Alex Carpenter, president of Seated Social, sat down with Taking the Hire Road host Jeremy Reymer to discuss the ways Seated Social focuses on quality recruitment leads and how that ultimately benefits drivers, recruiters and trucking companies.
Carpenter’s career path was a winding one, beginning with three deployments to Iraq in the U.S. Marine Corps. When he rejoined the civilian workforce, he sought the same kind of camaraderie and purpose that he had in the military.
Eventually, his career led into digital media and social media, and by happenstance, into the trucking industry. “At orientation, our manager told us they were promoting the former trucking social media manager,” Carpenter said. “I volunteered to take his place. Why not?”
It was there he found his calling and fell in love with the challenge and the evolving environment of freight and transportation.
When he founded Seated Social, Carpenter’s goal was simple. “The name ‘Seated Social’ tells the story. I wanted to carve out my niche and help people understand what we do. We want to get you seated through social media,” Carpenter explained. “We went that route because we’re after passive drivers.”
Seated Social’s model targets skilled truckers who have employment already and aren’t necessarily seeking a job – passive employees. “We craft ad copy and media that appeals to people’s pain points. Do you want to be home more? Are you looking for higher pay or other benefits? The drivers who are interested will submit their info, and we pass it along to our partners,” Carpenter said.
When the drivers consent to being contacted, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship from the start, Carpenter says. “The drivers understand exactly why they’re being called, and the carriers and recruiters know exactly what they’re looking for.”
Direct advertising and direct lead sourcing, according to Carpenter, are much better models for success than volume-based lead generation, and Seated Social helps partners and recruiters understand that. “I always ask prospective clients what a successful advertising campaign looks like to them,” Carpenter said. “Sometimes, we get the answer, ‘If we could have 100 leads a day, that’s what we want.’ They have a volume mindset – they want to throw large numbers at the wall to see what sticks.”
Large-volume lead generation, though, comes with inherent efficiency issues. According to Carpenter, most of those leads will not lead to successful hires. “We want to find you drivers that want to work for you, not contacts you bought from someone that may not be a good fit,” he said.
With Seated Social’s model, the leads and the applications are intentional. Any driver who submits information intends to have a conversation with the recruiter, and that recruiter can target drivers who best fit the needs of the carrier. “The quality of the conversation is generally higher when we target the right drivers and they show genuine interest than if we generate a wider spread of leads. You’re not going to hire every one of them, but we start from a better place,” Carpenter said.
For Carpenter and Seated Social, integrity and quality are much more important than vanity metrics. “We always talk to our clients about quality over quantity, because I don’t want to waste my recruiter’s time or the driver’s time. I want them to be intentional with their time, because I’m intentional with mine and the drivers are intentional with theirs,” Carpenter said.
The metric that’s most useful, according to Carpenter, is cost per hire. “Some recruiting firms will talk about cost per application, but that’s meaningless,” he said. “Let’s talk about hires. How do we continually get that number more positive? If you don’t target the right drivers, you’re going to keep spending that cost per hire over and over again.”
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Click here to learn more about Seated Social.
Sponsors: The National Transportation Institute, Career Now Brands, Carrier Intelligence, Infinit-I Workforce Solutions, WorkHound, Asurint, Arya By Leoforce, Transportation Marketing Group, Seiza, Drive My Way, F|Staff, Trucksafe Consulting, Seated Social, Repowr