JB HUNT New Recruits

roadkill4512 · Feb 16, 2010

Pretty good Mike.

I've had probably the most miles in the past 4 weeks since I started. I think I'm around 10500 for the past 4 weeks. My FM doesn't hassle me at all and for the most part I've been getting nice weekend runs.

I realize the economy is still in the crapper so if I have an occasional 1800mi week I won't go ballistic but honestly I haven't below 2000 since before Christmas.

As with all trucking companies a lot depends on your FM. And sometimes they do screw up. The key is not to make a rift with him/her.

Do your job, communicate, translo paperwork promptly, keep accurate logs and you can do all right here.

banjo151 · Dec 8, 2010

I have something to say on this. this company don,t give a dam about you all thy wont is money .I am a o/o and by working for thee crooks i lost 4,500.00$ that thy owe me and i have not seen a dime for 6mo so don,t you go blowing smoke up my pipes you are crook............

freight train · May 18, 2011

yeah;you just made up my mind for me too.thanx

bbechtel16 · Mar 30, 2012

Dukefan8408 said: ↑

to get home every night to bang my wife.
Click to expand...

LOL I enjoyed your saga, and the apparent punch line. I too am interested in banging my wife daily. Although for me it seems JB is the one that's going to get me laid!

justanothercrzytrkdrvr · Apr 28, 2012

Please allow someone with over 8 years of experience @ JB Hunt to elaborate a little further and clarify for any of you who may be reading...my remarks in red of course.

LookemntheEye said: ↑

Good Day my Future Fellow Truckers,

I would like to share some insight on this company of you are interested in working for them. First of all let me start off by informing you of what they will tell you at orientation.. the very FIRST thing.. "Welcome new drivers to JB HUNT.....Please dont believe anything you hear that is negative about this company". This will be told to you as soon as class starts and then it is all down hill from there. I dont know where this cat went to orientation at & I will not dispute how 1 instructor may decide to start his class. Everyone is different so you can not base it off what one instructor may or may not have said. When I was instructing I always welcomed my new drivers, introduced myself, covered the safety briefing (fire exits;etc), and gave a quick run down of how the next few days would go.

During the course of 3 days of orientation you will see many drivers leaving the classroom for 1 reason or another...they are the LUCKY ones... they won't be back. Depends on your definition of Lucky I guess. While the statement made here is accurate let me atleast 2 most common reasons; could not or did not pass physical or needed further medical treatment or records from personal doctor, and second - employment verification which could be due to a company going out of business or O/O's who don't like to report, & occasionally there is that "oops I forgot that" events that the "new recruit" failed to mention like DUI's, accidents, etc.

The instructors will act as if you are best friends and try to sell you everything so that you can get the least amount of money on you're check... I would hate to go to orientation where the instructor acted like my worst enemy?! I'm sure there are bad apples but for the most part all of the instructors I worked with inlcuding myself were truly there to help out any way we could and it was not an act. As for the selling I assume he refers to things like drivers legal plan & health insurance but as with anything else it's your choice - if you don't want it don't get it. BTW: Instructors are on salary not commision so what benefit is it to the instructor to "sell" anything?

say no to everything for the time being, chances are..YOU wont be there for 3 months..By all means, if you don't want something say no... 3 months? if your job hopping thats probably a record! I've been here 8.5 yrs now and I know others who have been here longer. If your looking for the perfect little dream job you better wake up quick cause it ain't there!

they will convenietley forget to inform you that you cant change you're mind on anything you agree to for 3 months..of course this will be told to you after you have signed and if they do tell you you can withdrawal or change... they will pass the buck telling you can call Corporate and they will change it... it won't happen. Again, this is based on one persons perception; allow me to clarify...the 3 months he speaks of pertains to perdiem - we present the material and then you decide yourself whether you want it or not by checking yes or no on the perdiem sheet. If you take perdiem then yes he is partially correct as you are locked in for that quarter - if you hire in the middle of the quarter it would only be a 1.5 months before you could elect out. You are only allowed to opt in or out of perdiem at the start of each quarter.
The only thing you would call Corporate about is your personal insurance (health, dental,etc). Once you make your elections in orientation there is a 30 day period in which you can make changes and yes you have to call benefits to do that. After the 30 days is up the only other time you can make changes is if you have a qualifying event (marriage, divorce, death, birth) or during open enrollment which is once a year from October to November.

