On this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road, Justin Clarke, founder and CEO of driver staffing firm F|Staff, sat down with host Jeremy Reymer to share his vision for the future of CDL driver staffing and to discuss leveraging technology to match drivers with the right fleets.
When Clarke began in carrier staffing as a young man, the traditional method of staffing relied on a branch model, wherein a central staffing branch supports the businesses throughout its city.
Clarke, however, says he saw early on that decentralizing that model could make it more efficient.
“I think since I got into this career at such a young age, I had a creative perspective on how I envisioned the future of our company,” Clarke said.
F|Staff helps match truck drivers to motor carriers around the country. The firm works with hundreds of carriers to meet staffing needs, including on-demand help, short-term work orders and permanent direct-hiring.
As technology began to revolutionize every industry in the early 2000s, Clarke realized there were ways that he and F|Staff could not only revolutionize the staffing business model, but also make the experience better for the customer and the worker.
“We wanted to abandon the traditional concepts of staffing,” he said. “We started developing technologies that would make things better – help workers find the job they want faster and help employers find the right hire more seamlessly.”
Eventually, Clarke says, he understood that small-scale, iterative development was not the best use of technology. “I finally had a Rubicon crossing moment,” he said. “It wasn’t just stages of development, it was a completely new business model.”
Over the past decade, the F|Staff on-demand model has converted from a traditional staffing company to a direct sourcing marketplace where employer partners, mostly motor carriers, use proprietary technology to find the workers they’re looking for directly. “It’s an entirely different way of doing things from the old model, where everyone has to be bottlenecked while we make phone calls all day back and forth,” Clarke said.
F|Staff has reimagined that paradigm by using technology that helps end users meet their needs more efficiently. “We’ve become a conduit for success instead of a big Berlin Wall between good employers and good employees,” Clarke said.
According to Clarke, many staffing agencies initially pushed back on F|Staff’s on-demand concept. “A lot of businesses in this space were afraid that they would lose their relationships, but we’ve found the opposite,” he said. “Our relationships have improved because businesses and workers can get to what they need without anything in their way. Because of that, we’ve seen growth to our head count, increased retention rates, and warm reviews from clients and hires,” he said.
Efficiency is the name of the game in staffing, Clarke says. “I am all about finding the right worker for the right employer at the right time, as fast as possible,” he said. “And when I say fast, I mean snap your fingers and get it done.”
In the coming decades, the goal of F|Staff is to move the trucking industry into the future of staffing. Clarke says that means even more hands-on, direct sourcing that allows carriers to be granular in their hiring process.
“If the old model was Staffing 1.0, we’re in 2.0. I equate us to the Uber concept,” he said. “Our system allows clients to push job orders directly to the marketplace, and our algorithm pushes that job order to the appropriate workers, allowing for the best match,” he explained.
“3.0 is a totally different version. Where we’re headed next is a business like VRBO, which lets people rent vacation homes for cheaper than hotel costs,” Clarke said.
“With direct sourcing, clients will go to our marketplace, search and filter for workers they’re looking for, all the way from the type of CDL requirements down to the specific industry that a driver has experience hauling in,” he said. “We have the capability to view reviews for the workers, and even a way for drivers to post details or videos verifying their experience and qualifications.”
F|Staff has created a marketplace where the drivers are available for carriers to screen and filter precisely. “We want to give them the opportunity to not just find a qualified person who generally can fulfill the requirements, but the exact person that they want,” Clarke said.
Click here to learn more about F|Staff.
Book recommendation: Platform Revolution
Sponsors: The National Transportation Institute, Career Now Brands, Carrier Intelligence, Infinit-I Workforce Solutions, WorkHound, Asurint, Transportation Marketing Group, Seiza, Drive My Way, F|Staff, Trucksafe Consulting, Seated Social, Repowr