The following is a recap from last week's CCJ webinar "Finding and keeping drivers in a demand-driven job market," sponsored by Bestpass. If you missed the event live, you can download a recording by signing up here.
Challenger Motor Freight (CCJ Top 250, No. 77) is working to onboard a new member to its driver roster: a young woman of South Asian descent. But bringing a woman onto the team isn’t an everyday occurrence for the Canadian carrier.
Boysie Dindyal, director of recruiting and retention at Challenger, said the company still has some work to do around forming a better strategy for attracting women drivers – a population that carriers have shifted more recruiting focus to amid a massive driver shortage that has been exacerbated by pressures from an influx of supply chain issues following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As carriers compete for very few fish in a large pond, they’re discovering and implementing new ways to attract talent, reaching beyond the traditional demographics of a driver and offering more competitive pay, benefits and home-time options, among other things.
One of the top considerations in recruitment and retention during these trying economic times is driver pay.
“We need to be priority fair to the drivers on what they should be paid. There are a lot of things going on in the economy. Things cost a lot more. We are cognizant of that,” Dindyal said. “We did address it, and then secondly just to ensure that we're in the game from a recruiting perspective as well.”
According to the American Trucking Associations, driver wages were up considerably in 2021 compared to 2019 with a slow migration away from mileage-based pay. According to a CCJ survey conducted last year, 68% of fleet respondents said they raised driver wages at least once in 2021, and 31% said they raised driver wages more than once, while 7% raised it three times or more.
