We respect motor carriers who make the effort to muscle through making a generic HR system the system onboard drivers and manage Driver Qualification Files.
Systems like BambooHR, Breezy HR, Greenhouse, JazzHR or your payroll system are great for your office staff but just don’t make sense for drivers. We agree with your goal of putting everything in one spot.
However, our experience with customers who make the switch from a generic system to a DOT-centric system is they realize they can’t program all of the DOT-specific tasks that come out of the box with a driver-specific system. Get the best of both worlds by using a driver-specific onboarding and compliance system and integrate it with your payroll platform.
A generic HR system simply doesn’t stack up to a transportation-oriented driver recruiting, compliance and training software like A-Suite from AvatarFleet. Why not? On both the pre-hire and post-hire sides of the business, generic HR systems don’t ensure you’ll be in compliance with driver-specific regulations, they don’t integrate with key job boards and they don’t feature automation designed with motor carriers in mind.
In transportation driver compliance, your world is centered around Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) regulations Part 391. Also known as “The Big Green Book” or “the bible,” it’s a dense read, to say the least.
In the pre-hire phase, there are 14 records you need to collect that all have special nuances about them.
It starts with the driver application. Sure, you could create custom forms for a record like the DOT Application with validations for three years of address history and 10 years of job history with a safety-sensitive function to technically meet compliance.
But it will not feed into the Safety Performance History Records Request validation feature that sends off employment verification requests.
You won’t get a Driver’s License upload feature that will extract and populate the data into the candidate profile.
You won’t get a Med Card upload feature that will automatically validate and document if the doctor is on the Federal Registry.
A Note On Driver Job Board Integrations:
Industry-specific job board integrations are another advantage of a transportation-focused software like A-Suite. Pretty much everyone integrates with Indeed, which certainly has a lot of candidates, but it takes a lot of leads to find the drivers you actually want to hire. There are proven sources that attract drivers that give you a better targeted ad spend such as CDLJobs.com, CDLLife.com and TruckersReport.com. Generic HR software platforms do not.
You live in a niche world of transportation. Big giant HR systems have to accommodate every job on the planet, so you’ll never get the features that are specific to driver onboarding that a driver-specific system will provide.
Just like on the pre-hire side, non-compliance in driver record keeping can lead to costly, time-consuming lawsuits. AvatarFleet’s software helps mitigate your risk and protect against these suits by automating data entry and ensuring compliance with all the pertinent regulations.
General HR systems may do a fine job storing files and records, but what guardrails do they have in place to ensure compliance with FMCSA Part 391?
For example, an MVR must be run within 14 days of the driver receiving a new Med Card.
Can your system connect those two records together?
Can it automatically order the MVR for you based on a pre-set rule when new Med Cards are uploaded?
You don’t want to rely on someone’s memory or a manual process for verification.
Another example is the Avatar Assistant — A-Suite’s built-in artificial intelligence bot — which will automatically text your drivers about upcoming expirations for Driver’s License and Med Cards. It reads and extracts data from those records. It verifies the doctor is indeed registered on the Federal Medical Registry. It will automatically order MVRs before their expiration date. And if you use driver monitoring, it knows which state accepts driver monitoring in lue of an annual MVR to save you money.
Whether you’re focused on the pre-hire or post-hire side of the business, if you’re a transportation company considering BambooHR, Breezy HR, Greenhouse or JazzHR, you might want to reconsider.
To learn more about A-Suite, calculate your pricing or schedule a 1:1 call today.