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Explore the world of driver recruiting with the Hire Truckers Podcast! Join us as we talk to recruiting experts, offering industry insights, marketing trends, and motivation to enhance your recruiting skills. Whether you're a seasoned recruiter or just starting, our podcast is here to help you level up your game in the trucking industry.
Welcome to the Hire Truckers Podcast, where we interview experts in driver recruiting. We provide industry insights, marketing trends, and motivation to help you level up your recruiting game. This is Aaron Craddock with the Hire Truckers podcast. Today, we have Lance Christensen on. Welcome, Lance.
Lance Christensen:Howdy, everybody.
Aaron Craddock:So just to give you a little background on Lance. So Lance is the recruiting strategy guy as Brandon on LinkedIn with over 2 decades of experience. He leads with value publishing his Monday Minute on LinkedIn for free to help you up your driver recruiting game. Lance is currently with Appcast and previously with Bayard prior to that acquisition, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Today, we're gonna dive into, as Lance and I were talking about topics that would add value to directors of recruiting, fleet executives, etcetera, we really narrowed down on focusing on, building teams and differentiating.
Aaron Craddock:And so that's some of what we're gonna dive in today along with the Bayard acquisition. So to start us off, should carriers focus on pay to differentiate? I know we talked a little bit about this, but I wanna dive more into it.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. Pay has always been important. Part of the different roles I've had as a recruiting leader and one that I just ran last night was a just a a market comparison for pay modeling. When you've got drivers, obviously, pay matters. Dollars always matter.
Lance Christensen:When somebody has a job and somebody offers them a little bit more per year or a little bit more per hour, they their eyes and ears open and they're ready to listen. So, obviously, pay is a factor. Now should it be the determining factor is the problem. When you make it the determining factor, you get people to come work for your company for money. And, yes, they will come to work for you.
Lance Christensen:Problem is being the top payer in an industry and trying to maintain that, it's it's a game. You constantly have to know who's paying more, and you did this leapfrog process where you always have to stay on top, or or you're gonna lose your money. You're gonna lose your employees because you you do not have the the top compensation anymore. When you're attracting people for money, you're attracting the same people. They're gonna leave you later because you fall below market.
Lance Christensen:So it's kind of that that little rat race. If you attract employees for other reasons, more tangible reasons, more lasting reasons that don't need to be constantly maintained. Culture is a huge one. When people wanna come work for you because you're at the awesome place to work, not just because it's money, because you've got cool people and you got cool culture, you've got great benefits, you you treat people right, they come and they stay. And it's not about money, and that's easier to maintain.
Lance Christensen:Granted, it's a bigger infrastructure, and it's more of a a holistic approach. But the people that you attract because of that are the ones that are gonna stay. They're not coming just for money. If they come just for money, the second somebody pays more, you're you're likely to lose them. And drivers, because of drivers' search behaviors in trucking, they have a whole lot of time to be sitting on a mobile device.
Lance Christensen:The second the truck's sitting, they pick up the mobile device. They're checking their email. They're checking their loads. They're checking their next run, mapping out a route, and the whole time being hit with digital display ads. Hey.
Lance Christensen:This company is hiring. This company is hiring. This company is hiring. And if it's a driver that comes for money, he's being presented with money all day long. And it's only a matter of time till somebody presents him a better offer than what he's got right now.
Lance Christensen:But it's gonna be hard in a little digital display ad to present a culture that's good enough to seal him away from your culture.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. So how how do fleets do that? Like, we understand it's hard, but how do fleets lead on something like culture?
Lance Christensen:Yeah. It takes a lot more investment. You have to really understand your employees and what you're capable of doing. Culture can be very expensive to really create something that is amazing to be a part of costs money. And sadly, I mean, some companies don't have the margin to really explore culture too much because, again, they're just trying to do that rat race.
Lance Christensen:Trying to keep enough employees going, and they're spending enough money just trying to feed the churn and the turnover. They don't have budgets to really invest in culture and and and deeper benefits and and and better leadership. They they're just bracing after feeding feeding the beast, the turnover beast that a lot of companies get faced with. How do they get it started? It's baby steps.
