Recruiting CDL Drivers

One thing I haven’t talked about much on here is what I do for a living. Are you familiar with tractor- trailers? Well I oversee a team of fabulous recruiters that recruit and hire CDL drivers to work for my company. When I first started with my department, I was directly recruiting for drivers myself. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been able to grow and work myself up to managing the department, which has been a very rewarding experience thus far. When I started, our department was brand new at my corporate office and I was one of four recruiters. Today, we have a team of over fifty people. It’s been awesome being part of the expansion and continuous process improvement of what we do over the last few years and I am super excited to see what the future holds!

If you recruit in general, then you know we have a really tough, competitive market out there. If you recruit for CDL drivers, you are even more familiar with the woes of hiring.

The hours of time that goes into speaking to driver candidates and pitching our opportunities is the easy part. It’s the disappointment that comes with being “ghosted” (candidate becomes unresponsive) unexpectedly, having a candidate fail a piece of background or pull out of an offer due to a better package from a competitor…the set backs come in high numbers.

Hiring drivers and recruiting in general can easily be comparable to the movie Groundhog Day. The monotony can be intense, so it’s really up to the individual to make the job fun and push themselves to excel in different ways to find growth opportunity. The difficult openings are tough for a reason- whether it be position or market related- so the work that goes into finding the right person can be repetitive and seemingly never- ending, depending on the situation.

If you’re wondering why that is with drivers, you need to familiarize yourself with the transportation industry and what a driver can expect every day. Also, don’t even get me started on the CDL driver shortage. There are a handful of “perfect” job opportunities that are M-F, morning shift; however, the majority of openings range in fairly undesirable schedules and shift times because of what the accounts require. Ultimately, my team helps drive the economy (lol, get it?) and in order to do so, we have a wide variety of options out there that need drivers and needed them yesterday.

I’m sitting in the car during a two hour drive to the beach and started thinking about ways I can make team meetings more interesting and worthwhile. Tied into that, how can I make meetings oriented (in a good and not boring way) around what we do and our industry? I think a lot of keeping the team feeling positive and happy is by engaging them in different ways- whether they be informationally valuable sessions or just a fun discussion topic. In addition, there has to be recognition and reward when deserved.

My thoughts led me to this blog. Stay tuned upon my return from maternity leave to see what I am able to come up with for the team and how it goes!

Have any ideas for positive team engagement? Do you recruit and have similar issues to what we encounter? If so, what industry do you work within?