5 Steps to Use the Holiday Season to Win the New Year

Through the rest of the year until early January, freight demand will continually slow down and drivers will be with their families, not on the road. Truck drivers are intentionally not applying for jobs right now so they can have time off to celebrate the holidays.

Even though drivers are not looking for jobs right now does not mean you can slow down your recruiting effort. This time can be used to set yourself up for a big recruiting year next year.

Here are the 5 steps to use the holiday season to win the new year:

  1. Increase Facebook Advertising
  2. Focus More on Content Production
  3. Cutback on Geotargeting Recruitment
  4. Revise Your Trucking Recruiting Website
  5. Reflect on Previous Year to Improve for the Next

Truck driver recruiter successfully using the Holiday Season to win the new year

Increase Facebook Advertising

Drivers spending time at home, and not in a truck, means that they now have an excess of free time. A large portion of this free time will be filled by scrolling through Facebook.

The essence of digital driver recruiting is getting your company in front of the eyes of potential drivers. If drivers are spending more time on Facebook then you need to spend to get your company on Facebook more.

Drivers are making a list of potential employers and checking it twice.

Make sure your company is on that list by flooding driver feeds with your Facebook advertisements.

Focus More on Content Production

You are going to have more time on your hands during November and December because you will not be hiring as many drivers. Do not waste this time.

The extra time you have on your hands could be spent wisely working on content creation.

You should be filming driver testimonials, recording interviews with upper management, and writing about how great it is to work at your company.

Post this content on social media for drivers to see and they will be more likely to apply for your company once the new year starts. Drivers are not going to apply for companies that fail to sell them on their company culture.

Cutback on Geotargeting Recruitment 

The amount of freight being delivered during the holiday season is lower compared to the rest of the season.

Since there is less freight being delivered around the country, there will be fewer drivers on the road. The locations you are geotargeting are going to be less occupied.

Do not waste ad-spend to target locations where drivers are not going to be.

In an ideal world, you would take the money you cutback from your geotargeting budget and allocate it to your Facebook advertising budget.

Revise Your Truck Driver Recruiting Website

It is best practice to constantly revise your company website to optimize for truck driver recruiting.

You should delete outdated content from your website to make room for the new content you are creating. Also, conduct some keyword research and update your page titles and headers to boost your SEO rankings.

Finally, make sure your website is built to work well on mobile devices. More people than ever are accessing the web from a mobile device, especially drivers.

Reflect on Previous Year to Improve for the Next

Reflect on the previous year to utilize the Pareto Principle

The final thing you should do during this time is to conduct reflection sessions on what worked and did not work during the previous year.

Strategize with your colleagues about how you can all cut out the processes that were not producing results and focus on processes that do produce.

Remember the 80/20 rule. 80% of your results are produced by 20% percent of your actions. The holiday season is a great time to find the 20% of actions producing results.

Truck drivers are not applying for trucking jobs right now. The applications will pick back up in January so you need to be prepared. Follow these 5 steps to use the holiday season to win the new year.

6 Steps to Successfully Hiring Truck Drivers

Truck driver recruiting is a career that requires creativity, the ability to be a salesperson, and extreme dedication. Given the driver shortage and constantly changing industry, it is common for recruiters to feel like they have lost their “hiring touch”. If that sounds like you then follow this guide and you will reignite your hiring touch with the 6 Steps to Successfully Hiring Truck Drivers.

  1. Generate awareness with paid advertising
  2. Inform the driver with your website content
  3. Get the driver to apply for your company
  4. Call the driver ASAP after they apply
  5. Ensure the driver attends orientation
  6. Officially hire the driver

Two truck driver recruiters successfully hire a driver

Paid Advertising Generating Awareness

Launching a paid advertising campaign is the first step to hiring professional drivers. Paid advertising campaigns are the best way to generate awareness for your company within your desired driver demographic.

Paid advertising includes social media advertising, retargeting, geofencing, buying ads on Google, and much more. Each avenue of paid advertising works together to touch the driver during different use cases.

For example:

A driver may first come across one of your banner ads while they are surfing the web. This first touch doesn’t create much of an impact, but then while stopped at a truck stop a geotargeted ad pops up on the driver’s phone. They take more notice the second time but not enough to act.

Finally, while scrolling Facebook a driver testimonial comes across their feed. This interests the driver enough that they click on your Facebook page.

On your Facebook page, the driver consumes enough content they decide they want to learn even more about your company. So they go to visit your website.

It is important to note in this example that the driver never clicked directly on a paid advertisement to apply. Paid media rarely generates direct applications.

Instead, paid advertising is amazing at generating impressions for your company. In the example, the driver never would have known about the company if it were not for paid ads.

Website Content Informs Drivers

If your paid advertising campaign does what it is supposed to do, your website will be flooded with traffic. The majority of this traffic will be from drivers considering the idea of applying to drive for your company.

Think about the example above.

The driver in the example was exposed to enough paid advertisements that they took the next step and visited your website.

Now that they are on your website they still need to be convinced to apply to drive for your company. The reason they are on the site is to learn more.

Drivers are looking for content that tells them the logistics of the position (pay, route type, required certifications, etc.) and what it is like being an employee for your company.

The logistics of the position should all be covered in the job description. To show what it is like to be an employee for your company you need things like driver testimonials, write-ups on top-performing drivers, and messages from upper management on their views of the drivers.

Driver Submits an Application 

At this point, you have made the driver aware that you are hiring and informed them about your company’s driver experience.

Assuming the content did its job, the driver will click on your CTA and apply to drive for your company.

The most important thing with this step in the process is to make your application quick and easy to submit. A complicated application form can deter drivers from applying.

