How to Sell Safety When Recruiting Drivers

Most drivers want to work at a carrier that pays a decent wage, provides a safe and secure environment, and is compassionate. Many carriers are good at marketing the first of these when recruiting drivers but tend to not market the others.

Do you have good and safe equipment?

Driver frustration with vehicles and maintenance is a real concern. Ask yourself the following questions, and if the answers are yes, you are doing a good job of providing and maintaining good and safe equipment and should boast about it in your marketing!

• When purchasing equipment, do you spec for safety and driver comfort (adaptive cruise, automatic emergency braking, air ride, etc.)?
• Do you have a preventive maintenance program that is followed and set up to work with the driver's schedule?
• Do you fix a vehicle quickly when a driver reports a defect or are defects carried over to a later date?
• Do you know the average time for a driver-requested repair of a defect?

Ask the following questions as well:

• Do you provide the driver with adequate breaks and days off?
• Do you have and follow an on-time at home policy (if the driver says they need to be home on the 25th at noon, do you make it work)?

The key here is the working relationship with dispatch (or whatever the driver supervisors at your company are called) is an important aspect of driver retention and safety. If you do a great job in this area, market it! If you don't, figure out what needs to change and change it.

Market good safety data

When a potential hire looks up your company in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration tracking systems (such as Compliance, Safety, Accountability), what do they see? Is your performance good enough that you would be proud to provide a driver applicant with the link to your data? If it is, market it! If not, why not?