They will give you a nice shiny yellow JB HUNT credit Card and tell you "ITS just like a Mastercard".. cant be used everywhere" ..Negative . If you do get lucky and it works, JB HUNT will charge you $5 and then of course you get charged from where you used it and it will be deducted from you're pay. Yes we use to issue a Comdata card to those drivers that did not have a checking account or wanted to split their money between checking and comdata and or for cash advance purposes. There was a charge but it was $10 if I remember correctly and yes the ATM's would charge you just like they do with any other card. We have since moved away from all that - if you have a checking account then that is where you money has to go and we have options now for those that do not have checking so yes Comdata was a bad deal all the way around - I was never a fan of it!

Instuctors will ask "If you should need an advance before you get you're truck, "JB HUNT will give it to you because they want to take care of there drivers".. they also will charge you $10...deducted from you're pay. Yes, JB does make available to you an advance on your first check. You can take the full advance of $120 or less in increments of $40. There is no charge for the orientation advance however the truck stops may charge you for cashing it if you are not purchasing fuel.

You will be asked if you want direct deposit, you can sign yes and it will be disregarded and you're weekly settlement will come on the JB HUNT Comdata card anyway...know why..so they can CHARGE you to get your money out. In years past even if you had a direct deposit account you were still issued a com data card to use for cash advances and so on. I had one and always put $50-100 bucks on there for my spending money on the road. If you get a cash advance then yes you were charged for it. BUT there was no charge except what the ATM charged if you simply withdrew your money off the card. In 2010 we stopped issuing comdata cards except to those drivers who claimed not to have a checking account or any other means for them to receive their money. I think I made my point earlier - Comdata sucks imho! BTW: Right or wrong JB was charging for the advances for several reasons but one in particular was to discourage it - drivers would abuse the privelage of advanced payment of their checks and end up deeper in the hole each week.

The instructors will make a good attempt to sit with you in class at the computer filling out the information for direct deposit and then suddenly the computers will malfunction and you will be instructed that you can contact corporate and they will do it... Negative.. corporate will tell you to do it on your home computer. Yes, as Instructors we are available and will make every attempt to sit with every driver and help him/her fill out their information. I doubt very seriously that every computer malfunctions at the same time and that there was not another one available - except maybe if there was a storm or something but c'mon be real. You have 30 days to enroll so you could come back by the terminal and seek assistance at a later date or do it yourself at home on your computer. The main reason you would be told to do it yourself is because its your personal stuff and you really should be the one making the entry - we are all human and capable of error and I personally do not want to be trying to give all that information out over the phone and hope the person on the end gets it exactly right.

The orientation " 2008 DRIVERS MANUAL" handbook that will be given to you...JB HUNT reserves the right to disregard any and all policies that are within this book,which means they can deny you anything and that includes certain types of pay..., layover, short haul, shuttle runs, ect.ect.This will be told to you when you have a dispute in regards to pay after you have been hired. I realize I'm about four yrs late here but what the current manual states (and it hasn't changed that much) is that JB reserves the right change, add, or delete any and all policies. Of course they can, it's their company! The manual given to you in orientation also states that it does not supersede any other manual which means if you go to Intermodal or DCS then they will have their own manual and policies which will be explained to you at that account. So to some degree I can understand the confusion here as one account may be able to pay certain things that other accounts can not based on their operations. Just like some accounts may actually observe holidays while others do not.

