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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. Welcome to the Hire Truckers podcast. I'm your host, Aaron Craddock, and I'm excited about the episode today. So today is actually in preparation for a speech I'm doing at the Driver Employment Council of America, coming up this Friday.
Aaron Craddock:And so I'm using this show kind of as a practice run for some of the content that we're gonna cover there. So, I know some of you listening were probably at DECA, and so I have a feeling this will be a little bit different today but similar. And, I hope you guys got some value from the conference and then also get some value from my time with you today. And so the focus of today's show is quality over quantity, smarter driver recruiting. So again, quality over quantity, smarter driver recruiting.
Aaron Craddock:And so the tagline is build teams that last, recruit smarter, lead stronger. And so a little bit about what I'm going to talk to you guys today about is recruiting retention related, even some case studies, things like that. I thought a lot about what I could go in today. But I think more than anything, the value that I can add today is just to encourage you guys to embrace big goals, go after big things. And so this will be as much professional development, startup part of my story, what's working, what's not working, a little bit of that, and then a little bit of driver recruitment and team building, basically just kind of a mix of all the things that I'm passionate about talking about and things that we talk about on the show pretty regularly.
Aaron Craddock:And so where it started. So a little over seven years ago, me and my teams had run several $100,000,000 in ads. At that point, we had bought multiple different job boards at the company I worked for. We had built different job sites. And so I had a lot of experience.
Aaron Craddock:And that's one of the things that built all this. Just to go a little bit into what happened. So again, had built a large team, had a lot of success, and transitioned into some different roles. And then I had one of the hardest moments of my life. I go into the office one day, and I notice things are a little bit different.
Aaron Craddock:The desks are different. My boss is in town. He's usually not there. And I had looked at people's calendars. Anyway, was just weird.
Aaron Craddock:I felt like things were off. And a little while later, I got summoned into HR's office or actually, my boss's office at the time. And so I went in there. And at this point, knew something was up. But HR was in there.
Aaron Craddock:And they proceeded to tell me that my position had been eliminated. And so that was hard. And my next thought was, what do I do? How do I tell my wife? And so I was like, I have to have a plan.
Aaron Craddock:And so I sit down by the river after meeting with HR and the leader for an hour. I went down by the river, no longer had a job, and sat there and was like, what did I tell my wife? Like, her question is going to be, do we have to sell the house? Because she is on a teacher salary. I was on executive salary.
Aaron Craddock:And I'm like, I don't really know the answer to that. But I can take some action. And so I proceeded to go to the local startup incubator in Tuscaloosa. That's where I lived at the time. And the executive director happened to be there, which again, I don't think anything is coincidence.
Aaron Craddock:I think it was a God thing. And I met with her. Her name is Teresa. And said, Hey, can I start a business here tomorrow? She's like, well, do you have an LLC?
Aaron Craddock:Anyway, we went through the things. I went through my vision. And she said, sure. And so I signed up as a member through my company that's Krak Holdings, which all these companies are under, like TruckingClicks and hiretruckers.com, things like that. Anyway, so that day, I think it was a little over six years ago, in 2019 was my last day, but also the start of something new.
Aaron Craddock:And so my vision at that time was how do I create a job site or company that's differentiated in the driver recruitment space? And again, we you know, had several $100,000,000 in ad spend and different sites and different businesses we acquired, like, just a lot of experience. And where I saw a hole was in quality leads, like, a job site. And so that's where I decided to focus. And so how do we do quality leads, but not only quality leads, but quality leads at scale?
Aaron Craddock:Because one of things I noticed as we built as I built out that last department in my w two was how much effort went into even small accounts. And so a thousand dollar a month client takes sometimes more work than maybe a $10,000 a month client. And so basically, we picked a spot in the market that's $20,000 and up monthly budget. So that's typically, I think, a good market, that's 200 plus truck fleets. In a down market like we've been in the last few years, it has been more 500 plus truck fleets.
Aaron Craddock:And so that's a 100% what we tailored to out of the gate when I launched Trucking Clicks. And then we just listen to our clients. We're like, hey. What do they need? What are the pain points?
Aaron Craddock:And and that's part of why I started the Hire Truckers podcast, which subtle plug, if you're not subscribed yet, I include you and I encourage you to to subscribe to the show. So I've been able to talk to a lot of recruiting directors, a lot of c level executives at some of the largest fleets in the country, and ask them what they need. And it comes down to not tying up recruiter time, a lot of automations, things like that, and just having fewer leads convert to a hire. And so that's something I want to go into. And so that was just, again, it was a vision years ago.
Aaron Craddock:Trucking clicks did not exist until two years into the ordeal. And then I had an opportunity to acquire hiretruckers.com. And so I had met with a few different people that have had successful exits in this industry and built some really cool businesses. And one of those conversations sticks out where the mentor suggested that whatever company name you have, it needs to be clear what you do. You want to have to do all the marketing to describe something.
Aaron Craddock:You want it in the name. So when I saw hiretruckers.com for sale, and that's a little bit of a crazy story, but I got it. I went after it full out and was able to acquire the domain hiretruckers.com. And I had a vision for that. Again, how do we create a job site?
