Referral Bonus

Plus, I never believe a driver that claims it's a great company to work for, followed by "Please use my name as a referral."
I assume all they care about is a referral bonus.

 

Even the best company in the world will have miserable, complaining drivers.
Paying top pay, and you still get adult men wailing and sobbing. Money doesn't help with people like that.

 

Some days you look around the waiting room and think, "not today...."

 

The thing you have to remember is that everybody’s situation is different and every company’s situation is different. What works at company “x” might not work at company “y”. Factors include geographical location, normal shipping lanes, home time, and the list goes in and on.
The best employee policy I have heard was actually at a manufacturing facility that had a clearly defined profit sharing plan and were transparent with the monthly results. They put uniforms on everybody that were coded by color....- newbie in a bright color and folks out of their probationary period in a dark color. If you were a dark shirt and caused the company to lose money (and ultimately impacted the pay of everybody with the profit sharing) they would take your dark shirt away and put you in a bright shirt that signified to others that you were the cause of something that cost them money. Made everybody pay real close attention to what they were shipping out the door.

 

Whatever the pay is, drivers will still complain; that's what I'm getting at.

 

Of course it’s a strategy for increasing capacity. Companies are desperate to hire and so do things like referral bonuses. Even the best and highest paying companies. If you needed to add trucks or fill existing trucks and no matter how high you paid, how nice your equipment, how much you spent on ads, you still can’t get enough drivers hired. You would probably try a referral bonus.

 

No.

Because that would deprive their shareholders and executives of much needed compensation. How are they supposed to make the hard choices about whether we need three driver-facing cameras or four in the cabs of the trucks with the taunts of the other CEO's fresh in their ears when they were seen driving last year's Range Rover to their cottage in the Hamptons?

They think if they offer a hiring/referral bonus it's only temporary. In another year or so they can drop the bonus and go back to paying 26 cpm. It's a lot harder to cut everyone's pay than it is to drop the temporary incentive. Besides, they tell themselves, once the drivers are lured in by the hiring/referral bonus they'll see that it's not such a bad place to work and stick around after all the bonuses have been paid. Of course, they all move on to the next outfit paying a bonus instead.

 

And not even that when the "bonus" is $250.