You will be required to attend from 7 am until 5 pm which will be placed on your logs, however for pay purposes, you will be asked to sign for only 8 hours of pay, which is what you will only be compensated for. Yes most orientations are from 7-5 or pretty close to 10 hours with an hour for lunch. Orientation pay is based on minimum wage x 9 hours so about $63 bucks a days give or take as my math may be a little off. As for the signing for only 8 - no clue here as the only thing I can remember drivers sign about their hours worked is their 7 day log but there is nothing about pay on there.

After the first day of orientation you will feel something inside...kinda feels like you're being scammed..Guess what ..you are. If you complete orientation and get in a truck, You will regret the day you let the recruiter with the soft southern voice entice you to come to orientation. This companys staff at Lowell AR. are deceptive, untrustworthy, manipulative and can and will falsify anything and everthing to justify their actions..they will enjoy breaking you down, and yes they will break you and you know what..they wont lose any sleep over it... I hope thats not the way you feel. In speaking to some drivers on their second day of orientation most of them are a little sore from the physical or still tired as they adjust to the travel and sleeping in a strange bed. As for the staff at Lowell - I've seen it all. We have bone head account reps, rude people, overly nice people, people with no clue, and people who are genuinely great at what they do. There will always be that diconnect I think between Corporate and those of us who work in the field but overall everyone here is just trying to do the best they can. As a driver I never had a bad experience with upper management and as a manager I really never had a bad experience either. Yes there are politics that are played and I'm sure some folks in our system that are just here for a paycheck and could care less but the general consensus is that we care about the company, each other, and we want us all to succeed.

they will have another 30 men and women waiting to go to orientation on Monday and Tuesday. Thats 60 recruits a week, 240 a month. You gotta ask yourself.. Do they really have that many trucks? Why such a huge turnover? You already have your answer. We have from time to time seen about 30 people actually show for orientation but the average class size is maybe 15 for company and 5 for DCS & LP. Turnover is not what it used to be - probably due to the economy but even when I started in 2003 we only had about 20 or so in our class but we had slightly tighter hiring standards back then. It does fluctuate and we do our best make everyone feel welcomed and our goal is retention as it costs ungodly amounts to hire people these days. We do our best to retain everyone we hire but JB is not for everyone. I've always believed that we as individuals can make any circumstance as bad or great as we believe it to be - in other words your destiny is in your hands so do with it what you will but don't beat others up for your own shortcomings!
Click to expand...

Ouachita Native · Apr 29, 2012

justanothercrzytrkdrvr said: ↑

Please allow someone with over 8 years of experience @ JB Hunt to elaborate a little further and clarify for any of you who may be reading...my remarks in red of course.
Click to expand...

I think you explained that about as straight forward as it can get. I have been looking at the regional position being offered out of Winnfield, La. I had a old school driver tell me back around 2001 that the two best companies to work for starting out were J.B. Hunt and Schneider (I know a lot can change in 11 years). I have talked with Schneider to compare their options. When I retired from service in 2009, I received my DD214 one day then drove home and started truck driving school the next. Been in the oilfield since 2010 and am trying to get back to driving again.

ewill71 · May 4, 2012

if people cant make their own decisions, that is a problem. there are people that say JB is the worst company ever but never give exact details on what happened. There will be more good comments than negative. i started for jb in feb 2002 and to this day still here. I have worked on a DCS account ever since. i have heard stories about how bad the company is but when I ask the people what happend you can see right through their story. Some people have had bad experiences but there are some who arent willling to work and refuse load.

Joker85 · May 4, 2012

I start orientation the 15th for a DCS account in chicago otr two years I'm happy just to bee local finally and making more than being on road. Its all what u make of it. theres bs every where

ewill71 · May 5, 2012

Joker85 said: ↑

I start orientation the 15th for a DCS account in chicago otr two years I'm happy just to bee local finally and making more than being on road. Its all what u make of it. theres bs every where
Click to expand...

good luck, have fun up in chicago.

Joker85 · May 5, 2012

ewill71 said: ↑

good luck, have fun up in chicago.
Click to expand...

ill try my best im originally from there, i live in az right now and moving back there next week. So hopefully everything goes well

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