Trucking Sees Early Indications of Rising Driver Demand

(Volvo Trucks North America)

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The trucking industry saw very early indications that driver demand picked up during the third quarter, while remaining affected by market conditions.

The Q3 2024 Driver Recruiting & Retention Data Download Report found competition for drivers intensified as freight volumes began to improve slightly across certain sectors. This led to a 51% rise in company driver job postings between April and September. The report was compiled by Conversion Interactive Agency and the Professional Driver Agency.

“The key to success lies in leveraging the technology and strategy that provides cost savings,” Conversion CEO Kelley Walkup said. “We have seen fleets save millions in recruiting by putting the technology and strategy in place to deliver quality hires much faster — and the tech is improving every day with machine learning, predictive analytics and AI involved.”

The Q3 report also found that 85.3% of drivers are applying to multiple jobs at once. It also noted that nearly 60% of the frustrations that drivers expressed are linked to communication and planning issues. The report stressed the importance of keeping drivers engaged.

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“After a long-stagnant market, I am happy to report a positive shift in the driver recruiting market, including an upward trend in applications submitted and jobs posted in the third quarter,” said Darin Williams, president of the online driver job application data and advertising company CDLjobs.com. “For the first time in a long time, the jobs posted increased at a higher rate than the applications submitted, perhaps signaling that carriers will need more drivers soon.”

Williams also saw heightened interest in targeted lead generation services. That has meant more clients advertising in specific locations instead of general national blanket coverage. He added that this aligns with the increase in the overall number of jobs posted.

“It seems like everything is just stuck at the moment, waiting for something to happen,” said Tom Bray, senior industry business advisor at J.J. Keller & Associates. “There are some good things happening in the industry. Things like the rejection rate and spot market are starting to stabilize, if not start to come back up. That translates down the road to better driver hiring.”

Bray noted that driver recruitment stayed about the same throughout the quarter. He pointed to turnover holding steady and wages managing to stabilize at a lower level. He doesn’t expect a substantial change until market fundamentals improve, like the capacity and freight balance.

“We have a lot of industry dynamics going on with rates being down as low as they are, having to do with the surplus of the number of carriers coming out of the post-COVID boom,” Bray said. “There’s an adjustment in just the gross number of carriers that’s going on. That’s, of course, creating changes in the driver market. Because, as companies structurally can’t survive for some reason, are leaving the industry, that’s putting their drivers on the available market.”

Bray added that conditions will improve again when rates and rejections start going up enough to impact the industry overall. That would be expected to cause downstream improvements to things like freight rates and driver pay.

“We saw a rather surprising increase in the number of payroll employment jobs for general freight truckload,” said Avery Vise, vice president of trucking at FTR Transportation Intelligence. “They went up by 1,600. That is a rather large increase. We haven’t seen anything that large since May of last year. It puts employment at 4.5% above where it was before the pandemic, which is not all that much. It’s a little bit higher than it’s been in the last few months, but it is actually lower than May of this year. But it certainly indicates some firming.”

Vise warned that there is also the question of how sustainable this increase is. He said the rise in import activity during the third quarter likely had more to do with shipments getting in ahead of expected disruptions like a short-lived strike at East and Gulf Coast ports.

“It turned out to be only a three-day strike,” Vise said. “But, obviously, a lot of people feared it would be a lot longer. And, of course, it can still come back. But it’s unclear really how much of that surge in imports in the third quarter is sustainable. The other thing we know about the surge in imports is that the impact on freight is not as strong as it would be implied.”