Chris Schoate provides insights into driver recruitment and retention

Chris Schoate, vice president of driver recruitment and retention at Gulf Winds International, spoke with FreightWaves about recruiting and retaining drivers in a post-pandemic job market during the Enterprise Fleet Summit 2024. (Photo: FreightWaves)

TOPIC OF THE FIREPLACE CHAT:

Driver recruitment and retention in a demanding freight environment

DETAILS:

Chris Schoate, vice president of driver recruitment and retention at Houston-based Gulf Winds International, talks to FreightWaves about recruiting and retaining drivers in a post-pandemic job market.

KEY QUOTES FROM SCHOATE:

“The one big change I saw during the COVID transition was pay. It was 100% paid, that was the most important thing. And while pay is obviously going to be a major factor for all jobs in every sector, time at home became more and more important… People weren’t willing to drive a lot of the longer distances. Two to three months in advance, that was kind of gone and people were looking for more regional opportunities. If you had local (job postings), you were in a good position.”

“Trucking is very unpredictable. Anything a driver can do to make it more predictable, whether it’s more predictable pay, more predictable time at home, own routes – which is a very dangerous word – but anything that’s more predictable for the driver, that’s what they’re looking for…. Since COVID, that’s been a huge shift.”

“We generally plan for 50% of the people who come into our process to be the ones we expect to get hired. That’s a trend we’ve seen for a long, long time… But you can kind of get lost in that. You have to plan for the numbers, but also take each individual situation as it is. You’ll have some success if you look at the needs of each driver and find out what’s actually keeping them from working.”

“One of the best things I’ve ever seen – and this was in the dedicated model, so it was a little easier to implement – was that there were bands. There were pay bands and there were home time bands. Every week that report came back, and if they didn’t hit their pay band or their home time band, the fleet managers had to call the driver, get some information and tell them why… They told me if they come home on time and do what we say, they’ll be OK.”