ATA Pledges Members Will Hire 100,000 Veterans Over Two Years

This story appears in the Dec. 8 print edition of Transport Topics.

American Trucking Associations last week pledged that member companies will hire 100,000 military veterans over the next two years.

ATA’s hiring push is part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s “Hiring Our Heroes” campaign, which has set a goal to hire 500,000 veterans nationwide.

“There’s no higher calling for an American than to serve in our armed forces, and I’d like to think that driving a truck — delivering America’s most essential goods safely and efficiently — is also a high calling,” ATA President Bill Graves told a news conference on Dec. 2.

Though drivers are the most critical hiring need, ATA also said the industry needs mechanics, technicians, managers and other support staff, all positions that veterans could fill.

Scott Darling, the acting administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration who attended the news conference at ATA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, said the agency will consider the federation’s proposal that could help speed the hiring of veterans as drivers.

“We’re trying to partner as much as possible with whoever to actually increase the volume of truck and bus drivers that are out there, people who want to be in the industry,” Darling said.

ATA proposed that states be allowed to give the written knowledge exam for those seeking commercial driver learner’s permits to out-of state job seekers.

Under current rules, states can only give the written test — the first step to a commercial driver license — to prospective drivers who live in the state, meaning

applicants often have to take expensive trips home in pursuit of CDLs.

FMCSA understands how “extremely important” drivers are to the industry, Darling said.

“Good drivers make a world of difference every day in keeping our roadways safe and literally moving forward the economy of this country,” he said. “Many returning vets have extensive experience operating trucks and buses.”

At FMCSA, one in four of the 1,100 employees is a veteran, Darling added. “Every day I see their contributions in my agency.”

ATA Chairman Duane Long, also chairman of Longistics in Raleigh, North Carolina, said hiring veterans can benefit everyone.

The Hiring Our Heroes campaign is a win for veterans returning to civilian life and “a win for the trucking industry, which is desperate to find dedicated, hard-working and safety-minded people to fill these thousands of open positions of drivers, technicians and mechanics,” Long said.

ATA has said trucking will need almost 1 million drivers over the coming decade. However, carriers have jobs open to veterans in all areas of trucking, said Graves and others addressing the news conference, including a veteran who is now a professional truck driver.

“Regardless of what position we’re hiring in the trucking industry, be it dispatcher, be it salesman, a driver, a dockworker, a manager or industry support, I suggest you consider hiring one of America’s national heroes,” said Alphonso Lewis, a driver with YRC Freight and an America’s Road Team captain.

Lewis said his success in trucking can be attributed to the foundation he developed in the military, “a foundation of pride; it was teamwork, confidence; it was commitment, integrity and the drive to be the best that you can be.”

YRC’s director of driver recruitment and development, Dave Renfrew, said 15% of the carrier’s 30,000 employees are veterans.

Renfrew cautioned, though, that there’s “not one silver bullet” to help carriers find veteran hires. “It takes a lot of different programs to make it work.”

Carriers must partner with veteran and employment groups, learn to use social media and personally recruit on military bases, he said.

YRC launched a veteran-recruiting program eight months ago and has a military-recruiting manager, Paul Thompson, who is a veteran.

Thompson told Transport Topics that successful recruiting requires an understanding of veterans’ needs as they prepare to re-enter civilian life.

For example, he said, in recruiting YRC shows job seekers that they can use the military moving subsidy — the Relocation Assistance Program — to get them to their first job in a location where there are jobs.

Too many newly separated veterans want to stay around the military base they know or return to their home towns when there are no jobs in either place, Thompson said.

“You just got to get them out of their comfort zone,” he said.

Eric Eversole, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and executive director of Hiring Our Heroes, said he’s found it’s critical to reach military members before they transition out of the service.

The Chamber of Commerce program has sent recruiters all the way to Germany to talk with service members about job expectations and opportunities.

Graves said ATA’s role will be to tap carriers that successfully recruited veterans for help.

“Our intention is to use them as leaders in displaying and educating other ATA member companies about their potential to follow suit, to emulate, to learn from best practices,” he said.