Why Your Driver's Voice is Critical to Recruiting & Retention

You have a powerful driver recruiting and retention resource sitting at your fingertips: your current drivers.

Do you know what attracted your best-fit drivers to apply for your company in the first place? Or, have you ever asked your most veteran drivers what keeps them behind the wheel for you and not the competition?

These are pertinent questions if you’re looking to fill your empty seats and keep them filled. That’s why you need to listen to your drivers’ voices and record driver video testimonials.

Driver video testimonials can improve your recruiting and retention efforts by:

• Helping you create unique and effective job ads
• Uncovering what attracts drivers in order to create better ad copy
• Giving you actionable feedback to improving job culture

Make Job Ads That Attract the Right Drivers

If you’ve read our blogs before, you know how important it is that your ads stand-out from the crowd.

Effective driver recruitment ads:

• Quickly get someone’s attention
• Avoid platitudes by saying something unique
• Address why someone should drive for you and not your competition

If your ads aren’t accomplishing those three things, you’re wasting your time and money. One effective way to check all these boxes is to utilize driver video testimonials in your ads.

AvatarFleet's driver marketing agency helps you stand out from other trucking companies by finding your purple cow. Your purple cow is the secret sauce to helping you attract drivers by means beyond pay, benefits and home time. It's your cultural differentiator that makes a driver want to work for you instead of having to work for you.

Learn What Attracts Drivers

Like we said, an effective job ad leverages why a driver would want to work for you instead of your competition.

What do you think those reasons are? Pay? Hometime? Benefits? Those are all table stakes for anyone to make a living and have a homelife. You have a secret sauce in your culture that’s hard to replicate. Your struggle has been proving to the world how you invest in your people and how great of an organization you have created. Don’t close your eyes and guess what your driver’s love about your culture - ask them! 

Dig into why drivers love working at your company, their primary challenges in work and life, and how you can help them overcome those challenges to meet their goals. Once you understand why drivers love your company and the problems you solve, you can create ads that get prospective drivers saying “that’s me!”

Driver video testimonial collected for RDX about what life was like before and after driving with the company.

Improve Retention by Getting Driver Feedback

If you’re like everyone else in the trucking industry, your retention numbers could use some love. Turnover and churn are huge problems for every carrier in the nation. You don’t need to just take your lumps with turnover, though. You can solve your driver problem and keep the good drivers you have.

One way to increase retention is to regularly receive feedback from your drivers on their work-lives. You need to ask your drivers:

• What keeps them driving for you
• What the best part of working for you is
• What could improve their work-lives
• What they would change about the company

You should collect this information on a quarterly basis from all of your drivers. Of course, it can be time intensive to mine this data. That’s where DriverAsk comes in.

With DriverAsk, you can request your whole fleet of drivers for a video response to whatever questions you want them to answer. Best of all, it’s easy to use on both ends. It takes just a few clicks to send out the questions and to record answers.

By leveraging this process, your drivers will feel appreciated and you’ll have actionable steps to take towards becoming the employer of choice.

A New Way to Solve Your Driver Problem

Here’s a cold, hard fact that every carrier needs to face: you need your drivers more than they need you.

Your best drivers can quit, find a new job, apply, and get hired all in the same day. And, most drivers on the job hunt have dozens of carriers to choose from. All the more reason that you need better recruiting and retention tools at your disposal.

There’s no silver bullet to solving your driver problem. You need a multi-pronged approach to become an employer of choice with a fleet of all-stars. You can get started on that process today by letting your drivers’ voices be heard.