Navigating the Future of Recruiting – Taking the Hire Road

DriverReach founder and CEO Jeremy Reymer chatted with Travis Overton, president and owner of CDLLife on this week’s episode of the Taking the Hire Road podcast. 

CDLLife is an online initiative dedicated to improving the quality of life for truckers. The website is a one-stop shop for trucking-related news, with articles focused on health, finance and entertainment. CDLLife also lists job opportunities in addition to offering display advertising and lead generation products. 

Overton asserts that one of the biggest challenges facing motor carriers today is securing effective lead generation in driver hiring. In the past year, this has become problematic as he explained that advertising has become the largest line item cost for trucking companies outside of maintenance, fuel and payroll costs.

Overton said CDLLife has worked on numerous different product opportunities over the past four years, making it his mission to make sure companies get the best bang for their advertising dollar in finding drivers that’ll help grow their fleets.

“If you can do a good job attracting the driver, you’re going to be able to grow your fleet and your company,” Overton said. “It’s really, really crucial for companies to have state-of-the-art revolutionary lead generation and advertising products and services.”

Overton described the past year as one of the most transformative times in the industry’s history. Many companies slowed, or paused, advertising spending when business declined, instead of using the downtime to develop more creative promotional strategies.

“The industry found out that supply chains in this country are drastically shifting,” Overton said. “Now is not the time to put things on pause; now’s the time to really go after it.”

Carriers have begun to ramp up advertising spending, but Overton said that many dollars are wasted because the message is not targeted. Motor carriers will find much greater recruiting success if they use technology to help find drivers. The old ways of recruiting won’t work anymore, he said.

“No carrier wants to hear that it’s costing them double the budget today to produce the same result that they could have got 18 months ago,” he added. “If the behavior of the job seeker is changing, then we as an industry need to change with it, because otherwise more money will be put into the same thing while getting less and less results,” Overton said.

Click for more FreightWaves content by Jack Glenn.

More from Taking the Hire Road:

Adapting to the recruiting evolution

Seizing the moment with TCA’s chairman

Predicting your future workforce