You have one overriding goal as a recruiter – and that’s to find and hire quality drivers. If you’re watching a slow stream of drivers trickle through your hiring process, you may want to make some simple changes that will crank open the floodgates and release a heavier flow of qualified talent.
First, make sure you’re looking for drivers in the right places
According to a recent study conducted by Glassdoor, 60% of job seekers use their smartphone to apply for jobs on their site.
As you would guess, the study found that the percentages vary depending on the industry, with blue-collar workers topping the charts. The highest percentages of job seekers who use smart devices to find jobs on Glassdoor are for food service (64.9 percent), transportation (63.1 percent), and retail (60.2 percent). In fact, 56% of job seekers with a high-school education – oftentimes the only requirement for a blue-collar job – use mobile devices to search for jobs, while only 42 percent of job seekers with a doctoral degree did so. This is because blue-collar jobs typically position workers in environments where a desktop computer isn’t, and owning one at home doesn’t make budgetary sense. So these job seekers rely on their smartphones to move them along their career path.
“The diversity of candidate pools can be improved by having more mobile-friendly job application processes,” said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor. “Our research shows many workers with less formal education and from traditionally underrepresented social groups are more likely to rely primarily on mobile devices to find jobs.”
The data correlates with what we’ve found to be true for applicants who use Tenstreet’s trucking-specific platform to find their next job. This month, the number of drivers who use their smartphones to complete a DOT-compliant application is at an all-time high of 80%. This means that out of the approximately 530,000 driver applications that were filled out over the last 30 days, 424,000 of them were completed on a smartphone. This percentage is up from 73% just one year ago, and up from 67% the year before that – a powerful trend that shows no sign of changing.
If your application isn’t mobile-friendly, you can only capture a small percentage of the target market you’re aiming to hit and you miss out on applicants where they apply. And with nearly half of those applications being completed after business hours, you need a way to get your application in front of drivers after dark as well.
Second, use a mobile-friendly application that takes drivers minutes to complete
The requirements carriers must meet to have a DOT-compliant application are extensive, often change unpredictably, and are responsible for creating lengthy applications that can take drivers hours to complete. If there’s an easier way, drivers will find it. Our online application, the IntelliApp, is what drivers hope to see when applying on their mobile device, as it recognizes if they’re already in our database and populates the application with their information so they don’t have to enter it manually. Our database holds data on over 4 million applicants, so if a driver is active and in the market, he or she will more than likely only spend a few minutes on the application only having to answer any company-specific questions.
Drivers aren’t the only ones who benefit – in addition to experiencing a fresh surge of driver applications, carriers get a customizable, DOT-compliant online application with a company profile and application link in Driver Pulse, the mobile app that delivers free full applications and brings drivers and carriers together.
Get started in three easy steps
If you find yourself struggling to get the drivers you need, start simple. Find your way to a mobile-friendly hiring process by first adopting a DOT-compliant online application. Let drivers find you where they search for jobs – on their smartphones.
- Call 877-219-8294 or email [email protected] for a quick consultation where we learn about you and your needs
- Get a mobile-friendly, customizable, pre-populating, DOT-compliant, driver-preferred application in under a week
- Start receiving more applications, get greater visibility from the mobile-dependent driver market, and fill your trucks
