In today’s candidate-driven market, recruiting in any industry can be a hard road to travel. Despite increasing wages and job stability within the transportation industry, many companies are still struggling to keep their trucks full and on the road. At the end of the day, there simply aren’t enough qualified applicants in the workforce to fill all of the open positions. But, CDL driver recruiters have been facing driver shortages and recruiting challenges for years now. So this is nothing new. What is new, are the ways in which the challenges can be overcome. Read on for an overview of the top 3 challenges in the transportation industry, and how driver recruiters can overcome them to keep their trucks full.
The Driver Shortage
Let’s get the most obvious challenge out of the way first. It’s no secret that there aren’t enough qualified CDL drivers to keep every available truck on the road. According to statistics from the American Trucking Associations (ATA), the trucking industry is currently facing a shortage of nearly 80,000 drivers. That represents a 30% increase from pre-pandemic numbers when the industry faced a labor shortage of 61,500 drivers. Furthermore, additional studies from the ATA show that America’s trucking industry will need to hire as many as 900,000 new drivers within the next ten years. While the driver shortage affects the entire industry as well as the nation’s economy, it’s a major challenge for recruiters.
Overcoming the Challenge:
Finding the best talent for your fleet can be difficult when the pool of candidates is narrow and demand outpaces supply. To overcome the challenge, it’s time to increase your investment in sourcing and recruiting initiatives to widen your candidate pools. When you partner with Work4 using our Employer Branding and Custom Ads Campaigns we can help you increase your driver pool by targeting both active and passive driver candidates.
Unqualified Leads
Another top challenge for CDL recruiters is that when you do manage to find leads in the midst of the shortage, about 50% of your leads aren’t viable. This leaves recruiters spending valuable time and budget sifting through dozens of candidates that may be unqualified, uninterested, inexperienced, or otherwise inappropriate for the job.
Overcoming the Challenge:
Work4’s automation with Facebook recruiting ads allows your fleet recruiters to customize pre-screening qualification forms and using ATS integration or our own API access, only qualified leads are delivered to your team. Reducing time and budget spent as well as time to hire getting those qualified drivers into your trucks faster.
High Turnover
As if the driver shortage wasn’t challenging enough, driver recruiters are also faced with a staggering 91% turnover rate. This means that for every 100 people a carrier signs, 91 walked out the door.
Overcoming the Challenge:
Strong retention starts with a strong employer brand as well as strong recruiting. Studies show that employees hired through a referral are 50% faster to hire and 45% more likely to stay with a company longer. With Work4’s Employer Branding we make it easy to set up automation that allows both recruiters and drivers to share your branded job ads with just a few clicks.
Overcome More Challenges With Work4
At Work4, we understand the CDL job market, have proprietary audiences to target and 12 years’ worth of data points to rely on, and we’re ready to put our expertise to work for you.
We know that what recruiters really need are strong tools to help them recruit more efficiently and that’s exactly what we offer. Are you ready to get started? Schedule a meeting with one of our recruitment marketing experts and find out if you qualify for a free trial.
