5 Ways Recruiters Can Use AI and Automation to Hire More Drivers

It’s no secret that recruiters at transportation companies wear many hats. 

Ideally, you’d have a different team member to tackle all the roles of the recruiting department: neuromarketer, ad coordinator, creative designer, candidate vetter, candidate processor, deal closer and someone to oversee road testing. 

In reality, you — the recruiter — are doing most if not all of the above. 

What if you could take off a few of those hats and give them to someone else — an assistant, so to speak? And what if that assistant were an artificial intelligence-enabled bot? You may be skeptical, but if a bot could help you screen, hire and onboard more qualified drivers, wouldn’t it be worth a try? 

At AvatarFleet, we’re proving an AI Assistant will turn you into a super recruiter. We’ve been digging into the best problems that AI and automation are fit to solve in recruiting. In summary, you do a lot of repetitive and mundane tasks that have to happen. These are mainly compliance tasks that fall on the recruiter’s plate or the recruiter has to wait on a compliance admin to complete. On their own, each task may take only two to 10 minutes. They are no big deal individually — but what happens when you multiply them by 200 per day? Any one of them becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back. (You’re the camel in this analogy.) 

We’ve prioritized these five areas to help you based on the frequency and time investment we’ve seen our customers slog through. 

1. Screening Candidates & Reducing Time to Hire

As a recruiter, you often have a ton of leads — more than you can keep up with. You need to keep qualified candidates moving through your screening process as quickly as possible. You can’t let them wait around for you and continue their search with your competitors.

Start by leveraging a Candidate Landing Page that features qualification questions and built-in triggers to automatically move a candidate down the hiring funnel when they self-report certain criteria. 

For instance, the Avatar Assistant can automatically order Motor Vehicle Records for candidates who meet your standards. If the MVR comes back clean, AI will take the next step, such as ordering a PSP or background check. If disqualifying data points show up, such as a DUI, no further steps are taken.

When the Avatar Assistant orders your MVRs, PSPs and background checks, you spend less time doing those things. It gives you the ability to see a full application, including screeners, potentially before you even “touch” the candidate.

Let’s face it, you as the recruiter can only make so many calls, clicks or keystrokes in a day. Using the Avatar Assistant to reduce your hands-on time opens you up to more candidates, and allows you to spend time with the right people. 

2. MVR Scoring

While reviewing MVRs is not the most difficult thing you do as a recruiter, it can be time consuming. For every candidate, you have to open the PDF document, your eyes scan a multi-page report and consume the information. You invest more time than you need processing information regardless if the MVR is clean or has issues

To save time and leverage automation, you can enable MVR Scoring in A-Suite. Simply set up your scoring parameters, then all you have to do is glance at the score to instantly evaluate the results of the MVR. 

If the score is 0, you can move on to the next step. If it’s a 15, you’ll have to take a look and consider the facts. If it’s higher, you can automatically reject the candidate and move on. 

Through automation, MVR Scoring can help you evaluate candidates faster. 

3. Reducing Data Entry

Nobody likes data entry. It’s time consuming, costly and rife with potential for human error. Avatar Assistant reduces data entry in several ways. 

First is the Medical Card Review step in A-Suite. Avatar Assistant completes all the steps necessary to verify the medical card information from the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners as required by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. 

Doing it the “old way,” you have to go to a government website, type in the medical examiner’s number, take a screenshot to verify their registration, save the screenshot and upload it into your software. The Avatar Assistant can do all those steps for you. AI will read the Medical Examiner’s Number and expiration date, go to the federal website and capture the screenshot to prove the doctor is compliant. 

Similarly, the Avatar Assistant takes care of reading and entering driver’s license data entry for you. It’s as simple as depositing a check on your mobile banking app. The driver responds to an automated text message by replying with a photo of their driver's license, and AI does the rest.

4. Answering Calls with the Robo Recruiter

We’ve observed that most transportation recruiting departments have a live telephone answer rate of 10 percent or less and take nearly a week to respond to candidates on social media. No bueno! 

We’ve proven with humans that increasing the live answer rate of inbound calls increases hires at the bottom of the funnel. We’re willing to bet that our AI bot, aka the Robo Recruiter, will be more effective than voicemail and more scalable than humans.

You’ll see a return on investment for recruiting in one of two ways: 

1. You can keep your ad spending the same and hire more drivers.
2. You keep your number of new hires the same and save hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on marketing.

The Robo Recruiter collects pertinent information from candidates over the phone, records and transcribes it and sends you, the human recruiter, the results. From there you can easily scan the transcript and address issues quickly without having to listen to every single voicemail. 

You might be wondering: Will drivers interact with a bot? Our early tests are proving that drivers will absolutely interact with a quality Robo Recruiter.

We believe it’s a relatively low risk area to explore because 90 percent of recruiting calls go to voicemail today, and drivers typically don’t leave voicemails anyway. Frankly, you don’t have much to lose. 

5. The Future — Candidate Scoring

The problem for many recruiters working in trucking today is having too many leads and lacking effective ways to screen out poor candidates. 

A common tactic among recruiters is only calling drivers who complete the full Department of Transportation application. There’s a good chance that’s only 50 percent of your candidates. Can you really afford to automatically discount half of your potential new hires? Another approach is screening out folks with dings on their MVRs and PSPs. Those are good screening tools, but they only identify drivers who’ve been “caught.” What about poor drivers who don’t have any violations yet?

You want to identify drivers in the sweet spot between safety (they don’t have accidents), operations (they make money for the company) and HR (they stick around). At AvatarFleet, we call this Candidate Scoring, and we’re creating an algorithm to make it happen.

Candidate Scoring is the next step in driver recruiting, allowing you to more effectively filter candidates with a combination of data, AI and automation. We’re excited to work with our clients to bring this to the market — stay tuned or get in touch anytime to learn more.