Lance Christensen:Set aside a budget, start making some improvements, talk to your drivers, talk to your employees, find out what you can do at a lower price point, but what will still yield a decent result. Sometimes it's just, you know, free food on Fridays or, you know, free cooler food when you first get in the truck if you're dispatching over the road drivers. Just little simple things that say, hey. You know, you're you're cared for and you're thought of more than just, you know, to the classical analogy, meat in a seat that, a lot of companies use. Drivers are more than meet in a seat.
Aaron Craddock:And so what have you done specifically? Like, I know you're at different fleets like MFI and Hub Group, like in the director of recruiting type roles. And so what did you do there? Whether it's with your recruiters directly, you could kinda dive into that for retention and culture, and or with the drivers that you brought on.
Lance Christensen:A lot of it's just messaging, what you tend to advertise. If you advertise days in the life and and employee testimonies and stories and and the feel good stuff, you start to develop more of a reputation of an employer that cares, an employer that's got this rich history, an employer that has something more than just money. If all your advertisement is constantly saying new pay package or exciting new pay and pay pay pay, what do you think of when you think of that carrier? Oh, it's it's a carrier that is always increasing their pay, increasing their pay. That's all they're all they're about is pay.
Lance Christensen:One of the one of
Aaron Craddock:the things we talked about in our pre podcast planning call when we were chatting was just how you've been able to build build teams where you've had a higher retention rate. So tactically, like, what do you do with your team? Like, you personally, like, with your teams to, like, have a have a high retention rate, have a high employee engagement rate, things like that?
Lance Christensen:There's a couple of things that you can really do as a recruiting leader. One of the most important things is that the recruiting team needs to own the process. Some companies compartmentalize things. They'll have the recruiting on the first part of the funnel, then hand it off to processing and onboarding and HR, and then the recruiter never even talks to the driver after that point. And then after they're hired day 1, then it's all the operations manager that does all the interactions with with the, the drivers after that point.
Lance Christensen:So, I mean, to track them to the company, you got the recruiters. To get them into the company, you've got HR and safety. And then afterwards, everybody just keeps handing the driver off, and not this uniform line that communicates with them, through their whole process. I've always been a firm believer that recruiting owns the length of that process all the way through sometimes as much as 90 or a 120 days post hire where the recruiters are still engaging that driver. Is everything how how I explained it?
Lance Christensen:Is this the job that I hired you for? Getting that feedback from the recruiter who already has the relationship with the driver. When you hand somebody off to a different individual, that relationship kind of becomes broken, and they have to establish a new relationship. And they're less inclined to share. They're less inclined to be honest about what's going on.
Lance Christensen:But if the recruiter maintains that relationship through the whole time, the recruiter one understands exactly what the job that they sold ends up as and what the driver feels. And they can turn around and they can pivot and change their recruiting style to make sure that it's accurate and genuine as opposed to just a sales process. Another facet we can do that I'm a big advocate for is having driver ambassadors or driver advocates that are assigned to drivers once they're hired. You could even go as far as to bring those advocates into or ambassadors into the recruitment process. Say the recruiter starts the engagement, assigns a driver ambassador, reaches out to their rep and says, hey.
Lance Christensen:I'm Steve. I'm your driver ambassador. I've been here for 3 years. I'm doing the same job that you're gonna be doing. Do you have any questions?
Lance Christensen:Is there anything that you're curious about? Do you do you wanna know more about the job from a driver perspective? A recruiter can explain the job as best as they can, but if they've never driven the truck, they don't know all the details. They only know what they've been told. The driver doing the job knows everything, and drivers will always talk to drivers more honestly and truthfully than they will to leadership, operations leadership, safety, recruiting.
Lance Christensen:They'll always be a little bit more genuine. So establishing that relationship early on, the drivers get to kinda mingle and get to know each other before they're even hired. And then post hire, that relationship stays for the first 90, 120 days, and it helps cure your your 90 day return tension and your 45 retention, which a lot of times is a killer. Drivers get in with the company and within the first few weeks, they're like, you know, this isn't exactly what I thought it was. And then they start again.
Lance Christensen:They're on the mobile device, parked it in dock, and they're looking for another job. If you have that ambassador, they're more inclined to call that ambassador or the ambassador is checking in with them. How is everything? Is it are are you having any problems or having any obstacles, any difficulties? That relationship that they establish with an ambassador a lot of times will, prevent a lot of that miscommunication and that need for, you know, being embarrassed and saying, hey, you know, this isn't right.
