Broadly speaking, it’s safe to say drivers choose carriers based on pay. When asked, they’ll claim job benefits played only a small role in choosing this or that carrier. But when asked why they left a job, many will point to a benefit deficiency.
In other words, higher pay affects recruitment, while other factors tend to affect retention. If you want to keep the drivers you win over, you have to offer enticing benefits.
But what is a benefit? On our landing pages, we like to keep benefits standard and uncluttered with other perks. Benefits should include:
Structured Home Time
Can you promise daily or weekly hometime? If so, claim it here. And be honest. Even if your structured home time is a little less generous, spell it out anyway. Drivers respond to specifics and often mistrust generalization: “Plenty of home time”. Granted, we know this isn’t always a possibility. Work with what you have. Just avoid shooting yourself in the foot.
Insurance
You either offer it or you don’t. There isn’t a lot of variety to get into here. Health, life, dental, vision. Can whole families get it? Shout out free or significantly low premiums if you have them.
Retirement
Be specific about what you offer including any company match.
Those are your benefits. Reading them, you may feel you have many other enticing job perks to offer beyond home time, insurance, and retirement plans. Those are your incentives. They differ from benefits and should be treated as their own separate section of your job description.
More or less, companies will offer the same benefits. Minor details might change, but they look broadly identical to a driver scanning your landing page. A quick visual glance confirms they exist and maybe deserve a more nuanced reading later. If you group incentives with your benefits, you increase the chance of them getting lost or overlooked during that quick glance.
Solve this issue by separating incentives into their own section, a place for the eye to land and perhaps find something unexpected.
While most benefits are the same, incentives are where your company can stand out as unique. Offered perks may not have the persuasive power of high pay, but they can easily provide the extra little bump a driver needs to decide between you and a similar competitor offering the same basic package.
Incentives can include things like:
Bonuses
Equipment
Rider & Pet Programs
Training Opportunities
Company Events
Quality of Life Aids
The difference between a benefit and an incentive may seem small in the grand scheme of things. But remember, a driver shopping for a new carrier will scroll through a large number of landing pages. By making this visual distinction, you give your carrier one extra opportunity to attract that driver. It’s a crowded market out there. This minor step costs nothing, yet offers the priceless benefit of helping you stand out among the rest.