Trucking fleets can use tech in driver recruitment, retention

On the professions web page of FirstFleet’s web-site, the Tennessee trucking business shares a video clip outlining its main values with the acronym Serve. The ultimate E in the acronym stands for “embrace improve as a truth of development,” and that incorporates the evolution of technological innovation.

The organization offers its know-how to not only bring in new drivers but also retain present motorists, which is critical when recruiting, interviewing, instruction and working with highly-priced driver turnover and an industrywide driver scarcity. 

“Holistically, know-how is completely a piece of the equation for attracting and retaining driver expertise. I would not say that necessarily just about every driver who comes to FirstFleet chooses us because of that. I would say that we do see technological know-how as a supporting element of remaining a reliable and fulfilling position of work,” said FirstFleet CIO Austin Henderson. “There has been a extended record of transportation organizations owning technological know-how but not totally employing it down to the driver’s palms. If it can make the drivers’ lives superior, or their work a tiny little bit a lot easier, or preserve them 15 minutes, we’re heading to check out our most effective to make that conversation as efficient as attainable. Technological know-how is … a person of the major ways we do that.”

Though most trucking businesses recognize the great importance of know-how – with items like predictive upkeep and trailer tracking to boost uptime, for instance – as a small business software to help boost efficiency, not as quite a few realize engineering as a way to recruit and keep motorists.

“Lord knows when it arrives to recruiting, all people talks about the rate per mile and basic gains, but ‘we treatment, and we want to give you tools to make daily life a minimal bit easier’ would seem to get lost in some cases in that concept,” reported Chris Oliver, chief marketing officer at Trucker Path. “The actual key there is to concentration on the (driver) facet of the equation, producing life easier and more snug when they are on the road, encouraging to just make a day in the lifetime a minor bit far better. So many technologies as a total concentration so tricky on the business enterprise and the productiveness gains that they are likely to ignore – or it’s possible not even consider about – what it does for the driver.”

Trucker Path provides a cell app for truckers that can supply the most productive and direct route to a destination while also demonstrating motorists in which the very best tacos are together that route, among the other options. The enterprise just lately released a new transportation administration method, COMMAND, that is created to enhance driver associations and high-quality of existence whilst managing operations.

Motorcity, a transportation and logistics software program developer, also just lately released a engineering developed to make the driver’s daily life much easier by maximizing conversation in between drivers and dispatchers. RELAY is a cloud-centered interaction system that offers actual-time dispatch-to-driver messaging.

“That’s truly what RELAY is all about is to modernize the dispatch-to-fleet conversation into what I contact the modern-day environment, and beyond that, it truly is more about partnership management and having the dispatch aspect nearer to the driver,” said Motorcity President and co-founder Bob Stemple. “Historically, there’s been this lag in between the time you deliver a concept and the time the driver really receives it. Of system, drivers are on confined clocks, so minutes increase up, and it minimizes the several hours they can drive when they have to wait around for possibly load info or response to thoughts and points like that.”

Stemple mentioned no one desires to sit in a cold truck in Michigan staring at a box, waiting for a message, and RELAY will help lessen that downtime and enhance retention in the process by relieving some of the annoyance. RELAY also features a attribute that acknowledges drivers’ birthdays and operate anniversaries, among the other points.

“We all know driver retention and attraction is an difficulty,” Stemple said. “It just appears incredibly basic to me that if you can streamline the communication with your fleet, you happen to be likely to have a improved relationship with your motorists, and then they’re going to be extra satisfied than staring at a box waiting for a information.”

When Stemple 1st started off functioning in the trucking business, Qualcomm was the large telematics participant, allowing for companies to send messages to drivers with only a three-moment ready period of time. But three minutes for every information adds up swiftly, taking too considerably time when modern-day know-how is actual-time. 

“Those are the spaces that I would appreciate to see technological know-how continue on to evolve is how to give drivers back those valuable 15-minute segments of their time that collectively, over a 14-hour workday, quantity to important high-quality-of-lifestyle differences,” Henderson explained.

And that is crucial to driver recruitment and retention in an environment where by tensions are high as drivers aim on basic safety, several hours of services and rules. So when a trucking corporation can present technological know-how to enhance drivers’ life, they need to use that to their advantage as a recruiting tool, he mentioned.

“A driver’s worst panic is sitting down there becoming detained or damaged down on the side of the highway. They’re commonly not obtaining compensated nicely, for that … so motorists want the wheels to be turning. That will get into the point that the driver may perhaps or may perhaps not make it home for that baseball game for his son or daughter,” Henderson said. “At the conclusion of the day, technological innovation remedies that focus on making the expert driver’s high quality of lifestyle superior is in which we will need to emphasis some significant hard work.”

But Oliver stated, if it is about high-quality of lifestyle, it is critical for corporations to also look at how considerably added function any specified technologies will call for a driver to get on in get to gain efficiencies mainly because it’s simple to overwhelm motorists with the broad quantity of capabilities readily available to “make their lives easier” that it can truly make it far more complicated.

Oliver mentioned the ELD mandate was a significant tipping level for the industry since it compelled all people to use the technological know-how ubiquitously, opening the gate for further technologies developments. But providers have to have driver purchase-in to make it operate.

Although most drivers have a smartphone these days, working with technological innovation may possibly not always be an attraction, he claimed, especially for old-college drivers who are much more snug earning a simply call than applying an app.

He said it’s crucial for organizations that pick out to marketplace technologies in their recruitment to be conscious of the messaging and how it can make the driver experience.

But over-all, trucking companies must contemplate internet marketing their use of engineering to possible motorists, stated Ken Van Heel of Motorcity.

“I do believe that would be a piece that they would use as component of their outreach to draw in drivers – that they are investing in the most up-to-date technological know-how to bring the most efficiency to the communication and to the drivers’ procedure.”