What sets your company apart in your recruiting position to professional drivers? How do you differentiate your offer from the vast competition in the recruiting space?
Is it pay and benefits? Performance incentives? Home time? Company culture? Nice equipment? Wellness programs? Generous PTO?
Those questions are likely ones you answer internally at the leadership level, and your company works hard to craft unique offers that are meant to attract and recruit drivers in a crowded, competitive market, and to help retain them once they’re on board.
However, while fleet leadership — HR and recruiting managers, operations personnel, and senior leaders — might be able to quickly answer and define your fleet’s unique value proposition and recruiting sales points, they’re not the ones communicating the message to drivers.
Ultimately, the responsibility lands with your recruiters of clearly communicating an offer that sticks. So the questions become: Do your recruiters know what sets you apart? Are they effectively selling your company’s message? Are they equipped to answer drivers’ questions accurately and clearly?
That was one of the key themes and takeaways from last month’s CDLLife TurningPoint Summit held in Kansas City — that your fleet can craft an amazing offer for drivers, but it’s crucial to train and support your recruiters to relay that offer effectively and consistently. As we touched on in our Four Dos and Don’ts for driver job ads and recruiting pitches in the NTI blog last month, you’ll remember one of the don’ts was to not leave our recruiters guessing.
Here are a few best practices to implement at your fleet:
Hold frequent enrichment sessions and expose recruiters to every fleet department
Your recruiters need an intimate working knowledge of how your fleet operates, what a driver’s day and week typically entails, and — maybe most importantly — how the offers they’re promoting to drivers will reflect in a driver’s pay, benefits, home time, etc.
The best way to do that is to consistently expose them to every department in your fleet — operations, safety, HR, and equipment. Also, pair recruiters to learn from each other and workshop best practices, both internally and externally. Hold frequent training sessions to make them experts in everything your fleet does, and consistently communicate to recruiters what sets your fleet and your offers apart, especially as your comp, benefits, and value proposition evolve.
Incorporate feedback to optimize the driver’s experience
Read drivers’ reviews across online channels and incorporate that feedback into your recruiter training. Listen to recorded calls of your recruiters’ pitches and offer constructive feedback where necessary. Regularly evaluate your processes and continue to fine-tune. The point isn’t to be punitive with your recruiters. It’s to coach them, show them you’re supporting them through their learning process, and ultimately put them in position to achieve their goals and quota by being responsive to drivers’ experience with your fleet.
Leverage data and benchmarking to create a stand-out offer
When you’re building and communicating your fleet’s value proposition, your recruiters need to know where your fleet excels and what you can market to drivers as unique to your fleet.
To do that, wage and benefits benchmarking is critical, so that you can find — or create — opportunities with your driver compensation program to promote externally and internally.
That’s especially true as driving jobs become more fragmented and unique by location, application, labor level, and freight type.
With solutions like NTI’s National Survey of Driver Wages and National City-Centric Driver Pay Survey, you can compare and benchmark across over 100 attributes of driver pay and benefits to know exactly where your fleet stands out, where you want to stand out, and the right message to give to recruiters to communicate to driver candidates.
More resources from the NTI Blog:
Four Dos and Don’ts for driver job descriptions and recruiting pitches