Job resume document out from laptop. Hands holding cv resume papers. Human resources management concept, searching professional staff, work. Found right resume.

Recruiter Calls the Driver ASAP

Just because the driver applies to your company does not mean they are completely sold on being employed by you. Plus, they are often applying to multiple companies at once.

If you take too long to call the driver, you are going to lose them to another company.

The odds of contacting a driver are 100 times higher if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes. The odds of qualifying a driver are 21 times higher if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes.

Use software like Zappier to notify you of the moment an application is submitted. The moment you receive the notification call the driver.

You are far more likely to get a hold of the driver, verify their credentials, and get them to commit to your company before another company does.

Recruiter gets the Driver Through Orientation 

Truck drivers are constantly being sent new job opportunities. They are in a position where their skills are in high demand.

It is very common for a driver to apply, accept a job offer, and then take a different job for another company before making it through orientation.

Truck driver recruiters can not lose contact with the driver once they get a commitment. It is up to the recruiter to do whatever it takes to get that driver through orientation and officially hired.

The Driver is Officially Hired

The final step in the recruiting process is officially sending the driver off on their first run for the company.

However,

The driver recruiter should never stop recruiting drivers hired.

Considering the driver shortage, there is no guarantee that a hired driver will last long with your company. Recruiters should take it on themselves to value the drivers and make them want to stay with the company over others.

Awareness, content consumption, application, direct contact, orientation, and officially hitting the road are the 6 steps to successfully hiring truck drivers. Keep in mind that it is rare for a driver to go through all 6 steps in order. Most people will go through steps 1-4 multiple times.

5 Steps to Recruiting Truck Drivers on Facebook

Over 96% of professional drivers have a Facebook account. Truck drivers love using Facebook because it enables them to stay connected with fellow drivers and loved ones while they are on the road. Because of the large number of drivers using Facebook, the platform is one of the greatest sources of driver recruits. Here are the 5 steps to recruiting truck drivers on Facebook.

 

Build Your Company Page 

The first thing you need to do before you start recruiting truck drivers is to build your company’s Facebook page. Drivers that are interested in working for you are going to search for your company on Facebook. Building a Facebook page ensures that you will be found by drivers.

Your company page needs to share the most relevant information about your company and tell the story of what it is like to work for your company.

Relevant information includes: company name, location, website, and a succinct description. Provide enough information for drivers to know who you are and become interested enough that they visit your website.

Tell the story of working for your company through your posts. Any driver celebration you conduct, company wins, driver testimonials, etc. need to be documented and posted to your page. Photos and videos are typically more effective than posts containing solely text.

Once you have your company page built you need to encourage all of your employees to follow the page. The more that people interact with your content, the more that the Facebook algorithms will blast your content out to people. This is free exposure, but you need to earn it with quality content.

Magnifying glass used to symbolize a driver recruiter looking to recruit truck drivers on Facebook.

Join the Right Groups

The Groups feature on Facebook is one of the best tools for connecting with truck drivers. There are groups dedicated to connecting drivers with recruiters across the country. Also, there are more geo focused groups to help drivers find jobs in your area. Take the time to do your research and join all groups relevant to your company.

Posting in groups enables you to reach a large amount of truck drivers for free. Because this strategy is so cost effective it is hyper competitive. Competing companies are going to be flooding the groups with their job postings.

In order to combat the competitiveness of groups you simply need to be more active than everyone else. This means doing more than posting your job ads. You need to like other people’s posts, comment, share informative content, and do your best to build relationships. Doing this will make it so that drivers look specifically for your posts.

The Science Behind Posting 

There is a common misconception with Facebook that all you need to do is post your content and all of your followers will see it. Facebook’s algorithms are far more complex than that. The algorithms build individual feeds for every user and only show them the content users will interact with.

It does not matter how many followers you have if you are posting poor quality content. Everything from font color, time of day, device optimization, and much more effect whether your posts are seen by followers. Posting is a science.

In order to perfect the science behind your posts, you need to be running A/B tests. Create different posts that are designed to test one specific variable. For example, one post may have red font and the other has blue. Publish those posts so that different drivers see them and see which perform the best.

After conducting multiple tests you will begin to figure out what post characteristics work the best. It is important to keep running tests because the algorithms are updated constantly. Also, the tests build on one another making each post better than the last.

Young boy conducting science experiments similar to the science experiments driver recruiters conduct on facebook

Facebook Paid Advertising

There is no getting around having to pay for advertising when recruiting truck drivers online. Facebook is no different. You are going to need to pay to get your recruiting advertisements in front of the eyes of drivers.

Paid advertising on Facebook is the only way to guarantee that drivers will see your job openings. The Facebook algorithms make it so that non-paid posts have a limited reach. Facebook wants your money so they have built a platform that requires you to pay them.

Paid advertising is going to ensure that professional drivers see your company every time they open Facebook. This will keep your company on their mind and when drivers go to look for a new job they will search for your company.

Consistency Is Key

The most important thing to recruiting truck drivers on Facebook is to be consistent. You will not see results if you are super active on the platform one month and then absent the next month. The longer you are consistent on the platform the stronger your brand image will be.

Tools like Hootsuite make it easier to post consistently. With Hootsuite you are able to write out multiple posts at one time and then schedule when those posts will be published. Some companies will schedule posts months out in advance and others like to take it week by week.

Considering that over 96% of company drivers have a Facebook account, of course you need to be recruiting truck drivers on the platform. Facebook is the place for you to reach potential drivers and share your company’s story in real time. Follow this guide and your company will know how to recruit truck drivers on Facebook.