Truckload Fleets Recruit Drivers as Capacity Begins to Tighten

This story appears in the March 22 print edition of Transport Topics.

Many truckload fleets have almost overnight found themselves in a mini driver shortage, as demand for freight-hauling capacity is suddenly climbing in some markets and carriers expecting better times seek to put more trucks on the road.

The increased demand and concern that qualified drivers will become scarce is pushing fleets to step up their recruiting efforts after hunkering down during the worst months of the recession, industry officials said.

Tonn Ostergard, president of Crete Carrier; Steve Williams, chairman and CEO of Maverick USA; and Greg Koepel, a vice president at Roehl Transport, all told Transport Topics recently that recruiting is accelerating.

Suppliers of recruiting services reinforced the fleet executives’ comments, reporting a recent spike in fleet advertising — and suggesting that the federal government’s new safety program may cause fleets to weed out drivers with poor records.

Until recent weeks, fleets of all types were parking trucks and paring jobs, and there were no reports of trouble finding drivers. But that’s changing quickly, officials report, taking the industry far from where it was a year ago, when, for example, Celadon Group said it had 50 applicants for every available job.

Williams told TT that Maverick was “not having a great deal of success finding qualified drivers” as it began putting some of its 300 idled trucks back in service in response to stronger demand.

“We had proportionately downsized recruiting, like many carriers, and we had pretty much stopped hiring,” Williams said. “The notion was that you would let 300 people go, and they would be there when you wanted them back. That is not the case.”

“As business volumes have ticked up, we have increased recruiting in anticipation of what is going to be an improving economy,” Ostergard told TT. “Driver recruiting is all about the right lead time. In anticipation of that improvement, we want to accelerate our recruiting now.”

Crete is moving now, Ostergard said, because it typically takes six to nine months to add a driver, and he expects that competition for labor will heat up as the economy strengthens.

Ostergard added, however, that while it isn’t easy to hire the right drivers now, it is far from the shortage that plagued the industry four or five years ago.

He said that while the pace of recruiting has accelerated, it was not a surge at this point.

Koepel, vice president of workforce development and administration for Roehl Transport, said he is recruiting drivers for a different reason: the company is expanding.

“We are trying to keep up with the new business that we have been developing,” he told TT. “We have been able to keep up so far. We are making sure our fleet is properly sized.

“We are making a concerted effort to expand our fleet,” Koepel said. “We’ve been growing our refrigerated and flatbed business. It is not just the general economy for us; we are making a concerted effort to grow those businesses and expand into new geographical areas.”

“For two years, it wasn’t any real challenge to hire drivers,” said Steve Sichterman, vice president of business development for ACS Expedited Solutions, which designs driver-recruiting materials for carriers. “Fleets are telling us now it is harder and harder to get [drivers] in the door.”

To help attract more drivers, CRST Malone — the flatbed unit of CRST International — announced on March 12 it was temporarily doubling its driver-referral bonus. The company said in a statement that any CRST independent contractor who refers another driver would receive $1,000 for an independent contractor and $500 for a lease-purchase applicant through the end of April.

ACS, a unit of Xerox Corp., has seen a 20% increase in driver-recruitment advertising during the past three weeks from its client base of 265 fleets, he said.

“We have seen a strong pickup,” said Jay Wommack, CEO of the Vertical Alliance Group, which reported a 31% increase since the beginning of the year in driver recruiting advertising on its Web site.

“The situation changed in the past three or four weeks,” he told TT. “We have never seen so many companies calling us.”

Usually, he said, his firm is the one making the calls to companies, seeking to drum up advertising.

Wommack said he believes the newfound interest in recruiting is largely being driven by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 program.

Fleets fear they will be dragged down by drivers whose safety scores are deficient, Wommack said, though a stronger economy also has sparked renewed interest in recruiting.

Sichterman agreed that CSA 2010 was behind the recent surge.

“There are a lot of people concerned about the number of drivers they are going to lose,” he said. “They are saying, ‘If I don’t do something now, where am I going to be when freight is stronger?’ ”

The recruiting drive hasn’t yet touched the less-than-truckload business and has been limited in the refrigerated markets, which saw more steady demand during the recession, Sichterman said.

Recent recruiting efforts haven’t yet been reflected in the form of higher trucking employment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest report on trucking employment showed a decline of 4,300 jobs to 1.27 billion industry workers. That decline was part of an overall drop of 36,000 jobs last month, BLS said in a March 5 report.