Lance Christensen:They'll tell the driver, but they're not inclined to tell an operations manager or dispatcher because, you know, they don't have that level of relationship. And then they're fearful a lot of times that, they don't wanna be the bad seat that got hired. It only wants to complain. And they get the bad loads and get the bad dispatches and get retribution because they complain.
Aaron Craddock:So in a perfect world, like, how do you keep the recruiter engaged with the driver and that driver ambassador through the whole process? Do you just operationalize that? I'm just trying to get my head around. How do you execute on that.
Lance Christensen:There there's tools that you can do it. I mean, talking with 10th Street, I I passed the idea on to 10th Street a little over a year ago. They actually built something in their applicant tracking system to actually facilitate that. Other applicant tracking systems have some level of ability to do that. You can go manual and put it in your Google Doc with Google Calendar or Microsoft Microsoft Calendar.
Lance Christensen:I mean, it's it's not that difficult. Just set a regular cadence of when you're required to communicate and just do the process.
Aaron Craddock:I really like that driver advocate idea. Like, just because yeah. Again, we're just you need to have a place where the driver can can vent and, you know, share, like, when when things are a challenge, not if things you know, every every every job is a challenge and, specifically, you know, being on the road, dealing with different people, just all the different challenges that can come up, having having somebody that can empathize with you, I think, is is key, and be like, hey. I've been in that exact same spot, and here's how I handled it. Here's how you can get like, talk with leadership about preventing it in the future.
Aaron Craddock:And yeah. Absolutely love that. So have you had scenarios where you've been able to improve retention rate with the fleet client by implementing something like this?
Lance Christensen:Oh, absolutely. I've seen turnover rates get decimated, cut in half or or better just by doing better processes and having better communication. Ghosting rates go down significantly too. I mean, ghosting is an emerging problem because people communicate less effectively now that they're kind of driven to mobile devices and mobile communications as opposed to actually audible speaking and having conversations and face to face meetings. Turnover and ghosting are are both amplified because it's easy to misunderstand a text or an email and not get the intonations and the the mood and the theme and make false assumptions.
Lance Christensen:Oh, well, they're angry because they typed in all caps. Well, maybe the caps lock is just stuck and they're not angry. It's or they just don't know any better. Mhmm. Being able to have that that personal communication really works.
Lance Christensen:When it comes to ghosting too, a lot of times when drivers are in the process, especially if you've got the disjointed process where recruiting hands it off to safety, which hands it off to HR, it's easy to have significant gaps in that hiring process. Whenever there's a significant gap of 24 well, let's say 20 4 to 48 hours, greater than 24 or 48 hours. It's easy for a driver when they're getting all those inbound calls because they applied maybe at 5 different carriers. It's easy for them to forget you and remember the one that just called them 30 minutes ago. Mhmm.
Lance Christensen:But if you have regular consistent communication and you have that static point of contact that you get to know, that is gonna be communicating on a daily or every other day basis, then that that connection doesn't get broken. Despite the fact that somebody's coming in and trying to break that connection every day by trying to recruit that driver and get him to orientation quicker. The ability to keep them engaged in that funnel is is so very important.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. Do you think, like, with the increase in AI and automation, making it really easy to follow-up more consistently via email, via text, to be automated calls that connect, Do you think that helps or hinders your recruiting department, like, in terms of retention?
Lance Christensen:It helps. It helps. Yes. Because it does make it easier. And the best way to do that is have the AI help make your job easier, but not to take your job away.
Lance Christensen:AI is impersonal or it's a fake personal. It can write a beautiful email, it can write some great letters and content. I see people using AI to generate content all the time. I'm not an advocate for that because it seems mechanical despite despite the fact that it sounds good, it really sounds cliff notes. It sounds copied.
Lance Christensen:It sounds not genuine. I love drip campaigns and emails and email blasts and using templates, but the problem with a lot of the way things are written, it's not personal. Nothing is better than a a personal email that you can tell is only yours. It is not, hey, driver. Hope you're having a great weekend.
