It's been a while since I've been on here, so let me just give you some info outright. 1. I am a recruiter, but I am not here to recruit. Well that's it. Anyway, the company we currently do adds through is currently up in the air right now, at least in terms of if we want to renew with them. I am curious, when you guys look for jobs, where do you go? I know word of mouth is very big, but has the net come up at all? If you do use the net, what sites do you go to in search of jobs? How often do you go there, have you ever used a site to find your current job or a job in the past. I would appreciate input from the people I am looking for. The current site has been hit or miss and I am wondering if any others might have a larger following. Thanks in advance.
Cant speak for anyone else, but the first place I go is TTR to get word of mouth from drivers. Slick looking websites that promise the world do nothing for me except provide contact information, applications, and base pay scales. I would guess that most long time TTR members consider most company websites nothing but ads designed to bait and switch drivers into a seat. Once I see a company on TTR that has decent reports from drivers, I can find the contact information about them, even if they do NOT have a website. Word of mouth helps me make a decision, websites do not. I'd rather the money you spend on a recruiting site go to another .01cpm - .04cpm for the driver. Just my .02
Thanks for the input, a few points to make in regards to your comments. Our website is not very slick looking, at all. In fact, a website I built back in high school looks much better than this. Its a bare bones site. Our drivers do get paid well, and yes I am be biased there, but last year we have a seasonal business that cut our rates down. Guys no longer got paid for stop offs, which are very frequent for this customer. We continued to pay our drivers, despite the fact that we made no money on it, for those stops. Guy needs his truck repaired, if he's been with us a while we have no problems loaning him money. We've had trouble in the past with guys taking off on us after we loaned them money, but it was worth it to help the decent guys. Point? Our recruiting budget is very small. Considerably less than what our O/O's make a week. By the way, we don't pay per mile we charge a line haul rate, fuel surcharge, cleaning charge, and an accessories charge. Our rates are high, so if a guy comes back from say Ohio empty, he's still made money on his trip. Re-loads have been harder to come by. Our problem recruiting is we are a tanker outfit. Not many guys willing to make the switch, and its hard to get new guys in. Here is another question, how many of you guys get 100% of the fuel surcharge from your company?
Not nearly enough. This one is a no-brainer though, the ONLY way to deal with the FSC is 100% to the truck. Everytime. All the time. No "ifs", "ands", or "buts" about it.
Odd, we pay 100%, no ifs ands or buts about it. The truck gets 100% of it. Right now I believe our fuel surchage is 30% of the national average. So our customer pays 30% based on the national average for diesel. Our guys also get 100% of the accessory charges for their equipment. So if there is a charge related to the pump, and he used his pump, or his hoses (when not required) he gets 100% of that money. Not trying to recruit because its against policy. I just want to know how others are doing it. We get a number of our O/O's from the big guys because they just lied to the guys. So would you say, as an O/O, if another guy came up to you and spoke with you about the company he works for, good or bad, you would be willing to avoid, or seek out more info on that company based on that?
Absolutely. One of your best recruitment tools is going to be your drivers. If they are happy with their situation, if they feel they are being treated fairly they are more likely to express that in both words and actions. Being treated fairly doesn't just mean giving them whatever they want, but it does mean having open lines of communication, not hiding behind some B.S. policy when there is bad news and so on. I have read a number of studies over the years that indicate that once employees feel they are being paid fairly for their efforts they are more responsive to positive recognition than anything else.
I've found that while most O/O's we have our happy here, many are of the opinion that if they bring on a new driver, he is going to take their work. The problem is: many of these guys want to expand, take longer loads, etc. Well we can't do that without more drivers to cover the stuff we have. Unless they start finding more guys, we can't expand. It's in their interest to bring on more guys. We have, believe it or not, plenty of opportunity to bring in more work from our current customers. But they won't give it to us unless we can cover the stuff they have right now with the addition of this extra work. Some of our guys have been very responsive and have been actively doing it, which was great. I gave them our brochure basically so the guy they are talking to has something to take home to his wife or girlfriend when she starts asking questions. We have gotten some response, but still not good enough. I'm also finding a major problem is how hard it is to get into tankers. Added safety, etc. Shippers and receivers have almost no responsibility, even if they make a mistake loading the trailer. It will fall on the driver. I can see why so many have decided they wont be in this industry much longer.
TTR seems to be the place for getting information on the good the bad and the ugly. As far as FSC. When I was doing all my research on buying my truck and looking between independent and leasing on I found very few companies that do not pay FSC. The ones that just paid a flat percentage of what the total collected tended to be places that took drivers that others would not touch. Point is, 100% FSC is the norm. So I wouldn't use that as a major recruiting tool.
100% of the FSC only tells part of the story. How the FSC is calculated tells another. For instance, I may get 100% of the FSC, but if it is .35 a mile and another outfit is paying .50 a mile, that can make a big difference. If a carrier will not lay out the calculation schedule on FSC for me to see, we have nothing further to discuss. There has to be nothing hidden, and it has to be a realistice FSC calculation based on at least the national average fuel price or regional average fuel price, updated on a weekly basis at a minimum. No slight of hand based on percentage of rate calculations or whatever that cannot be tracked by a person themselves by looking up the DOT average fuel pricing online and calculating it out themselves.
