Recruiting Session 1:

The road ahead is dark. The long-heralded warnings of a severe truck driver shortage have finally come racing upon us and set our economy on a collision course with disaster. Nationwide freight interruptions have ground commerce to a stand still. And they’ve stranded consumers in gridlock as inventories run out and back orders pile up. Remaining carriers compete fiercely, fighting to recruit the few good drivers that are left. And road conditions have grown treacherous as companies resort to hiring any drivers they can find...many of whom are completely unqualified.

Where will we go for a solution? Will we take to the skies? Or return to the rails? Will we look to science and technology, welcoming the arrival of autonomous vehicles? And risk that machines will rise up against us? Or is there still hope for truck driving? Still time to turn it around? Can we take control and correct our course to steer clear of the hard times ahead? Can we get up to speed and ramp up our success? Can we take off in the right direction for driver recruiting?

Welcome to the Recruiting Sessions. Thanks so much for tuning in. My name’s Matt Lee, and in this series, we’re going to talk about the driver shortage facing us and what we can do about it.

So first, I admit, the outlook for the trucking industry isn’t quite as grim as our video portrayed it. We might have exaggerated just a smidge, but as movies often are, our intro was inspired by actual events. As an industry, we do continue to hear about doom and gloom–that we are in a serious driver shortage. And it’s true. As we’re recording this video in early 2016, the shortage is somewhere between 43 and 45 thousand drivers, and the American Trucking Association estimates it could grow to nearly 74 thousand by year end.

Now that’s a big number, especially when you consider just how much freight it represents, but let me give you an even bigger number: 890 thousand. You wanna take a guess at what that is. And I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the number of trucking regulations issued by the Department of Transportation, though it may be close. No, 890 thousand is the estimated number of additional drivers we’ll need over the next decade to keep up with retirements and industry growth. That number comes from the ATA’s 2015 study of the shortage and its underlying causes. In this series, we’re going to focus on solutions, but to do that, we have to be sure to understand the problem first. So let’s briefly go over three of the big issues identified in the ATA’s study. See if these sound familiar and line up with your experience.

Issue 1: A Young Driver is Hard to Find

The average over-the-road driver is 49. Now, that’s not old, but it is older by seven years than the average American worker. And that’s a big factor driving the shortage. Put simply, drivers are exiting the workforce faster than they’re entering it. I probably don’t need to tell you–in fact, I should probably ask you–about the difficulty of getting younger people into trucking. By the time they’re old enough to drive an interstate route, many have gone into other jobs. That’s why the industry is lobbying to get the age requirement reduced from 21 to 19 and a half. That could certainly help, but it wouldn’t totally solve the problem. Because the age requirement isn’t the only barrier to entry. There’s also a negative public image to overcome. I’m not saying it’s fair or accurate, but many people view truck driving as a grueling job that requires long, lonely days on the road. And when you combine that perception with the reality that trucking does require some hard work and long hours, it truly makes for a tough sell.

Issue 2: A Good Driver is Hard to Find

If you’re like 88% of carriers, you have no shortage of applicants, but instead, a shortage of skilled, experienced applicants. So it’s a quality, more than a quantity issue. Frankly, this is a real problem, and one that kind of feels like no-win situation. If you maintain your standards, you might struggle to hire enough drivers, and if you lower your standards, you expose your company to a lot of risk. There’s no single answer, but many of our videos will touch on ways to find and develop good drivers, so stay tuned.

Issue 3: A Good Driver is Even Harder to Keep

Retention is a real challenge these days. The shortage has created high demand, so a good driver has his pick of jobs. If he’s unhappy with a route, pay, home time, whatever, he can quit and find another carrier. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. In fact, turnover is as high as 90% in the for-hire truckload industry. A key point here though is that we’re seeing is a lot of churn within the industry–drivers going from one carrier to another. So even if a company is having success hiring all the drivers they need today, that’s going to get harder tomorrow as the total number of drivers continues to shrink.

So, those are three big problems from the study. Not exactly a pep talk, but still a talk we’ve got to have.

These problems and the overall shortage won’t just go away. As long as the economy keeps growing at all (fingers crossed), we’ll steadily have more freight, but fewer drivers to deliver it. And even today, that imbalance is causing a higher number of fleet failures. We don’t want yours to be next.

That’s why we’re doing this series. Because we’re in this together.

Finding drivers is an everyday job for us. We help carriers across the country with recruiting, from the strategy to the execution. Working with lots of clients and vendors keeps us in the know on recruiting practices and tools. We’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t in driver recruiting, and in this series, we’re going to pass along those lessons. Because ultimately, the companies that find the drivers will win. The rest won’t. And we’d like to see you win.

In the next video, we’ll get started with the most fundamental question your company needs to ask: who are you?

Until then, I’m Matt. Good recruiting to you.