it be from the seats that recruiters, directors, recruiters sit in, vendors, etc. But the driver themself, really has no idea essentially what’s going on. And like we hear all about in recruitment and talent acquisition, the candidates aren’t trained to be professional candidates. So, improving and developing a much better candidate experience and helping them along the way to understand all the moving pieces that are involved in why they’re there.
An easy example in communicating is AI and chatbots, right? I think there was a story, I want to say last year, with a couple of guys that showed up to orientation, found out they couldn’t meet Olivia and left. Well, why is that? All of a sudden, there is kind of a negative connotation that could be associated with dealing with chatbots. “Do I want to deal with you?” Well, why could it be important for you? Why does this employer have this in place? Drivers and those involved don’t necessarily know and understand that. So we’re really taking an approach to make it a much better experience overall, but also be effective in messaging and helping all parties involved to understand each important piece or step along the way with the services that we offer and the services that we provide.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Sean. Mats, I think you’re muted.
Mats Holmbäck
Oh, sorry.
Darin Williams
I don’t know that we’re gonna make any fundamental changes in the next five months, or the next five years for that matter. What we’ve done has kind of been fundamentally proven over the last 25 years. The philosophy hasn’t changed since day one in 1999, before Katie was born. Communication with the carrier has got – it needs to improve. And it’s just the feedback that we’ve been talking about with all 10 of these questions or however many we had. The more feedback we can get, the more we can adapt, remain fluid, change your plans in the middle of the month if we need to, use that data, and continue to maintain not just a lot of leads, but a lot of good driver leads. So, focusing on that immediate change and that kind of stuff and sticking to the basics.
Mats Holmbäck
And now since I’m not muted anymore, I was just about to say, Sean, you put that so well. What did you call it? The drivers don’t know that they need to be professional candidates or something like that. That was great. I’m gonna have to replay that on YouTube later to steal that one from you, because that’s exactly it.
And hopefully if the matching is really good, the driver stays for a good chunk of time with every carrier that they’re at. Following Darin’s advice, the longer you stay with one carrier, the more successful you’re going to be. They shouldn’t be professionals in the application process. It should be something to where you come in, you do it once, maybe every couple of years or more. And, so what we’re focusing on for the remainder of the year into next year is really automating a lot of those processes that should be automated.
Again, just since it is such a heavily regulated industry, there’s so many hoops and hurdles to jump through. You know, you miss out on getting the driver’s license, then you call back, you can’t be on the phone when you’re driving, and then all of that information gathering after the application stage is where a lot of these carriers lose drivers. And who is quickest to hire the driver? Well, whoever has the best processes.
So, for us, we’re going to be focusing a lot on that infrastructure. What happened after that application stage, both from the driver’s experience, but also the carrier’s experience. Kind of goes hand in hand, and what we’re going to try to shoot for here in 2025.
Carly Miller
Thanks! Oliver, want to wrap us up?
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, absolutely. So, we’re doing a lot of things that everyone else has mentioned, but really, I mean, we’re trying to basically level-set our clients, and as they ramp back up, as the market hopefully recovers, God-willing sometime soon here, we think it’s an excellent opportunity to kind of take it back to square one with our clients. Everything from job quality to targeting to reporting and really kind of tying down to that per-hire conversion rate.
So, like I said during COVID, volume, quality, volume, but really, this is really what the last two years has really taught us and really kind of allowed us to focus in on at the bottom of the funnel a little bit more. And that’s where we’re moving to. We’re really looking to and making changes now actually to move more into more of an engaged marketplace, so we’re really looking at leveraging our tools, our programmatic, our machine learning as well, over the next several months to really try to have the platform do more than just provide leads.
We’re really looking at how that happens and we’ve already deployed this across some of our other verticals and it’s doing very, very, very well, so the data that we’re running in other verticals, we’re going to be running over to trucking here early next year.
So, I think we’re all working on some interesting stuff. This industry keeps us busy, that’s for sure. Yeah, I appreciate everyone coming on, coming to the webinar, and everyone who participated in here. You guys are obviously some of our favorite boards. If you can’t spend money with us or you already have, go give it to these guys. They’re all excellent people, excellent boards.
Like I said, Darin’s been in this longer than I think most of us have been in this game. So there’s a wealth of knowledge here and we kind of look at it as being friendly competitors. We have a lot of respect for each one of you and your products, and we hope all of you that are listening or watching this on YouTube later, give one of us a call, or a couple of us a call, and chat us up. We’d love – I’m sure we speak for all of you, where we’d love to help you so with that, I’ll turn it back to Carly, and thanks for everybody.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Oliver! So, looking through the chat, it looks like we’ve addressed a lot of the topics of the questions in there, so for sake of time we’re going to wrap this up. And if you’re in the audience and you have any burning questions that haven’t been answered, feel free to reach out to us or any of the panelists. We’d love to help you.
So, I again just wanted to extend a huge thank you to all of our speakers for their time and expertise and to all of you for joining. Be sure to catch the webinar recording once it’s available and stay tuned for more sessions with us.
If you’re interested in learning more about TrackFive or AllTruckJobs.com, please reach out to Nora, whose contact information is on the screen. She’d love to hop on a call with you and share a bit more about our platform and how we can help you meet your recruitment needs.
And like Oliver said, feel free to reach out to any of the panelists as well, to learn more about their platforms. We’re all in this together, and I’m sure they’d love to hear from you as well. So, thank you all again for joining, and I hope you have fantastic weekend!
Leave a Reply