A recruiter’s job is not easy, but it’s probably one of the most important jobs at your company. Moving applicants through the hiring process quickly is essential to keeping a carrier well-staffed with qualified drivers, and each candidate that your recruiters deal with represents a lot of time and advertising dollars that your business has already invested. As a recruiter or a manager overseeing a recruiting department, you need to be able to track where everyone is in the hiring process, how long they’ve been at that stage, and what actions need to be taken to move them along to the next step. While that sounds easy in theory, that’s a lot of pressure on recruiters. Each day recruiters need to split their time between reaching out to and nurturing new leads, guiding candidates already in the pipeline through the rest of the hiring process, and trying to track down and obtain all the employment information, documents, permissions, and background checks necessary to hire each new driver. The volume of work they have to deal with and the tasks they need to track every day can be overwhelming. That’s why it’s so important to have a well-developed recruitment strategy, as well as to make sure that your recruiters are well-trained and well-equipped with all the tools they need to execute that strategy effectively. Without these things, you’re setting your recruiters and your business up for failure.
While there are many challenges that go into developing and implementing an effective recruitment strategy, one of the most important components you need to be successful is organization. Keeping your processes well mapped out, easy to understand for your recruiters, and easy to track is essential to making this already complicated job as simple as possible. Developing an organized and streamlined recruiting process means accounting for a lot of moving parts and complications.
Map the Hiring Process
The first step is to map out your hiring process from the moment a lead comes in until the driver arrives at orientation. Each step in the process should be clearly defined, have a set procedure for your recruiters to follow, and be easily marked so that you can track each driver and his or her corresponding documents as he or she advances in the hiring process. All of this is critical for tracking your metrics. Without a clear system in place, it is nearly impossible to determine what steps might be slowing your hiring process down or to evaluate where and why drivers are stalling out of the recruitment pipeline. Clearly mapping out your recruitment process also ensures that your recruiters will always obtain all the information and documents that your business needs to identify qualified drivers, verify their credentials, and stay compliant with state and federal regulations. Keeping things well-defined and organized not only allows you to track metrics in order to identify and correct problems in your recruitment process, it also makes training new recruiters a much faster process, both of which will allow your company to save time and money.
Easy to Access, Centralize Files & Documents
The second step is to make sure that all files and documents for each driver are centralized and easy to access for your recruiters. Because so much information gathering and documentation goes into hiring each new driver, a crucial part of a successful recruitment strategy is keeping track of all the required tasks, information, and documents. The problem is that trying to keep track of all that information for each driver and make it easily accessible is a herculean task for any carrier. For each candidate they shepherd through the hiring process, recruiters will need to obtain and verify a full application, licenses and certifications, employment history, and background checks and any violations, along with documenting the proper permissions for all those verifications. Unfortunately, forms are often submitted with incomplete or missing information that recruiters then have to track down, and sometimes orders to run background checks and employment verifications mistakenly go unprocessed or the documents themselves go missing. One of the biggest time sinks a recruiting department can run into is struggling to try to find, replace, or update the documents needed to hire new drivers. That’s why storing all of a candidate’s important information in a central and easily accessible database is crucial. Recruiters need to be able to look up any given driver, view all the information and documents associated with that driver, and determine at a glance where they are in the recruitment process and what information is needed to move them on to the next step. It’s also crucial that your business has all the documentation and records needed to demonstrate your compliance in the event of an audit.
Effective Recruiting Strategy
Lastly, for an effective recruiting strategy, you need to make sure that your recruiting workload is being handled efficiently. Because the volume of work for recruiters can be so massive, it’s important for your recruiters to be able to easily evaluate their applicant pool and identify the most qualified and interested drivers so they can focus their time and effort on pursuing them. To a certain extent this depends on being able to easily access candidate records. When recruiters are reaching out to new leads and evaluating new applications for drivers, they need to know that the information they are looking at is the most complete and up-to-date version available in order to accurately determine whether the drivers applying (or re-applying) are qualified for the positions they’re looking to fill. Equally important is the ability for recruiters to know who and what exactly they are working on so they don’t accidentally end up doing redundant work or accidentally let qualified candidates slip through the cracks. It all boils down to instituting a workflow that divides labor evenly across your recruiting department and that promotes good communication between all your employees to allow them to better track and execute important tasks.
The Right Tools
Even with measures in place that allow your recruiters to effectively target the most promising candidates and avoid costly errors that slow the recruitment process and create extra work, there simply isn’t enough time in the day for your recruiters to get everything done that needs to be done. Inevitably, there will be drivers that your business misses out on due to not being able to capitalize on a hot lead or make a desirable candidate an offer quickly enough. That’s why, whenever possible, your business should find ways to automate and streamline as much of the busywork in your recruitment strategy as possible, whether it be something as simple as sending out an automated email whenever a new application comes in or implementing a solution as comprehensive as our Xpress system, which has been designed specifically to help you simplify your recruitment process.
