Notarized letters ?

As posted above, keep the back problem to yourself or you will never find a trucking job. Perhaps during that time you were looking for full time employment and lawn care for the neighborhood.

 

The notarized letter can not be from yourself. It has to be a third party that can vouch for you.

They write a letter stating your circumstances during that period of unemployment.
They bring the letter to a notary public and sign it in their presence, and then the np stamps it.

 

This seems to be a Swift thing and should be your message to look elsewhere for work.

I did a stint at Swift and they pulled this crap on me. After the big downturn in the housing market work dried up quick in this timber town. Since there was no work around I applied to go OTR. At the height of the downturn I did not get a answer from any trucking company for months and when I did it was Swift. Since I was employed in my own business for a few years, Swift claimed that was a gap in my employment history. They wanted letters from my customers to prove I had a business. I had already faxed them letters of recommendation from every employer I had since 16, but that was not good enough for Swift. I had two well written letters faxed by customers that afternoon. You see my business was good enough for local law enforcement and the State Patrol to patronize but not for Swift.

That should have been my sign of what was to come with Swift, but I needed to work. So I went to orientation thinking Swift had it together and was more exclusive then the mega-crap trucking company I thought they were. I was way wrong about that. All three days of orientation was spent 'fixing, correcting, or amending' the applications of 12 other prospects. The applications were handed back within a hour of first days orientation and 3 days were spent correcting those applications so Swift could put these people in a truck.

My application was handed back to me in the first hour. I tell you I was pissed. The room stopped when I promptly handed back my application and said "there is not a thing wrong with it! If you don't like it you should have told me last week! You need to let me know what is wrong now or I am going to be working somewhere else by the end of the week." She replies, "Oh your the one." Whatever that ment I did not know at the time. My application was never seen again.

I spent three days in orientation with people that could not fill out a job application at the hight of the recession. There were people with little to no job history. Ones that had multiple licenses in different states. People that had several names or 'aliases' associated with their Social Security number. Ones with criminal history. Some were homeless. One had never even been in a truck before. Still another lied about trucking school history. Many could not pass the physical. One had just had a quadruple bypass at age 38. Another, at age 44, claimed to be recovering from his 8th stroke and was on a "world record amount of warfarin." There others with unpaid tickets. Some with false driving records. Some with unpaid child support. Yet 'my employment gap' was such a issue. BS!

It should have been a message to Swift that if you cannot fill out an honest job application during the hight of the recession, truck driving is not a job for you. If you need someone to hold your hand to fill out an application, how are you going to do in a job like OTR. After all, almost all dropped out before the end of training. The rest fell out just weeks later.

As I see now, Swift was just profiling in there hiring. There was no way when compared to my peers in that orientation that my business was a employment gap worth consideration. Swift is just looking for the type of employee that can use to fill out the right check boxes in the eeoc paperwork.

 

Please elaborate further as to what Swift is looking for.

God bless every American and their families! God bless the U.S.A.!

 

http://www.doleta.gov/business/incentives/opptax/

 

As an example, say someone has had back surgery years ago, but is pretty good now. On the DOT physical, I'm sure that question comes up and a doctor can easily see the surgery scar. Can you get away with telling the doctor about it but hide it from companies?

 

As far as I know the DOT physical does not look at the back. I have never been asked to take my shirt off not that it would matter to me. The hernia, heart rate, and blood pressure can all be checked without disrobing so that is what I have experienced. So I would go with the don't ask don't tell philosophy on other medical issues.

 

Thanks.

Do you remember if they ask for your medical history like they do when you go see a new doctor?

 

Thanks for the post. I was always curious as to what the quality of applicants to Swift were. I had instructors that would tell our cdl class that we could do better than Swift....even the guys that bumped other trucks. I didn't know about the tax credit business either.

Do you think the gal was saying you were the "one" that was not going to generate a tax credit for Swift? In other words, you were the only one in the orientation group that had a good work background and you would therefore not qualify for a tax credit for Swift. It would seem like Swift did not do very with your orientation group if you were the only person retained to actually drive a truck. They have spent a lot of time working with those applicants, and not gotten drivers from it. I don't think Swift would get back all that much with the tax credit anyway, but it would help defray some of the expense of running a "fix your application session".

It is kind of misnomer for Swift to call it an orientation session, when in reality it was a "fix your application" session.