Lance Christensen:Well, I mean, hey, driver. I know it's a I know it's a chain email. But I mean, if you even if you insert fields and it says, hey, Steve, If the language in it is not personal, it's not conversational, if it sounds like a chain letter, it probably is a chain letter or a chain email or chain text. And we get enough of those in a day. I mean, spam is amazing, the level of spam that's out there now, via text and via email.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. And I think it's only gonna 10 x, like, over what it's at now. And, yeah, that's one one of the things we believe in at Trucking Clicks and Hire Truckers is, yeah, just focusing on the human element.
Lance Christensen:Nothing Because defeats the the phone getting a real genuine phone call from a live person.
Aaron Craddock:And I think that's gonna become more important. I think, again, it's just my theory. Like, you you could go the route that, hey, automation is gonna, you know, drive efficiency, and that's just how people are gonna get used to communicating. But my theory is that it's gonna go more the route of people wanting more human connection, more personalization, more community. And even just with the work from home and just all the different trends we have, I think there's almost a reversal of where people want to get in person.
Aaron Craddock:And and, you know, and I think the neck you know, the step towards that is, like, an actual phone call over an email, actual reach out or voice text or something that's personalized. And that that's kinda kinda bet that we're making as a company is that that's that's what even their directors of recruiting want in their vendor partners too is, like, an actual relationship and, not just drive efficiency, lowest cost, least meetings, all that. I think it's let's really be connected and then share in united goals. Because it's it's not only work goals, but also personal goals and other things, like, we're all trying to accomplish in our lives and careers, like, multiple different things. And they're they're all connected.
Aaron Craddock:Like and that brings up another point just with the rise of technology. Like, we're you can we can have the the tendency to always be working and always be online. And yeah. Just how do you how do you establish that that personal connection?
Lance Christensen:Yeah.
Aaron Craddock:So one of the things one of the reasons I was excited to have you have you on the on the on our show is that you lead you lead with value just in your online presence and focus. You know, you have over over 20,000 LinkedIn followers. And, one of the things I've seen you do in the last, I don't know how long you've done it. The the Monday minute, how long have you been doing that?
Lance Christensen:It's a it's a little over a year.
Aaron Craddock:Okay. That's what I was gonna say. I I think I remember noticing the first ones, like, a year ago. And, you know, a lot of times you see these things come on and people do them for a month and then drop off. Like, I think, you know, only 9 out of you know, only 1 out of 10 might continue, like, with adding value and the consistency and stuff like that.
Aaron Craddock:And and that's something I think you've done really well is leading with value. And why do you do that? Like, why do you think it's important to lead with value in the industry? Because I know that takes up extra time and and, you know, we all have a finite amount of time and resources.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. There's, there's been many a time that I lost sleep because I was just trying to to to finish up with a topic. I'm a firm believer in in paying it forward and and presenting that value. Now that I'm no longer technically on the recruiting side, I'm not a recruiting leader at a company. I'm a more or less a recruiting leader at 100 of companies because of, I've got a larger client base that I I consult and help.
Lance Christensen:But I really honestly believe that if I help recruiting leaders perform better and recruiting teams perform better, being now on the, the media and lead gen side, it helps them work what the services that I provide helps them get a better result from what I do. So I'm helping them help me, essentially. We all win. If if I give them lots of of value in in applications and leads and interested candidates and beautiful creative, and I do my job very well and they do their job poorly, we both lose. So if they do their job well, I do my job well, we both win.
Lance Christensen:So it's in my best interest to help them to perform at peak performance.
Aaron Craddock:Who have you had invest in you, like, throughout your career? Has it been people you've worked with, like, other peers in the industry, other recruiting directors, like, who who kind of invested in you that made you kinda realize the power of that?
Lance Christensen:There there definitely been some great leaders in my past. Everything from in the, the staffing world, boy, and in the in the trucking space. There's there's definitely been some folks that have influenced me. A lot of who I am is is more or less self made because the entrepreneurial background and the startups that I held. But in that, I got to meet a lot of amazing people.
Lance Christensen:Brian Filka, who was with Jeff JETCO that end up getting kind of merged into larger organizations, and now he's just on the speaking circuit. Joyce Russell at Adecco was an amazing leader. Sandy Gomez at Adecco, amazing leader. Jill Quinn at Trans at at Centerline. True Blue, great leader.
