If you’re struggling with hiring and retaining good drivers, you’re not alone. According to a yearly survey conducted by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), the driver shortage has been a top concern for motor carriers for five straight years. To make matters more challenging, the “Great Resignation” has hit the transportation industry hard. In 2021, there was a reported 80,000 driver deficit. If current trends continue, the driver shortage could surpass 160,000 drivers in 2030.
The current competition for hiring drivers is extremely high. Since 2019 (pre-pandemic), there has been a 36% increase in job openings, with a 4.7% wage increase. The number of gig workers is on the rise as well – with 31% making it their primary job and 78% reporting satisfaction from gig work. This makes recruiting even more challenging for companies looking for safe, qualified drivers.
In our latest webinar, “Overcoming the Driver Shortage: How to Hire and Onboard Safer Drivers,” we offer valuable insight into how hiring managers can establish a solid onboarding strategy that expands your hiring pool, speeds up your onboarding process, improves your driver retention rates and mitigates future driver risk.
We review the current challenges companies face in finding and retaining qualified drivers, with tips for recruiting the right people on behalf of your company. We also discuss why it’s more important now than ever to keep safety top of mind throughout your hiring process – with crashes and insurance premiums both on the rise.
Onboarding can be a company’s secret weapon in retaining talent if it’s accomplished with a proactive mindset. Even if you do have great hiring practices, you need to have a solid training strategy woven into your onboarding process. We discuss how a modern driver training approach (as well as ongoing training) can work to engage your drivers from the start and set clear expectations when it comes to your safety policy. You’ll learn how these efforts also work towards strengthening your retention efforts – so you can maintain a fleet of happy, safety-minded drivers.
We discuss how our continuous driver monitoring solution can play a huge role in this new hiring and onboarding strategy – screening and training drivers quickly and efficiently. You’ll learn how SambaSafety gives you full visibility into driver behavior, so you can make quick data-driven decisions during the hiring process and beyond once they’re onboarded and out on the road.
You’ll learn how to safely expand your hiring pool by leveraging “premedial” training. With this strategy, you can assign targeted training to drivers with light blemishes on their driving record – viable candidates who in the past you may have turned away before considering their potential. We discuss how you can assign drivers to over 300 specific training courses within the same tool you used to identify blemishes on their driving records during the screening process.
You can discover how the strategies above can help you immediately improve your recruiting and retention efforts by watching our webinar, “Overcoming the Driver Shortage: How to Hire and Onboard Safer Drivers.”