Gauging a carrier’s hiring success is something that can be monitored in many ways. For example, time to hire is an easily-defined and powerful metric. However, other measures such as driver happiness are more interpretive and difficult to interpret.
But when it comes to measuring recruitment success, the efficiency of truck driver recruiting is believed to be paramount. This is why carriers have to be conscious of and be able to measure hiring costs accurately. In this article, we’ll discuss the true cost of recruiting a truck driver and explore effective strategies for attracting and retaining top talent in the industry.
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How to Calculate Your Cost Per Hire
Before you can lower your spendings on recruiting new drivers, you should understand how to calculate the Cost Per Hire (CPH). It is pretty easy math! All you have to do is aggregate your total expenses for each hiring process, and then divide that amount by the total number of new drivers you have employed at the end. By using this formula, you will be able to determine the Cost Per Hire for any period of time like a month, three months, or a year. Remember, this calculation includes all of the hires – not only the leads. This understanding is crucial, especially when considering expenses like Truck Insurance, which can significantly impact the overall hiring costs.
So, What’s the Real Cost of Hiring a Truck Driver?
Figuring out the real cost of hiring a driver isn’t as intense a math problem as one might think. The main challenge is identifying all of the contributing costs, not just those connected with advertising the job and using recruitment services. Every company has a unique cost per hire related to their particular recruitment and hiring process, so it may take some time and tinkering to get an exact figure. Here’s a quick look at the most frequent expenses related to tracking down a truck driver.
Turnover Is Your Enemy
Now that you understand the calculation for cost per hire, it’s essential to also take into consideration another piece of the hiring puzzle; your turnover rate.
As it is widely recognized, the trucking industry faces some very high turnover rates. Data from surveys even suggests that over fifty percent of freshly hired drivers will depart their carrier companies in the first six months. In certain cases, it can be as much as ninety to one-hundred percent over the course of a year.
The above statistics clearly illustrate that turnover is a major issue for countless carriers. To stop this high turnover rate from occurring, you would be wise to be very careful and avoid the mistake of hiring drivers merely to fill an empty rig with the utmost speed.
If drivers are hired with too much haste and without taking the effort to confirm that you are a good match, the chances are the partnership won’t survive and your cost of hiring will skyrocket. If you persistently keep up this routine, it will cost your firm a great deal of money, yet you’ll still have to recruit drivers.
When hiring a trucker, always have the goal to keep them for as long a period as possible. The ideal approach to recognize this is by making sure you take the time to get to know your potential drivers during the employment process to guarantee that they are suited to partnering with your carrier. By doing so, you will dramatically lower driver turnover and in turn, reduce your cost of hiring.
Measure Consistently for Best Results
Once you’ve located all the associated costs, it is essential to ensure that you are tracking them consistently. This is the only way to be able to compare year-on-year or month-to-month, in order to establish whether the changes you are making are having an impact on the overall expense for finding professional truck drivers.
You should never include costs in one period and then remove them in the next calculation. If you do this, you won’t be getting an accurate account of the cost of your recruitment process.
If these costs are monitored regularly, patterns should start to appear and give guidance for changing the entire hiring process. The aim is to have the lowest possible overhead when sourcing and retaining quality truck drivers who remain loyal to your company.