Lance Christensen:Luke Simon Dinger at at Hub Group, who's now at TTSI. I mean, I've I've met some just really exceptional people that we've built magical things together, and, you know, they supported me in in my ideas and creativity. And and now here at Bayard, I mean, I got brought on by the chief strategy officer, going from recruiting over to media, and he has had my back. Michael Halpern has had my back in in countless iterations to let me do what I need to do to succeed. And now through the acquisition, I was a little worried that that would that would vaporize, but Chris Foreman, the CEO of Appcast, he is, he's he and his team have just picked it up.
Lance Christensen:And again, they they support me in what I do, and it's fantastic.
Aaron Craddock:And I think that's one of the one of the reasons you've had retention, like, good retention with your different teams, over the years is because, you know, you learn from people investing in you and giving you some of what I heard is giving you autonomy to just run with it and, and believing in you. I think there's kind of a belief component you can one one of the things as I've built teams over the last few years is realize that you can, like, speak like, you can see potential in someone on your team, and then you can speak that into them and see it become a reality over time. And, and I kind of pride myself as that being one of my that's one of my superpowers is I can see even if someone hasn't done a specific role, I can see, wow, you would be an incredible leader in this. You would be incredible at innovation and just the power of our words to you can almost create that in somebody. I mean, they have to choose to accept it and then take the actions.
Aaron Craddock:Right? And so some people, you know, I've had people on some of my teams not do that. And and then they haven't grown into that. And then there's also a subset that accepts that and takes it and becomes that. And then and then there's like a whole another level and a whole another level, and you just keep speaking it into them and investing in them.
Aaron Craddock:Like, have you seen that with with your teams over over the years?
Lance Christensen:Oh, absolutely. I mean, you and I, when we first started interacting with each other a few years ago, we early on, we determined that we're both empathetic leaders. And I do love the fact that empathy is now considered more of a a skill and a a desirable attribute in a leader when when before it used to be considered a weakness. As a recruiting leader, I've had times where I've inherited teams that I was told by the outgoing team or the executive leadership, this individual is a washout. They're done.
Lance Christensen:They're no good. They used to be good, but they're just burned out. You probably have to let them go. You probably have to let this person go. This this person needs help, and these are our top performers.
Lance Christensen:And, you know, 6 months later, they're all still there, and and they're all performing very, very well. I like to really get to know the teams that are working for me, to work with them, to determine what their what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what their goals are, what their passions are, and put them in the right place. Give them the right tools so that they function the way that they were built to function. And a lot of times burnout, when when somebody burns out, it's it's not because they hated the job or they never would have been good in the first place. They burn out because usually lack of support or lack of growth or lack of guidance, lack of leadership.
Lance Christensen:I mean, those things are all easily cured, especially if you're an empathetic leader and you can actually pick up on what what really is taking place there.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. Early in my career, I didn't value empathy or emotional intelligence. I thought of it more as, hey. We do these actions, and if we're the best, we'll grow. And, you know, kinda learned the hard way in when I didn't focus on relationships and helping people.
Aaron Craddock:And then, like, when I made a career transition four and a half years ago to to running my own company, I thought back on, you know, what were my biggest successes and wins. And and it all had to do with helping people be successful, like, not in our organization, like the organization I worked for, but, like, seeing them, you know, sometimes in the organization get promoted to different positions and grow, you know, from entry level person to vice president or whatever role they moved into. And but also to other companies. Like, I you know, I've had so much satisfaction seeing someone be, like, the head of an international missions organization or leader, you know, marketing leader at this Fortune 500 company or different you know, and just celebrating whatever that is. And and that's where my most fulfillment has come in.
Aaron Craddock:And so the way that we've operationalized that at at Hire Truckers is we do like, all the leaders on our team do a performance review, which I I still don't even like that term. But everybody on our team kinda learns that it's not we're never gonna bring something up that we haven't brought up before. Like like we might bring up an improvement area, but we we should have brought it up 5 times before the meeting like you're never surprised And and we're always aiming to give constructive criticism because I believe everyone can grow, even even your best, best team members that are already off the charts. But most of that meeting that we have every quarter with everyone on the team is what are your personal goals? Like, what are what are your career goals?
