Tips for Successful Driver Recruitment

At Rohrer Bus, we’ve faced our fair share of challenges with the nationwide shortage of CDL drivers, and while we haven’t completely overcome this struggle, we’re making steady progress every day. Today, we’re sharing some of our best practices and strategies to help close the hiring gap for School Bus Drivers!

We rely on our current employees.

We trust that our people know the right people, so we encourage our employees to refer applicants. Over time, we gathered that referred applicants complete the hiring process more often than applicants who found our jobs through other channels. Additionally, employees who came in as referrals tend to have longer tenures with our company on average! We offer generous referral bonuses to our employees once the person they referred gets hired. It’s a win-win; we invest in the future of our business, AND in our valued team members!

We always welcome referrals, so we’ve made it a priority to make our referral program seamless for our employees. We regularly send reminders to employees on the referral incentives, provide and promote materials that they can share on social media, and automatically track referrals through links unique to each employee (to increase the likelihood of them sharing and avoid missing referrals that should have been counted).

We honed our strategy on Indeed.

Indeed reaches up to 96% of online job seekers, making it an essential tool for any business looking to hire. We’ve been using Indeed for years, and maximizing its potential has required years of trial and error. While every business’s approach to Indeed will be unique, we can share a few helpful tips to get you started.

• You can post jobs for free, but sponsoring posts helps you gain more traction.
• Short, concise job descriptions are best. Be honest about job expectations and training schedule, but highlight what makes driving jobs so great!
• If you are hiring in a specific school district area, try listing your jobs in multiple towns within that district’s borders. Sponsor the listing with the town that gets the most impressions/clicks.
• Be careful when lumping many job postings into one sponsored campaign. Jobs that are listed in higher population areas can absorb most of your budget, and leave lower population areas with minimal funding. You may have better luck putting different locations in separate campaigns.

We follow up with lost deals.

Hiring a School Bus Driver is a lengthy process with many steps, and sometimes people drop out before they finish the process. This happens for a myriad of reasons, but oftentimes the reasoning boils down to: the timing simply wasn’t right for them to pursue becoming a bus driver.

We have had quite a bit of success by reaching out to individuals who have dropped out of various stages of our hiring process, whether they dropped out months ago, or years ago. We update them on things that have changed since we last spoke and remind them that we are still hiring. In a lot of cases, NOW is a better time for them to try becoming a bus driver again!

We’ve optimized our hiring process and implemented technology.

Nobody likes wasted time – neither candidates or employers. That’s why we are continuously improving our recruitment process, and move our potential employees through the initial screening stages as efficiently as we can. We have learned to balance the use of technology with personal connection. We adopted programs that automate the sending of additional forms and phone interview invitations for example, but never disregard the importance of the recruiter-to-candidate relationship, and follow up individually as needed!

We’ve found that our automations (emails, texts, reminders, etc.) not only increase response rates from candidates, but they also enable our Personnel team to focus less energy on tedious tasks like calendar scheduling and manual follow ups, and more on impactful tasks such as interviews and other real-time communications with candidates.

We adopted a CRM and keep it at the center of all activity.

By implementing a CRM, we improved our hiring process significantly! By using our CRM, we are able to:

• Build out proper pipelines and stages that represent the ideal candidate experience
• Trigger automations (follow ups, interview calendar booking, etc.)
• Stay timely with our candidate communications; the quicker we are at corresponding with our applicants, the more likely we are to keep them engaged throughout the hiring process
• Correlate candidates with the marketing channels they applied through
• Assign Personnel staff to candidates and maintain accountability throughout the entire hiring process
• Document and track all data

We track EVERYTHING!

We’ve discovered that the key to efficiently hiring bus drivers—or filling any position—is understanding which marketing channel brought applicants to us in the first place. Over the years, we’ve implemented proper marketing attribution across every channel where we run media. This includes using vanity phone numbers for radio and TV ads, applying UTM parameters to links, and more.

We also tie this attribution directly into our CRM to evaluate performance and gain deeper insights. By doing this, we understand how different channels impact one another. For example, we can identify what percentage of Facebook website visitors later Googled our business name and completed an online form or gave us a call.

We also account for how certain marketing channels may take a majority of the credit while being influenced by others. For instance, if we decided to cut Facebook Ads, we analyze how that might impact branded web searches and overall performance. This approach ensures we’re optimizing our efforts across the board.

By continuously refining our strategies and leveraging the tools and resources available to us, we’re working hard to address the challenges of hiring School Bus Drivers. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, our approach demonstrates that persistence, innovation, and a commitment to improvement can make a real difference. We hope these insights and practices inspire other organizations to find success in their hiring efforts!