Go slow to go fast. NASCAR pit crews don’t rush to go fast. They go fast because everyone knows exactly what to do and when. Every second is standardized because every second counts.
You need to bring the same mentality to recruiting to speed up your recruiting efforts. Why does speed matter if you’re not trying to win a NASCAR race? Time is money. Your time is a top expense in the recruiting process. In order to go fast, you’ll need to process more candidates quicker through automation, which means you’re getting hours back to focus on the right candidates. Respect your time by standardizing your hiring efforts with a proven process.
What do we mean by standardizing the hiring process? Having regimented, well-documented procedures and rules you follow internally as drivers transition from applicants to new hires. In other words, you have to make your hiring process black and white.
It will help you reduce the amount of time you spend sorting through applications, ensure you can delegate or automate these duties at any time and ultimately improve candidate selection, which will help you hire better people.
One trucking company recently told us they had a good week – netting 70 applications. Not too bad. But the problem is only seven of those candidates were qualified. The recruiter spent a lot of hands-on time screening out the 63 people who weren't qualified to find the 10 percent who were. In a case like this, a standardized hiring process is the first step to cutting down the human time required to evaluate the good candidates from the poor candidates.
Before hiring, you should standardize the questions you ask all candidates in fairness to them and to improve your efficiency. Essentially, you want to set up your hiring process so no candidate advances to the next stage without meeting certain criteria.
Start by collecting the following information upfront. Doing so will get candidates to pre-qualify themselves or potentially screen themselves out before you spend any time processing their applications.
- ZIP code
- License Class
- License Endorsements
- Required / Desired Experience with Your Equipment and/or Industry
- Violations / Accidents
If you ask these questions on a Candidate Landing Page, for instance, you can prompt only certain applicants to move on to a full Department of Transportation application, saving both you and them time if they don’t meet your minimum requirements.
Why bother moving forward with a candidate who lives outside of your hiring radius? It seems like a minor point, but it happens all the time. You can save everyone the trouble by letting that person know as soon as possible that they’re not qualified at this time.
In tandem with standardized qualification questions, an AI-driven phone-answering bot can be a big help. At AvatarFleet, our data show that driver recruiters who answer the phone hire more drivers than those who send nearly everyone to voicemail. Our AI bot, the RoboRecruiter, can collect information from candidates over the phone, transcribe it and send it to your human recruiter, so you can quickly scan the message and respond to questions without having to personally speak to everyone on the phone or listen to every single voicemail.
For the applicants you do choose to speak with over the phone, be sure to follow a checklist so no undesirable candidates slip through the cracks.
Here are a few questions you can add to your standard phone script:
- Please confirm the accuracy of the information you provided.
- Why are you looking for a new job?
- How soon are you ready to make a move?
- What’s the best way to get in touch with you?
- Why do you feel we’d be a good fit for you?
After you’ve qualified a candidate, the next step is having a standardized method for capturing release forms for the screenings, including Motor Vehicle Records, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Pre-Employment Screening Program, a background check and the FMCSA’s Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse check.
In all of these cases, having well defined hard stops before proceeding to the next one allows you to cut your losses if the candidate isn’t up to snuff.
Finally, we recommend doing the hour-long behavioral interview after all the screenings. Again, it’s about efficiency. If the candidate doesn’t pass the screenings, there’s no reason to spend 60 minutes with him or her. Your time is more valuable than the cost of an MVR, PSP and background check — especially if you’re going to disqualify them based on what you find anyway.
Structured onboarding procedures are another important part of standardizing your hiring process. You should have a predefined process and timeline for how quickly you respond to candidates with your hiring decision (one day or less is ideal), how soon you schedule their orientation (ASAP), which forms and screenings are required for onboarding, when video training will take place and when the road test will take place.
As much orientation information should be pre-recorded as a video or documented as possible. Think of the Disney or Chick-Fil-A model: You want everyone to have the same experience — and you want it to be a good experience, not dependent on who’s at the shop that day and how they’re feeling. What if the hiring manager is sick or out of the office? All the wheels should not grind to a halt. Watching your “Welcome to Our Company” videos before orientation lets new drivers spend their time getting to know the people of the company and forging relationships with their driver manager who is their lifeline on the road.
With the nuts-and-bolts details out of the way, the face time you spend with your new hires can be more engaging and personal than someone talking at them about administrative information. Nobody remembers two days of being talked at, so you’re wasting your breath. Provide them the content when they need it. For example, send them the five-minute video on understanding a settlement sheet the day of their first paycheck while they’re looking at it for the first time. No one can remember a week ago.
If you’re used to being a one-man or one-woman show, it might be a challenge to get the entire hiring process out of your head and into a standardized system. But trust us, it’s worth it. Making your hiring process black and white and clearly defining who does what and when — just like a pit crew — will only speed things up, make your decisions easier and reduce the room for human error.