Quantify Your Driver Pay & Benefits

Pay is always a top concern for drivers yet trucking companies can’t precisely tell a driver how much he or she will make in a year. Drivers tend to think in days and weeks, not months and years. For this reason, use days and weeks as your units of measure when you quantify your pay and benefits packages. If you do not offer a guaranteed paycheck for your drivers, you still need a way to offer a specific amount of how much money your drivers may or will earn without setting unrealistic expectations.

Driver Pay
Trucking companies tend to be clear about cents per mile paid but give a range of the average miles expected to drive per week. The reason to set a wide range is noble: you do not want to unrealistically set expectations for your new driver and have the driver see a lesser income than advertised as you pulling the bait and switch. One idea to be specific and truthful:

• Take your driver payouts for last year and group the average weekly payouts into large buckets
  (i.e. $900-1,000, $1,000-$1,100, $1,200-$1,300 etc.).
• Quantify how many drivers earned money in each bucket and market those numbers.

Now your recruiters have real data to share with drivers and drivers will have a better sense of real income at your company.

Benefits
Health care, retirement plans, and vacation are worth a lot of money but are tough to quantify. There is nothing “fringe” about these benefits to the person who has to write the check. Most drivers only focus on what comes out of their paycheck, so it’s your job to quantify what they get in return. Some ideas to quantify benefits:

• Summarize what drivers and their families receive from your health insurance providers (i.e.
  free preventative care, $10 co-pay, etc.). Use charts or easy to read breakdowns.
• Quantify how much free money your 401K match produces in 10 years if a driver stays with you. Sell it as free money.
• Concisely project vacation time offered by years of seniority, using charts as a guide.

We particularly like benefits that require tenure such as 401Ks and vacation because they lure an individual who is looking to commit to you. Again, drivers think in terms of days and weeks so this is easier said than done. For your prospective drivers that have families, sell health care and retirement plans as a way to provide security and stability for their families. Security and stability are both values you want in a driver, and likely values they want in an employer. Get drivers to think more long-term by having them focus on their families.

Study your competition’s benefits packages and identify where you are stronger. Be sure your recruiters can quantify and communicate that difference to prospective drivers. Having a great collection of benefits is worthless if you don’t effectively communicate their value.