Aaron Craddock:And and I'm not offended if it's, hey, running my own company in a year, or I see myself in this other organization, or I don't even wanna be in transportation. Like, that like, that's great. I'll help you get there. Like, I would much rather partner with our team and help them get to their goals. And and and I'm thankful for the season there with us.
Aaron Craddock:And then also, I, you know, simultaneously, I am gonna aim to have a biggest a big vision that they can do that within my vision. But sometimes, you know, sometimes that's not the case. And, and I celebrate that. And then the other thing I've seen too is like, you know, some leaders have worked worked with me in the past and then they've worked with me in this organization as well. And so I think that's one of the things you see too is they might go do something for a while and then and then come back.
Aaron Craddock:And and I think the differentiator is providing that amazing culture. And to your point, it is a a massive investment to take take that time. And I think, you know, on the on the vendor side, that investment's worth it. And and even when you were talking about the carrier side earlier, that it's important there too. And sometimes, you know, may not have the margins to justify it in the moment.
Aaron Craddock:But then some of the retention wins that you were just talking about where the fleets picked up, doubled their retention rate. And you know, what what is the actual economic implications of that? Oh, 100%. We know we know transportation can be low margin, but But if you actually do the math and you're saving several $1,000,000 in retention, like, well, maybe you can hire more people and invest in culture. And and I think all that rises and falls on leadership too.
Aaron Craddock:So and and a lot of times you can speak that into your leaders, kinda like you talked about, where people are like, oh, this guy is just not worth it. Like, that that might be because the previous leader didn't speak life into him and or hold him accountable or or give them, you know, a picture of what success looks like. So I think all that all that rises and falls on leadership. And I and I even think, you know, that as, on the vendor or agency side, like like, with Appcast and and Bayard, you you guys can coach on that and and help on that and add value in that process. And that that's where I think a lot of your, you know, decades of experience adds a ton of value to the market.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. A 100%. You you you spoke to so many good good points there. One of them just being the economic value. Being able to make changes that financially impact an organization are huge.
Lance Christensen:I've seen companies that make hiring decisions based off of say a leader's salary. They'll say, well, you know, we're really looking for somebody at a 120,000 and this person wants a 160. That's impossible for us to come up with. And then I always fight that argument. If one leader is able to make a a impact I mean, I've I've been at companies where my impact has been measurable in into 7 digits.
Lance Christensen:How can you argue about a a $40,000 a year expense when you're able to glean far more than that in the value of that leader. Yeah. And a recruiting leader, think of it this in this sense. You have recruiting leader a, they can get their team to say, hire a 100 drivers per month. You have recruiting leader b that can lead a team that could hire a 150 drivers a month.
Lance Christensen:What's the EBITDA off of a driver in a truck? If you can get 50 more trucks on the road, is it worth paying that recruiting leader more? Absolutely. But sometimes we just we don't see the forest for the trees. Having the right people in the right roles will financially bring success to the company.
Lance Christensen:Heard that time and time again, the right people hiring the right people makes all the difference when it comes to leaders.
Aaron Craddock:Mhmm.
Lance Christensen:And, yeah.
Aaron Craddock:The benefits It's just crazy crazy the difference in talent. Like, when you get up to that, the top tier of the best, like, the best 1%, like, they can outperform somebody that's on, like, maybe the 80, 90% level by 10 x or 50 x. Like, it's just insane because especially when you're hiring for those leadership roles, it's a multiplicative thing. And, like, everything just even something as simple as, like, showing up the way you say you're gonna show up. If you don't do that consistently, then you can't expect the next leader leadership level down, like, to do that and the next leadership level down.
Aaron Craddock:So it just has such a multiplicative effect.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. It's also that lead by example. Mhmm. They're gonna emulate what what you do at the top.
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Aaron Craddock:Visit truckingclicks.com or call 512-982-0816 today. And one one of the things I wanted to I could talk all day about the talent side of things and retention and creating amazing culture, because that that's one of my favorite things. But I do wanna make sure as we're as we're wrapping up time that we dive more into just because it's big news that Appcast acquired Bayard, you know, 2 companies with decades of experience and then Bayard with, you know, a 100 years in in the market. Like, what excites you about the Bayard acquisition by Appcast and how this better equips, your now united teams towards adding value in our industry?
