CSA Ratings Help Recruiting, ALK Conference Speakers Say

This story appears in the May 9 print edition of Transport Topics.

PRINCETON, N.J. — CSA, the new federal safety rating system, has become ingrained in the recruiting departments of some trucking companies less than six months after the program officially launched, fleet operators and technology providers said here.

With the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program less than half-a-year out of the gate, many carriers get their insight about drivers’ ratings through third-party software many vendors call “CSA scorecards.”

“We see a lot of companies who are presenting that CSA scorecard to the drivers,” said Brad Vaughn, director of recruiting for Maverick Transportation, a Little Rock, Ark., flatbed carrier.

Vaughn spoke last week during ALK Technologies’ annual Transportation Technology Summit. Maverick’s flatbed division runs about 1,200 trucks and the parent company ranks No. 89 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.

CSA replaced SafeStat late last year as the federal government’s tool for assessing how safe — or unsafe — a trucking company is. The new rating system includes several safety-rating categories, each of which contains many subcategories.

Drivers are not formally scored under the CSA program, but safety violations assessed against a driver are associated with that driver in federal databases.

One carrier said it has moved beyond assessment and is actually tweaking driver pay based on CSA performance. The effort is part of a plan to attract highly rated recruits by keying entry-level pay for new hires to that CSA performance.

“We don’t have a true entrance pay scale,” said Chuck Radke, operations manager for H&M Trucking, a bulk and dry-van hauler in Omaha, Neb. “We’re going off CSA scores.”

Radke called his company’s approach to CSA “more carrot and less stick.”

The top operations executive at P&S Transportation, a Birmingham, Ala., flatbed carrier said that his company has bought CSA driver-scorecard software and is aggressively integrating the tool into its hiring and training programs.

“We want to let them know that [they’re] going to be measured,” said Houston Vaughn, P&S’ chief operating officer. “A driver wants to know where he stands, he wants to know how he fares against his peers.”

Asked whether the carrier’s strict evaluation policy might scare off potential recruits, Vaughn said that the prospect of a CSA scorecard doesn’t frighten most driver candidates.

“It doesn’t scare them,” Vaughn said. “If it did, we’d know we didn’t want them.”

Using CSA as a means of incentivizing drivers and inciting competition among veteran truckers spurred one technology company to create a forum for drivers to show off their performance.

Xata Corp., Eden Prairie, Minn., is working on a product called Xata Passport. A Xata marketing executive called the software “a social media tool that allows drivers to interact with one another.”

“Drivers own the data” supplied to the software, said Christian Schenk, Xata’s vice president of product marketing.

Truck drivers, regardless of where they are employed, could elect to post personal information such as CSA scores on Passport. If allowed by the carrier that generated the data, drivers also would be encouraged to post details such as how much fuel they burn on a typical run, Schenk said.

Drivers also could talk to one another using Passport, and fleets’ recruiting departments would be free to use the software to run queries on drivers.

Xata will launch Passport later this year, Schenk said.

Beyond CSA’s usefulness as a recruiting tool, an executive with one big U.S. truckload carrier warned that it eventually could give well-rated drivers the ability to cherry-pick their employer based on who offers the newest trucks.

“We see drivers ultimately migrating to fleets with newer equipment,” said Paul Will, president and chief operating officer of Celadon Group, Indianapolis.

Because a driver’s personal safety record can be stained by equipment defects, truckers with few CSA violations to their names will become increasingly intolerant of old equipment that isn’t meticulously maintained, Will said.

Some drivers already will buck at starting a run in a rig that has even a single broken light on its trailer.

Drivers will say, “I don’t want to ride in that,” said Will.

Meanwhile, the CSA rollout already “caused many fleets to purge 5% to 10% of their drivers,” sucking down the supply of safe operators in an environment already plagued by a shortage of such workers, Will said.

Norm Ellis, general manager of Qualcomm Inc.’s truck telematics division, likewise acknowledged, “There are a lot of disruptions going on” related to CSA.

The three largest truckload fleets in the country are Qualcomm users.