Recruit and Retain Drivers Better by Going to WFBCON!

By now you’ve probably come to realize that the best way to find recruiting strategies that work for you is to try different things. One of the best places to go to find new ideas is a conference. Fortunately for you, there’s such a conference coming up that you need to check out for both recruiting and retention strategies.

The 2017 WorkForce Builders Conference (WFBCON) is coming up June 12-14 in Riverside, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City. This conference will gather together some of the most creative and experienced minds in the areas of human resources, recruiting, retention and fleet management in the industry for a three-day summit to discuss various strategies in these areas. Some of the highlights of the conference include a keynote address from TechSavvy Global CEO Scott Steinberg and appearances by TCA President, John Lyboldt, and Bison Transport CEO, Rob Penner. The theme this year is “More Than Recruiting and Retention: HR Strategy."

The conference offers a series of intensive workshops in each of the four mentioned areas, so you can come for one area or all of them, whatever interests you. The 2016 conference at the Westin Hotel in Indianapolis was a rousing success and featured speakers from over 40 different companies in the industry. Like last year, the 2017 conference will also feature programs that can grab your personnel credits for Fleet Management or NATMI certification in case you’re on the fence about attending or sending folks from your company.

If you’re already going to the conference, you’ve taken an important step in refining your recruitment and retention strategies. Attend as many workshops as you can get to. Try a few different programs and see what you think. You never know what you might hear that could help you. For example, the closing program on ransomware might not sound applicable to what you do as a freight company. But with most of the trucking industry moving to electronic logs and online HR systems, it might be good to know a thing or two about the threats out there. Or maybe one of the health and wellness presentations in the HR area has a great idea for your drivers that never occurred to you that you could implement for not much cash.

Of course, the recruiting and retention workshops tend to draw the largest audiences and those look to be popular again this year. Among the workshops organized by TCA on recruiting will be a talk on brand statements and advertising co-led by AvatarFleet’s president Scott Rea, who also spoke at last year’s conference. If you’re interested in jump-starting your marketing to bring in more drivers, you should definitely stop by for his workshop “How To Create A Brand Statement and Turn it into Compelling Advertising” at 3:30 pm on Tuesday, June 13. Scott and Lori Furnell, VP of Communications at Boyd Brothers Transportation, will run through how to develop a unique brand for your company and then how to use that uniqueness in bringing in drivers. It’s a talk definitely worth seeing.

If you are still unsure about attending the conference, consider that nothing helps ideas come to fruition better than a team, and WFBCON has hundreds of smart people to brainstorm with. To see the full schedule and get all the info on WFBCON, check it out here.  If you can’t make it, be sure to check out our eBook 75 Strategies to Help Increase Driver Retention. You’ll find plenty of good ideas to test out in your recruiting and retention ventures.