Lance Christensen:Yeah. Being acquired by a tech company, I mean, if there was any I mean, I I don't wanna speak poorly about that, but if there's any weakness on it, it was probably a little bit on the technology side. Technology and advertising having having really excellent tools, And and Baird had a what they labeled as a technology agnostic approach. They didn't really have any of their own internal clients of different pieces of software and different technology, and it was right for each client. But when it came to assembling that and building the strategy around that, it was it was always complicated and hard, and the process is sometimes of getting everything kicked off were were difficult.
Lance Christensen:Once everything was running, it was fantastic, but not really having anything internal technology wise. Appcast is a technology platform, and there are some amazing people behind the architecture of that. I had used Appcast through Bear white labeling it as app feeder. I I've been using it for for many years and was always amazed how it could deliver I consider programmatic like the heavy lift during recruiting. You throw the bulk of your jobs on there, all of the relatively easy to fill simple jobs to medium skilled jobs, you get pipelines filled on those.
Lance Christensen:And that saves the recruiter bandwidth and the greater strategy for the harder to fill roles. And Appcast does that does that very, very well. It's not to say that they're the only ones out there and there are other platforms that I've sold and worked with and they've performed perfectly fine. Programmatic is programmatic, but, having that kind of a resource with technology and, you know, they're they're deep into the AI. Our parent company company, StepStone Group, and Axel Springer heavily invested into AI.
Lance Christensen:They have massive teams. I've heard of a 150 people just working on AI concepts. Wow. It's just, yeah, it's just amazing seeing some of the stuff that I've seen now and know that I'm part of that. Whereas before, I was always dependent on other providers for the gadgets and and the neat stuff.
Lance Christensen:But to see it being developed internally just really thrills me.
Aaron Craddock:And so how does that how does that set you up to better serve, you know, clients that rolled from Bayard now into Appcast? And then have you already seen positive results as a result of that?
Lance Christensen:I've already seen it, for sure. Well, we've been at quarterly meetings with clients that hire, you know, a 100000 employees a year and seeing how the marriage of the 2 organizations in that client have basically just boosted performance to a level that is just unreal. And you go into a quarterly meeting with a client and it almost seems more like a, you know, a celebration as opposed to a quarterly review. And that is and I've had back to back QBRs since just this last month that we're you walk away feeling so good, it it's almost unreal. And a lot of that's just because the technology and the reporting capabilities now that we've had the internal systems and processes as opposed to outside vendors.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. And imagine how it'll be even just over the next 6 months to year as you continue to get better integrated and and work together. Yeah. That'll be really cool to watch.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. I'm I'm I'm anxious for the future, especially when it comes to some of the sticky stuff like you did. Plea attribution is always everybody's pain. No app applicant tracking system handles it well. The applicant tracking systems tend to, like they're good at understanding lead attribution at the bottom half of the funnel.
Lance Christensen:And then the advertisers, the media are relatively good at understanding lead attribution at the top of the funnel. But somewhere in between those 2, everything gets disjointed and reports don't match up. You know? Clients see one thing, technology sees the other thing, and they they don't match. Appcast is really developing some great tools that basically go from impression all the way to hire and draw that line all the way through for lead attribution so you know the secret sauce that ends up in the hire.
Aaron Craddock:Yeah. I love that because there's there's such a you know, being on the lead gen side, vendor side for for the last 12 years or so, we've almost purely focused on just hires at the end of the funnel. Kinda like what you're talking about. Just the last last touch or last couple touches. But there's so much that goes into it where you can be more strategic.
Aaron Craddock:So draw drawing a parallel to where what we talked about earlier in terms of investment in the team and the culture. I also think there's an opportunity, and you and I have had a lot of talks over the past year and a half on importance of brand and just in in the market and in the industry. And so what I hear when you're talking about marrying all that together is being able to actually prove that investment in in branding of a fleet all the way through to the hire. Because I think one thing people don't realize is, you know, you might invest a $100,000 in branding at the top of the funnel, And then that improves your hire rate by like 30% on marketing dollars. And so but you don't see that for a while.
