DriverReach Director of Sales and Services Wendy Bartz fills in for CEO Jeremy Reymer on this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road, welcoming to the show Josh Mecca, director of recruiting at American Central Transport (ACT). The two discuss tips for driver recruiting — and what to look for when hiring a driver recruiter — among other topics surrounding retention and the ongoing driver shortage.
Not everyone is cut out to be a driver recruiter, as the job has many demands and requires one to have a sharp eye for talent and character. Recruiters play a major role in shaping the fleet itself. Mecca calls them the gatekeepers of the company, explaining that they’re ultimately responsible for selling your company’s image to customers and the motoring public. “When your safety department gets those phone calls about somebody, remember that your recruiters hired them.”
When looking for potential recruiters, Mecca said he obviously wants a people person, but someone who is also quick on his or her feet and knows exactly what to say when starting a conversation. However, the biggest thing he looks for is integrity, considering it more important than talent.
“There’s so much more to recruiting, but at the end of the day, if our hirees aren’t sticking around, that sort of shows that maybe something else is going on with the candidate in the process, perhaps how we’re reading applications and backgrounds,” Mecca said.
A major concern of his is early-stage turnover, attributing it largely to the recruiter not being on the same page as the driver. He calls these instances “orientation surprises,” scenarios in which the hiree is underwhelmed by the realities of the job, finding what he or she was promised not to be, or when a recruiter failed to learn a critical piece of information about the candidate before welcoming him or her on board.
“If we have set their expectations too high, then we have failed,” Mecca said. “If those expectations that we sell to them are not what they see when they get here, we have failed as recruiters.”
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