Recruiters all lie?

It's really simple, if a company needs a recruter there is a 95% probebility the company is a pice of crap. So if the company is a pice of crap the recruiting office will have to lie, otherwise why would you hire on right?

Think of it like this, we are in a bad economy right, or so we are told. So bad economy everyone is looking for a job and my job as a recruter is to convince you to join... yep I'm going to lie, it's just like the army but your contract is only a year or two.

 

Yes, recruiters lie. My company recruiter sold me on weekends home.

He went so far as to say that dispatch did not leave on Friday until all drivers were routed home.

This lie was so common that in orientation the trainers made sure we understood that our company had 24/7 dispatch and that drivers were ALWAYS out.

Recruiters got us in with a lie but in orientation, we were made aware of the truth.

Then during training, we learned the truth: home for reset.

In my company's case, we were drawn in with promises of home Friday by lunch and out Monday morning. Then we were told out Sunday evenings. And we were shown home Friday evenings out Sunday mornings.

By the time drivers realized home was a reset, weeks were invested and leaving would mean spending weeks training with the competition.

 

Easiest way to tell if a recruiter is lying? Watch for their lips to move.

 

Yes recruiters stretch the truth. I know from experience. If you want to keep them honest ask for it in WRITING! I wish I had followed my own advice. Was promised local route and it didn't happen. Get it in WRITING!!

 

learn to read between the lines

 

Recruiters don't necessarily lie outright most of the time. Sure, recruiters, as a collective, do lie from time to time but not every single thing that comes out of their mouth is a blatant lie. They aren't going to tell you that their drivers earn $5 per mile while running an average of at least 10,000 miles per week in trucks that will run 100MPH all day long with D&H on both ends. That's something so outlandish that even the most deluded person with a potato for a brain would know is BS.

On the other hand, what they will do instead is called "lie by omission" wherein they won't give you an answer to a question by either dancing around it, redirecting it, or ignoring it and continuing on with their sales pitch or they will try to fool you with averages. I call it a sales pitch because that's basically what it is. The recruiter has to try and talk to into coming to work for them driving one of their trucks and hauling freight for them. They make a profit off each and every driver so it makes sense that they would want more drivers. Also, all the "megas" have to have a constant stream of people coming in to replace those that are leaving on a daily basis. So a recruiter is more like a salesman that has to convince you that their product (company) is better for you than their competitor's product (another trucking company).

Salesmen in other industries will try everything they can think of to get you to buy their product or service and trucking recruiters are no different. They have a script that covers the most common questions, which are things like:

• Pay
• Mileage
• Home time
• Types of equipment
• Rider Policy

Side note about pay - a lot of times I'll see printed ads from companies that state they pay something like .38CPM (arbitrary number) and it irritates the crap out of me when they do that.

Why?

Because .38 of a cent is thirty eight hundredths (38/100) of one cent. They're saying that they are going to pay you 1/38th of 1 penny per mile. At that pay rate, if you run 2500 miles in a week at .38CPM, you would gross $95 for that week.

Back to the subject of recruiters; most of the recruiters will just regurgitate whatever number their script tells them to. When it gets tricky is when you ask them if they pay based on practical miles, HHG, or some proprietary method. Sometimes they'll know and sometimes they'll just repeat back the first thing you said to them. Another thing they like to pull when you ask about pay is that they'll tell you the average of their highest grossing fleet. Technically, since they do have drivers making that much, it isn't a lie but it is still obfuscating the company average and we all know new drivers are going to be on the lower end of a larger average.

Averages

Recruiters love averages since it allows them to make their numbers seem more attractive to a prospective driver without being liable for providing erroneous information. If a recruiter says that their drivers can earn an average of $75k per year, then all that tells you is that's it's possible to earn that much at some point. Averages are exactly that, that average of EVERY driver. So lets say we have 10 guys in a fleet, 3 earn $25k, 3 earn 35k, 2 earn $40k, and one guy that works 51 weeks per year pulls in $80k. The recruiter can easily tell you that you could earn up to $80k. However, the fleet average is only $34k and if we exclude the guy pulling in $80k, that drops the fleet average down to $28,888. Recruiters want it to seem like you can make gobs of money with them, so that's why this is such a popular "trick".

The same kind of thing is often pulled with mileage. "Well, our top drivers run 3000 miles every week!" is what you'll hear when you ask about mileage. But what you don't hear is that only a few select drivers are able to get that many miles and even then they don't get it every week like clockwork. Again, their top 10% of drivers may be getting 2500+ miles while the bottom 50% are stuck with 300 miles runs that deliver in 4 days.

Overall, you have to be very careful of recruiters and listen to not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it. Listen for phrases like "top drivers" or "on average" because those can, and often times are, very misleading. It's even worse when the recruiter is talking to some guy who was just laid off from his factory job and needs a job NOW and figures he'll go be a trucker. All he'll hear is $75k and 3000 miles per week and figure he'll be rolling in dough just as soon as he finishes the trucking school at whatever mega he got suckered into,

 

My favorite past time when I was on the road was to get on fb and see the we are hiring unsolicited adds talking how good this and that is and I just give them a hard time.

 

Outright liars? Not all but they manipulate the truth for sure

 

I get paid hourly and am not to familiar with mileage pay but I'm willing to bet if companies are advertising .38 cents a mile and only paying 38/100 of a penny there would be some labor lawyers with new yachts. I just don't want new drivers getting confused. Your example would be 950$ not $95.