It won’t take too much convincing for all of us to agree to the following points:

• There is a major shortage of truck drivers across North America to the tune of 25,000 drivers
• The transportation industry continues to grow which means more drivers are needed
• Rules are being implemented to increase safety but could also result in decreased productivity
• To meet this demand, driver-mills have become a common place to “qualify” drivers at a decreased cost taking advantage of a vulnerable system

The accumulation of these factors inevitably leads to increased pressure on the industry to produce more with less. These concerns have been known for a long time and the lack of solutions has resulted in lowered standards in both the safety and quality of drivers now on the road. This in turn leads to inflated insurance premiums for all truck drivers.
That’s what we can agree on. Now what can be done to address a driver shortage? As a third party to the commercial trucking

industry, I was completely shocked by the turnover statistics available in various reports. Take into consideration an average churn rate of 30% and the current length of time it takes for a driver to be hired again by a potential employer. You can begin to imagine how much productivity is truly being lost across the industry and how many trucks are sitting in a yard rather than out on the road.
Once again, looking in from a third party’s perspective and after some research, one of the challenges seems to be rooted in the onboarding process and the lack of standardization in the qualification process. The real question then is; how, as a trucking company, can you attract a greater number of high quality drivers and retain them longer? ISB Canada alongside our trusted partners has created a customizable onboarding tool that allows you to quickly and efficiently process your applicant’s documentation in a paperless environment, decreasing the amount of time it takes to process an applicant.
The Solution is ‘Making Eligibility Easy’ or ‘MEE’ (as we have come to call it). Used as a standard tool for your hiring criteria, it will use increased automation to retrieve the driver’s required documents. This information will then be applied into an easy to review platform where you can effectively monitor your driver pool and their career within your company. One of the products within this package actually provides coaching tips to ensure that you have accurate knowledge of your driver’s strengths and needs, allowing you to properly dispatch your workforce. MEE has the ability to remove all the stress that is associated with hiring and onboarding your drivers and we believe that we have accomplished that goal.
By removing much of the hassle that comes with qualifying a driver, we hope to create appealing opportunities for new drivers and enable companies to hold on to their experienced drivers for a longer period of time thus improving productivity across the industry.

About the Author

“Paul Clement began his career at ISB Canada in December of 2012. He has since brought creative solutions to the Product & Vendor Management position and oversees the research and development of new products and their associated strategy. A background in sales allows him to proactively take the lead when ensuring that strategy