6 Ways to Measure Driver Recruiting Success

Transportation companies all over America struggle to achieve their driver recruiting goals.

Solving the recruiting challenge goes beyond a catchy tagline and spending big bucks on advertising. In fact, most transportation companies we visit are flying blind because they aren’t looking at the right data.

Your car has a dashboard to tell you if you need to speed up or slow down, get gas, or change your oil – each component tells you to take a clear action.

The flaw we see in many organizations is they’re driving the recruiting team through the rear-view mirror. If you only track lagging indicators, you can’t make adjustments on your campaigns before you realize no one is showing up to orientation this week.

How Do You Track Success in Recruiting?

It makes no sense to waste money. Being creative means you’re going to take risks. When you take risks, you’ll fail. When you fail, fail fast. When you effectively measure your recruiting campaign using an Applicant Tracking System like A-Suite, you can measure your successes and shortcomings to avoid making the same mistake twice and repeat what works.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Focus on measuring these six key metrics each week to create your Driver Recruiting Dashboard:

1. Cost Per Hire (CPH) by Job Type
2. CPH by Location
3. CPH by Job Type by Location
4. Time to Contact
5. Live Answer Rate
6. Reject Reasons by Source

Leading Versus Lagging Indicators

Before we jump into how to use these measurements, it’s important to point out that not all measurements are created equal. While you need all six to paint the full picture, some of these measurements only provide information after the fact. It’s good intel but there’s nothing that can change this week’s orientation class size. We call these lagging indicators.

The other measurements are leading indicators. Leading indicators serve as the confirmation to stay the course on a campaign or serve as the alarm bell to make an adjustment before you have no one scheduled for orientation.

Leading Indicators And How To Use Them

The following leading indicators will guide you to confirm you’re on the right path or be the canary in the coal mine before you have empty room for orientation.

Time to Contact

When a new lead comes in, how long does it take you to contact them? If it takes you 24 hours to contact a lead, they’re already had three interviews. When a lead fills out a contact form on a site like Indeed or Facebook, your response time needs to be in minutes, not hours.

Live Answer Rate

We define live answer rate as how often you pick-up the phone when a new lead calls versus going to voicemail. How often do you call a lead and you never hear back from them? If you call to order a pizza and it goes to voicemail, you move on to the next pizza shop. Driving jobs are like pizza – you can go down the road and find another shop in minutes. If you want better driver recruitment results, you have to touch leads while they’re hot. We also highly recommend asking for permission to text candidates. When communication is done on their terms, it will lead to better results.

Lagging Indicators And How To Use Them

CPH by Driver Type by Location

Cost Per Hire is the ultimate metric to set your recruiting budget and determine where to spend your money. Tracking CPH by job and location provides insight for which lead source is the most effective for each position – don’t assume the lead sources are equal across your geographical locations or job types. Look back on the last three months to find the lead sources that have the lowest CPH and prioritize your money there. Ultimately, this information will allow your Sales and Ops teams to prioritize which business and locations to go after. You have no shortage of business so you need to prioritize where you have the most success bringing on drivers.

Reject Reasons by Source

Your time in recruitment is valuable, and you need to treat it as such. In your ATS, create a set list of Reject Reasons and track them by source. You’ll begin to see which Lead Sources produce quality hires and which just toss you a pile of anyone vertical and taking on air that may or may not have a CDL.

Stay Ahead of The Curve in Recruiting

If you incorporate the lagging and leading indicators listed here into your ATS, it will become very clear what levers to pull. You won’t have to fly blind and feel like you're grasping at straws. The right metrics that are automatically captured in a dashboard make it easy to identify the right moves to keep the recruiting pipeline full.