Aaron Craddock:And so it's, you know, we can be so caught up in, you know, making budget decisions on a monthly basis or a weekly basis based on just the pains we're feeling, but then not be strategic. So I think it's kind of I get excited about it because I think you guys can help facilitate just the marrying of all that together in a longer term strategy and making really solid branding business decisions.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. Branding, I I have never seen branding not have an ROI. It's it's not that it it's it's tough because when you're arguing branding budgets, they're looking for how many hires did I get out of it? How many how many how many applications came in? And the reality is drawing those lines together, it's it's money.
Lance Christensen:In the past, what I've always done is the the deeper I push into branding, I I look at the whole picture. How many applications resulted in hires last year? How many hires did we make last year? We've invested another 100,000 into branding. How many hires do we have this year?
Lance Christensen:How many applications did we receive this year? The holistic large picture. I'm not trying to narrow it down to the specific media because branding improves all of the media. It improves organic traffic. It improves include improves paid traffic.
Lance Christensen:It in it improves performance of just organic social posts. It it improves everything because that that brand recognition. I always fall back to something like, you know, Starbucks for coffee. Starbucks has done so good for their brand that when you want coffee, you just automatically think Starbucks. Now when you automatically think about a driving job, if you do a branding perfectly to a particular driver audience, say LTL, and they just automatically associate LTL with a particular employer, you've won.
Lance Christensen:Mhmm. That's brand new.
Aaron Craddock:Because then they're searching for your fleet, which we know is a much less expensive click relative to searching for a general term where you're not so you're no longer fighting with a 100 people. You're fighting with, like, maybe 2 or 3 people that might be bidding on your brand. And so you get that for a tenth of the cost. 100%. And and and that's just the click cost when you actually look at conversion rates.
Aaron Craddock:The conversion rates are
Lance Christensen:higher because they're already sold
Aaron Craddock:on They're even higher too. So it's like the like conversion rates are higher. And so you make up mean, so sometimes it can be like a 15 x, you know, better lead that comes in, in turn if you actually look at the cost and then the the the conversion to higher. So
Lance Christensen:An applicant that comes to your brand for a job because they already believe in it, is not gonna ghost. They're gonna go through the process quicker. They more likely than not did not apply to 5 or 6 other jobs that you have to compete against. So you don't have 5 recruiters calling them. You only have your recruiter calling them because you're the only place they applied.
Lance Christensen:Because you did such a good job on the branding, you're the only place they want to work.
Aaron Craddock:And I think timing just with everyone, you know, you're a lot more fleets having full trucks right now than typical, seasons. I mean, timing. If you if you already have that budget carved out, like, invest that in branding now. And and I think I think the player which players have already been doing that for the last, you know, 6 months. And the ones the ones that did that over the last 6 months and do it over the next 6 months, like, they're going to pick up market share.
Aaron Craddock:Like, the market is going to come back. We're gonna have another run on everybody fighting over drivers, and the the ones that have invested in it in this season are gonna pick up market share.
Lance Christensen:And I
Aaron Craddock:think there's still an opportunity for that over the next few months too.
Lance Christensen:Yeah. One of my one of my goofy analogies there would be, you know, think of the 3 little pigs and building the house. The ones that are developing branding are the ones that are building the the brick house. And when the market turns and the big bad wolf comes along, we we know which house we wanna be in.
Aaron Craddock:Yep. Alright. Well, I'm gonna end on the pig analogy. The 3 little piggies. I think that was perfect to tie us up.
Aaron Craddock:So Lance, thank you so much. I enjoy these conversations every time we have them, and I and always learn so much. And I'm always just encouraged. Like, you just have this positive attitude and approach to the industry that we really need. Because I think a lot of times there can be, you know, just negativity and we have all these pressures because it it it being either a fleet executive or director of recruiting or a vendor is a high pressure, high pressure job.
Aaron Craddock:And, the, yeah, I just appreciate the the positivity and sharing and giving attitude that you add to our industry.
Lance Christensen:You've been a great partner, great friend. It's a pleasure speaking with you too, Aaron.
Aaron Craddock:Thank you for joining us today. Our goal with the Hire Truckers podcast podcast is to provide industry insights, marketing trends, and motivation to level up your recruiting game. If we added value, take a few seconds to share this with your network. Have a great week.