Driver recruiters have a difficult job. Besides the obvious pressure that comes with increasing turnover and the ever shrinking pool of available drivers, there is also the constant barrage of numbers. Every campaign has click-through-rates, submission rates, hire rates, and retention rates. Even a medium-sized fleet might be trying to recruit drivers through a plethora of channels.
A recruiter might be comforted to know that all of these efforts can be distilled into one number: Cost-Per-Hire (CPH).
On the surface, this number is simple. Take how much you spent on recruiting and divide that by the number of drivers you hired. Because drivers are worth so much to a fleet, it isn’t likely that a fleet’s CPH will be higher than the value of that hire. Although that is good news, lowering your fleet’s CPH means you can find more drivers for less money.
Here we go:
3 ways you can be a hero by lowering your CPH.
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1. Track your CPH by Channel.
An overall CPH is a great big-picture number to tell you how healthy your recruiting efforts are. However, you cannot stop there. Each vendor you use should have a CPH attached to it. The same goes for each channel you spend advertising dollars on. The more granular this calculation is the better you can allocate your budget.
It is easy to get caught up in just tracking where your applications are coming from. And although that is certainly important, you also need to track how many of those applications are turning into hires.
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2. Eliminate Low Performing Channels
Those sources of applications that aren’t getting you hires need to be eliminated. You probably knew that but keep in mind that sometimes channels work together to generate results.
A banner campaign has more value than just the clicks it generates. It will also give your brand exposure to a targeted audience. Be sure to track direct and search engine traffic to your site while you are running expensive banner campaigns. You might find a correlation between direct and search traffic and banner campaigns. These increases in traffic should be considered when allocating your budget.
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3. Trial-and-Error
It is important to understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to experiment with your budget. The wrong way is to throw money at whatever sounds fancy and then get a vague feeling of how well it is working based on a conversation you have with whoever sold you that service.
The right way to test a new source of applications for open driving positions is to start with a spend large enough to produce results but not big enough to ruin your year financially if it doesn’t work out. Each month you should be reviewing where all of you applications and hires came from and how much it cost you to get them.
Remember not to bail on a new technology or vendor just because something doesn’t work the first time you try it. Give each effort a chance to succeed, but if it doesn’t, take that money and put it to better use.
