“We are speeding into the holiday season but the driver shortage in the trucking industry means it could be headed down a rocky road.”
This driver shortage means your job is to recruit–and recruit well. We have to hire truck drivers because our economy cannot function without them. According to a recent study by Software Advice, a company that reviews trucking software, “The Future of Fleets in a Post-Driver World” survey found that the majority of respondents would feel less safe and uncomfortable sharing the road with driverless semi-trucks. Going driverless is not an option!
To recruit and retain drivers, you must set solid objectives. Whether you have short or long-term driver recruiting and hiring goals, it’s good to have a guideline to help you clearly describe those goals, set a deadline for meeting them, and understand the desired end result. This can be accomplished by focusing on SMART, a methodology that helps you make, well, “smart” goals!
SMART stands for…
Specific
When creating a goal, you want it to be as short, crisp, and specific as possible. Having “a good advertising year” isn’t a reflection of what your company actually accomplished. Imagine that you have a couple of minutes to give a brief overview of next year’s Flatbed hiring goals — what would you say to concisely explain your plans? Plan specifically, not generically.
Measurable
Oftentimes, companies say they want to “increase their social media following.” While that is a goal, it’s not a trackable goal. If you start the new year with 100 followers, and end with 101, technically you met your set goal. But if you switch that goal to read, “We want to increase social media following by 25%,” suddenly you can measure your progress every month to see if you’re on track to ultimately jumping from 100 to 125 followers. Now you really know you hit your goal (but hopefully it’s more ambitious than this example.)
Attainable
While having history-breaking goals are beneficial, it’s still important to keep these goals realistic. If in your company history you’ve generated an average of 50 driver leads every month, jumping to 1,500 leads per month would be a drastic change. Many businesses do this to push recruiters to “go as far as they possibly can.” But in reality, all this does is discourage them, as they feel they’re set up to never be successful. SMART goals are goals you can actually achieve.
Relevant
Why have a goal if the goal doesn’t matter? Relevancy is key because it allows you to strategize what’s pertinent to your company. If your main goals are to increase conversions and decrease your cost per application, you wouldn’t focus your advertising methods and budget around printed brochures. You would plan for maximizing platforms that will send traffic to your landing pages with strong call-to-actions to optimize conversions.
Time-Bound
While having all the aforementioned helps you develop a solid goal, you should have a timeline for meeting that goal. When you set a measurable objective and attach a timetable to it, it tells you when that goal is met and when to begin next steps. For example: if your goal is to increase job fair sign ups, you need to know when you will accomplish this in order to know when to start working on a secondary goal of increasing job fair materials and preparations.
Now that you have an understanding of SMART goals, start planning your very own 2015 SMART recruitment advertising goals!
Need help on the best ways to recruit truck drivers? Contact the Hightower Agency, the Leader in Recruitment Advertising. Some of our truck driver recruitment services include: retargeting on Facebook, data mining, search engine marketing, creation of landing pages, developing responsive websites, remarketing, social media, blogging, Facebook ads to recruit drivers, email marketing, Google AdWords, creation of mobile sites, ad campaigns, publication ads, brochures, newspaper and radio placement, and more.
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