The new decade is upon us. It's 2020 and the driver recruiting game has gotten more and more sophisticated so you need the right tools to keep up.
If you're feeling a little lost at the turn of the calendar, don't worry – we’ve outlined five trends that you should focus on in 2020 and beyond that will keep your driver tally high. Most importantly, you'll be able to conquer all of these without having to spend any extra dollars on advertising.
Video
Humans are visual creatures. Science has proven it through a concept called Neuromarketing. The old brain is the decision maker in the brain so sales 101 (recruiting is sales) says that’s who you need to talk to. Since the old brain can’t read, we have to communicate to it with images. Never say it if you can show it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video is worth 10 times that. There’s no more effective way to tell your story in 30 seconds than video.
Landing Pages
Landing pages convert more visitors to candidates than your homepage, career page or online application. Inserting landing pages in your candidate journey generates more leads because they remove distractions by providing a single call-to-action. A proper landing page fits on a phone screen without scrolling, contains a 30-90 second video and simple form fill area. The goal of the form fill is to collect enough information to start the process with one or two qualifying questions such as: Do you have a valid class A CDL? Then, it’s game on for the recruiter.
Automated Referral
Source TrackingSpend less time figuring out what sources work and let technology do it for you. Drivers often don’t remember where they found you anyways – the internet is a big place with lots of job boards and postings. Automated tracking will record where these leads came from so you know where to spend your money with confidence.
Social Advertising Our clients have proven social media has the lowest cost per lead. For those fans of the book Moneyball, you need to follow the same playbook of spending your advertising dollars on the undervalued sites. Don’t spend your money where it costs you $10 a click or $250 per lead. Look for the site where it costs you $250 per hire. In order to get there, you need to jump on the algorithm bandwagon to ensure you’re only serving advertisements to CDL holders in your hiring radius. We commonly see wasted spend on non-CDL holders or out of market drivers by not using the data that’s available.
Text
Email is dead. Many drivers who never used it anyways. While texting is a trend that you should have been using since the early 2000s, not enough transportation companies make use of this cheap, effective technology in 2020. Texting allows you to avoid the cluttered email inbox where emails get overlooked, deleted or sent to spam. Texting is a significantly faster, more direct form of communication.
Professional drivers can't talk most of the time from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. because they’re driving – do you really want the driver who will take your call while they’re on the job? Texting allows drivers to respond to you on their schedule which is ever changing and outside of their control. Our clients will commonly text candidates 15-25 times throughout the recruiting process before onboarding a driver. Texting from your Applicant Tracking System should be the primary form of your communication with candidates.
You will recruit more drivers in the 2020's than in the 2010 decade. Your Driver Applicant Tracking System should be facilitating all of these trends so you can touch more candidates each day, track where they came from and ultimately generate more leads. Cheers to a new decade full of more qualified leads!
