Recruiting software company YouCruit received an $11.5 million investment in September specifically to enhance the capabilities of its trucking industry job marketplace application called Lanefinder. Now it’s turning its focus to trucking insurance.
YouCruit co-founder and CEO Mats Holmback told FreightWaves that a number of trucking companies and drivers were using its original job marketplace in unusual ways in order to recruit drivers, so his team found it necessary to build a completely separate hiring ecosystem tailored to the needs for driver hiring.
Related: YouCruit raises $11.5M for driver hiring app Lanefinder
“They were not working the system as it was intended,” said Holmback. “So I got on calls with the users and we realized that the trucking hiring process was so broken. There were so many issues with drivers not knowing what jobs they qualified for and companies were having to spend a ton of time interacting with drivers before they knew if they could hire them.”
After spending time getting carrier feedback, YouCruit launched Lanefinder, closed on its independent investment and enhanced the platform, currently serving 7,000 companies, to include search functions for everything from freight-handling needs to pet-friendly jobs and even solo or team preferences.
Insurance offerings
Search functionality was not the only issue with YouCruit’s trucker hiring application and the company quickly found many insurance policies were holding companies back from hiring available drivers.
“For some trucking companies, the majority of available drivers were not eligible to work for any carrier because of odd little intricacies in insurance policies,” said Holmback. “The trucking insurance industry hasn’t innovated anything for the last few decades, so we thought with our insights and the right person we could change that.”
YouCruit in November hired industry veteran Kevin Rettberg as head of insurance to help execute its vision of an insurance coverage offering that leverages its data insights and proprietary behavior modeling analysis to support its underwriting methods.
“The problem with most insurance policies is they are not built for growth,” said Rettberg in an interview with FreightWaves.
“Carriers will start at two to three trucks and now they are at 15 and insurance is costing exponentially more for them. Carriers will then get an opportunity to get contracts with shippers directly but their original insurance guidelines will not work with the available driver pool. Carriers are always looking for ways to lower their insurance costs but are not considering the revenue they might be losing. That is why we want to use a collaborative approach to offer specialized commercial auto liability to our carrier network,” said Rettberg.
YouCruit is currently engaging with insurance agents to bring the offering to its Lanefinder marketplace, which has the ability to spend about $3.5 billion in auto liability insurance annually. The company plans to launch its insurance services in mid-2022.
“Our vision is to be one of the largest insurance providers out there,” said Rettberg. “We will continue to engage with insurance providers until an insurance partner gives us the best opportunity for this program to succeed.”
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