In today’s driver recruiting landscape, time-to-hire has become one of the most vital KPIs for any driver recruiting team. With the driver shortage creating a candidate-driven market, speed is of the essence, particularly when trying to get new drivers into trucks and on the road. Each day that passes between the time an application is received and the day your candidate starts orientation is an opening that can send your new hire into the hands of a waiting competitor.
To help you determine if there are some efficiencies missing from your driver recruiting process, we’ve put together this list of 5 factors that could be impacting your driver hire speed.
Not Utilizing Employer Branding and Employee Referrals
Let’s start with some facts:
- Employee referrals are 55% faster to hire than their non-referral counterparts.
- 83% of people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family.
- When it comes to employer branding employee voice is trusted 3x more than corporate voice.
Speeding up your time to hire starts by getting the best candidates into your candidate pool, and hiring funnel faster. With social job sharing and employer branding, you can do just that and if you’re not utilizing this strategy, you could be missing out on top driver candidates.
Confusing Processes
If your application process is confusing or lengthy you risk the chance of losing top drivers to the competition pretty easily. Remember that your driver candidates spend much of their time on the road, ie. on mobile devices. Ensure that your website and all application processes are designed with a mobile-first initiative and whenever possible use one-touch apply features to increase your applicant pool.
Lack of Preparation During Recruiter Follow-up
Best practices from our top clients say that you should aim to follow up with driver candidates with 8 minutes of initial contact. But this does not mean you should go in unprepared. Always have the candidate’s relevant data from their application on hand. If your follow-up involves making the driver answer questions and give you data they already supplied you with in writing it waists valuable time for both driver and recruiter.
Still Using Manual Interview Scheduling
Going back and forth with candidates when trying to schedule interviews and waiting for confirmation is another step that is unnecessarily time-consuming. Automate this part of the recruiting process with automatic scheduling software that allows drivers to confirm via text.
Lack of Applicant Tracking System
Applicant Tracking Systems or ATSes can help to keep track of all pertinent driver applicant information including next steps and verifications. Some of them can even handle the aforementioned automated scheduling. Without an ATS managing this information digitally, your hiring processes can become disorganized, incomplete, and inefficient. Implement an ATS to improve efficiency, make it easier for recruiters to contact and engage drivers, and get drivers on the road faster.
Not Partnering With Work4
The Work4 suite of driver recruiting solutions allows your team to customize a recruitment marketing strategy that works for you. Choose from employer branding, social job sharing, SMS text recruiting, and virtual CDL job fairs. With Work4, driver recruiters are equipped with modern solutions for the modern trucking industry. Try out all of the features of our custom ads campaigns for 5 weeks and see the difference in your recruiting stats. Click the link below to find out if you qualify for a free trial.
