Driver Recruiter Viewpoint

From a recruiter's experience, I too, had always dreaded having to filter through the unqualified to get to the qualified potential hires. The best sources cannot filter out, completely, the unqualified. One of the reasons of course is due to those who think they can slip through the hiring process w/o their past disqualifier(s) being revealed. Upon a background check the truth comes out after you've wasted time with the interview and spent money to run your checks.


Early on I learned to write better ads and began to get better quality. Dealing with drivers is a unqiue learning process, unlike other industry workers. Generic ads that would work well for hiring nurses, attorneys, or even firemen for example, usually do not work well for attracting enough qualified drivers.

For an advertising expert, cost and efficiency is what they do best. An expert can at least help companies solve how to get more qualified leads to how to track your results so that you're not wasting ad dollars due to a bad resource. It's part of their job to write ads and word image ads to bring the qualified to your inbox or phone and help filter out the unqualified. For instance the 2 ads below demonstrate a poorly written ad that would attract any experience & background level versus a qualifying Adword ad or any type leader ad to your full information on your web site or other related sites...content that may or may not be fully read once on a page or pages with full details. The ad that gets them that far sticks in most minds so how an ad is worded (your first contact with the job seekers) is extremely important

Hiring OTR Drivers

Great Pay + Benefits

Apply Now!

Hiring Class A Drivers

Min. Exp. 1yr OTR Recent

Clean Bkgrd, Clean MVR

The first ad is far too generic while the 2nd ad is clear on basic requirements. The 1st ad will get you hundreds more leads while the 2nd ad should & usually does, get you a lot fewer leads BUT more qualified candidates, saving time, frustration and money.

I know this is not news to any advertiser reading this but I see how some employers continually post generic ads. Then I hear the complaints that yes, they get quanity, on which many seem to base their decision to use a particular source, but get very few candidates that qualify. Some companies base their decision on how many hires they get which, in my humble opinion, should not be laid off completely on the source as I've pointed out in other posts. Broken down below is how a successful hiring process leading to money spent well and better retention should, in a perfect world, work out:

• Engaging expert ad agents and/or ad managers who KNOW your industry
• Post qualifier ads & images
• Post on driver popular sites, magazines/books & radio with great tracking in place
• Treating all candidates with respect, being truthful & doing timely follow up
• Everyone involved with the drivers telling them the same information
• Judging a resource by how many qualified applicants are generated, not by how many are hired.
• Employers who accept that the end hiring results is in their control and their responsibility wastes less money and have better retention.

Dump the resources that do not generate enough qualified leads and dedicate that money toward the ones that do.

That's not an exhaustive list of important factors but are the basic ground rules to follow for overall, better, less costly success.


by Marge