What’s the Best Place to Advertise for Bus Drivers?

Bus companies are typically sophisticated marketers. You have to be constantly booking new business, so you’ve nailed marketing strategy and tactics. 

You need to rank well when someone searches “ride from Denver airport to Breckenridge,” for instance, so your SEO is dialed in. You have to stand out from all the other charter bus operators who show up on page 1, so you have a solid unique selling proposition. You know it’s important to strike when the iron is hot, so you’ve mastered following up with prospects via marketing automation.

 

The problem is many motorcoach companies don’t apply their marketing savvy toward the bus driver recruiting side of their business. But you can — and should. Here’s an overview of the best approach to hiring bus drivers, including the best places to advertise.

What to Include in Bus Driver Job Ads

The most important thing to do before placing bus driver job ads is to craft a solid driver brand statement. We call this your purple cow. Essentially, it’s a message that outlines what makes your company unique and will attract the right kind of drivers to work for you.

To develop your purple cow, consider the demographics and psychographics of your ideal driver. Uncover their pain points and outline why you are their best solution as an employer. Ultimately, your purple cow will guide your three Ps of recruiting: pitch, placement and process.  

Other information to include in your bus driver job ads includes: 

• Duties and responsibilities
• Compensation
• Job experience
• Home time
• Benefits package

You can’t just tout your sign-on bonus anymore. It’s time to up your game by identifying your purple cow. 

Where to Place Bus Driver Advertisements

Advertising bus driver jobs is different from marketing for truck driver positions. There are dozens of websites specifically targeted to truck drivers. The quantity and quality of job boards is just not the same for motorcoach drivers. And in our experience, trucking job sites aren’t effective for recruiting bus drivers. 

In fact, we have rarely seen a client be successful at recruiting truck drivers and converting them into bus drivers. Think about it: A bus driver is typically a people person. A truck driver is usually more comfortable riding solo — freight doesn’t talk back to you. 

So what does work when it comes to advertising for bus drivers? There are many options, including: 

• Driver referrals
• Rehire campaigns
• Indeed 
• Organic social media campaigns
• Paid social media campaigns
• Search engine optimization

Our research shows the two that work the best are: Indeed and driver referrals — both in person and online.

Why Indeed Works for Hiring Bus Drivers

Indeed invests heavily to get a lot of eyeballs. They are the No. 1 job board out there, but it’s a quantity over quality situation. This reality makes it vital that you have an effective candidate screening system in place so you don’t waste your time on unqualified drivers. You need automation that will screen out the 90 percent of candidates that aren’t worth your time.

Why Referrals Work for Hiring Bus Drivers

Word-of-mouth referrals from your own drivers, whether they happen in real life or on social media, are going to be the source with the smallest volume but highest conversion rate. When someone sends their friends to work for you, they already understand what the job entails and they are prequalified in a sense. Drivers talking to other drivers is where it’s at.

The new age version of referrals is a Driver Influencer Program. At least 10 percent of your drivers post regularly and have over 1,500 followers. These are the people that you need to showcase your job and what they love about it. The Driver Influencer Program provides a tiered monthly payment they can earn based on the number of followers (more followers = more money) and posts that reach 1,500+ views. Then you use our software to track inbound leads from each driver and pay them your normal referral bonus if that candidate is hired. 

Make It Easy to Apply

Motorcoach operators have a lot of downtime while their passengers do their activities. Guess what they fill that time with? Scrolling on social media and the internet. In most cases, drivers are going to be applying for your job from the driver’s seat of their current employer — not from a desktop computer. 

That’s why you need a mobile-friendly Candidate Landing Page and bus driver application. You have to meet candidates where they are, which is on their smartphones. 

Similarly, we don’t recommend leading with the full Department of Transportation driver application. It requires too much information right out of the gate and isn’t necessary for starting the hiring process. 

You also should consider candidate preferences when it comes to speaking to a recruiter over the phone vs. filling out an online form. You have to make both options available and make both options easy to do. 

AvatarFleet research shows that answering the phone increases candidates and produces new hires. One customer improved their phone-answering rate from 8 percent to 80 percent with the help of our RoboRecruiter and netted two more hires per month. That’s an easy win right there.

How to Measure the Success of Bus Driver Job Ads

The best way to measure the success of your bus driver advertising and recruiting efforts is to know your numbers. 

In this case, cost per hire by source is the data point you want to track. You should be able to answer this question: What did you spend in a month on a given source, and how many hires did it produce?

A good finger-to-the-wind benchmark here is $750. In other words, if you’re spending $7,500 a month on advertising and you hire 10 new bus drivers, you’re on target. Monitoring conversion rate by source used to be critical, but it doesn’t matter much anymore. Until recently, lead-to-hire ratio was a key metric because you wanted to ensure you weren’t wasting your time on poor quality leads. But with AI and automation, that metric is no longer relevant. There are so many ways to automatically filter out candidates who aren’t a good fit that you don’t need to worry about conversion rate by source any longer.