New U.S. Plan Leads to Surge in Hiring of Safety Specialists

This story appears in the May 31 print edition of Transport Topics.

Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 is prompting a surge of action by fleets, including a sudden push to hire safety experts as the new federal program closely scrutinizes carrier performance, experts said.

Fleets’ renewed attention to safety and to CSA 2010 is being driven by the fact that all carriers for the first time are being scored on a broad range of safety measures, such as crashes. The worst-performing carriers, as judged by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s scoring system, face steps ranging from warning letters to shutdowns when the program begins on Nov. 30.

One of the carriers looking for a new safety director is Buchheit Trucking Service, Scott City, Mo., a contract carrier of bulk commodities.

“With CSA 2010 coming down, the viability of carriers is a lot more dependent on their safety,” said Jeff Buchheit, operations manager for the carrier. “Those that don’t have [safety] as a top priority may have a real rocky road ahead.”

“Safety has always been important,” said Buchheit, who said the company’s previous safety director relocated to take another post. “Because of CSA 2010, we’ve done a lot more training with our drivers.”

For Buchheit, that additional training includes an online program that focuses on issues such as pre-trip inspections and log books, which can be done at the company’s offices or a remote location.

Rick Parisien, safety and human resource director for Hartt Transportation Systems Inc., said CSA 2010 was a factor in the company’s decision to add a safety manager’s position. The Bangor, Maine, company is in the process of hiring that person now, he said.

“We want to have someone on board with a diversified background to ensure full compliance with CSA 2010,” said Parisien, adding that another reason for the hiring was growth in the company’s freight volumes.

“Another safety manager will give us the ability to have the education, training and compliance that we need,” he explained.

Hartt has grown its fleet by more than 10% to 450 tractors to accommodate growth at its newest terminals in Fulton, Ky., and Sumter, S.C., he said.

“We are definitely seeing a pickup in requests for safety personnel,” said Jim Parham, president of Jim Parham & Associates, an executive search firm in Lakeland, Fla. “With the advent of CSA 2010, there will be more need to get qualified safety people on board.”

That has happened this spring as the original starting date in July or August approached, and has continued since FMCSA delayed the startup.

“The CSA 2010 program snuck up on a lot of carriers,” Parham told Transport Topics. “A lot of smaller and midsize carriers had it on their radar screen, but they didn’t move right away.”

“Right before it was supposed to happen, they got excited about it,” he said, prompting companies to scrutinize potential drivers more carefully and tighten hiring standards.

“CSA 2010 is a topic of very high interest,” said Jeff Arnold, executive director of the North American Transportation Management Institute, Denver, which provides safety compliance training to fleets.

NATMI has added new material to its safety courses to reflect the new program.

The reasons for the heightened interest are two aspects of the program, he said.

One is that carriers will have the tools to “drill down” more extensively into their safety performance, Arnold said.

The other is that safety scores will change on a monthly basis.

“The information will be more real time, compared with the past when that safety data only came out in compliance reviews,” Arnold said.

FMCSA does those in-depth reviews at fewer than 2% of carriers each year.

Parham cited another reason for the recent interest in hiring and safety — the growing difficulty firms are having in finding additional safe drivers.

“The driver shortage has raised its ugly head,” said, Parham, a former official at Watkins Motor Lines.

The pool of people interested in over-the-road jobs has shrunk as more drivers gravitate to dedicated runs that allow them to be at home every night, he said.

Eric Starks, president of the consulting firm FTR Associates of Nashville, Ind., said the pool of potential hires has shrunk by about one-third since the recession began.

That situation resulted from the closing of training schools and scaled-down recruiting efforts by fleets as business declined during the recession and cost cuts were needed, he said.

Carriers are gearing up recruiting efforts again as freight volumes come back (3-22, p. 1; click here for previous story).

“It takes a lot longer to ramp up those operations than it does to close them down,” Parham said.