Aaron Craddock:How do we create a product that agencies can work with, applicant tracking systems? Again, to reach my goals in terms of volume, like, need to work with everybody. We need to work well. We need to integrate well. It needs to be easy, no friction.
Aaron Craddock:We want to make it really easy for agency partners to upload jobs. We want to make it really easy to turn on stuff, turn off stuff, change stuff. So that's really what it went into when we started building the back end of hiretruckers.com. And so and then as we were planning it, it kinda became more clear that it was gonna be a media company. So we have the hiretruckers.com podcast, and then it's a job site.
Aaron Craddock:So hiretruckers.com jobs. And then it's also a community. And so more and more community, like we're going to be launching, that's a thing to come, is communities in the space to where you can meet with your peers, have these talks like we're having on the podcast, but be able to get in front of these guests that I get to spend time with, for you to get to spend time with them as well. And so, yeah, what started as a bad thing, a layoff, ended with me having become a completely new person. And so some of that journey, just even flashing forward to today, I just finished a program called 75 Hard yesterday, which you've probably heard of that.
Aaron Craddock:That is two workouts a day, drink a gallon of water, read 10 pages a day, no cheat meals, like stick to a diet, no alcohol, and maybe a couple other things. But anyway, do that for 75 days straight. So the hardest thing is probably a mix between the workouts and chugging a gallon of water. Because to get two forty five minute chunks one of those has to be outside of workouts, it's pretty challenging. And so why would I do something crazy like that?
Aaron Craddock:It's because of the person I need to become to accomplish the vision I have for my different companies is not the person when I had that vision, it wasn't the person I was then. At my height, I was one hundred pounds heavier than I am standing here today. I struggled with addiction, alcoholism. I had just unhealthy relationships. I wasn't showing up at work the way I should.
Aaron Craddock:So I'd had a lot of success in my career, but I was just empty and and didn't really have that next purpose. Now let's take a minute to thank today's sponsor. Do you hire truck drivers in hard to fill areas, or do you need help creating efficiency in your recruiting department? You're not alone. With fifty plus years experience, TruckingClicks specializes in data driven strategies, industry leading customer experience, and custom solutions that'll get you to your goal.
Aaron Craddock:TruckingClicks is your go to place for high quality direct leads at scale. Visit truckingclicks.com or call (512) 982-0816 today. And so that's kinda what what my journey has been the last few years and part of why we have on the Hire Truckers podcast. Like, we have the personal development angle, the growth mindset. The reason I ask questions around that is because I know how much I need to grow because I saw who I need to be as a leader and who I need to be as a leader in my family, as a leader in my company, who I wanted to be in terms of a person of faith and my relationship with Jesus.
Aaron Craddock:A lot needed to change. And so I'm thankful to say today I've been sober. Coming up on February will be five years. That was a big part, cutting out the alcohol. There's a longer story there, of course.
Aaron Craddock:Additionally, yeah, I just went on this journey to lose 100 pounds. And so why am I sharing that? I am sharing that because I think we can do a lot more than we think is possible. And so as you're thinking about your different roles in your company, whether you're the CEO, the VP, the director, manager, recruiter, any level in the organization, I think you can accomplish a vision and you can impact other leaders. Yeah, so day one, it started out with a vision, the problem.
Aaron Craddock:So leads just to dive into that a little bit more. So leads don't equal hires. And so several of the fleets I had worked with in my W2 may get over 100 leads for one hire. And just thinking about the waste of recruiter time and so sometimes so the recruiters are overwhelmed, low quality leads, a lot of do not replies. Now, the interesting thing there is versus direct leads, back then, most stuff we ran, like a lot of times, the leads that were a lower quality may go to 50 different carriers.
Aaron Craddock:Those leads or even 10 different carriers, those leads actually did convert relative to the cost. So if you're getting a $5 lead, it might be a decent cost per hire if you hire one out of 100 or one out of 200, like $500 $1,000 cost per hire in terms of marketing costs. However, that's the part of the market I didn't feel like there was any job site in the market that could focus on that. So the shift, we wanted to go and focus on switching from volume to value. And so when we launched TruckingClicks, that's what we focused on.
Aaron Craddock:And so I initially hired talent with a lot of expertise in Google Ads and then Meta. And that was our real our real focus is, like, how are we the best, at Google Ads where most hires ultimately come from? And and that's where we focused before we launched tiretruckers.com. So now we launched Hire Truckers, the job site, the 2023 or 2024. I can't remember exactly.
Aaron Craddock:But in that initial beta test with the first couple million dollars in ads, our vision became a reality. And so we've seen, like in this particular case study right here, which was over a 5,000 truck fleet, we ended up on a large portion of their budget cutting the leads in half and having more hires. And this is a little bit of the data here. And so 50% fewer leads worked, higher quality, higher retention. We noticed that those drivers we were bringing in, as we anticipated based on our model, tend to stay at the fleet longer.
Aaron Craddock:And so not even taking retention into account, there was a lower overall hiring cost for those fleets. And then the next section I'm going go into is sharing with you guys some of the things I've learned by doing the Hire Truckers podcast and all the people we've been able to interview. So most of the interviews I've done have been with director of recruiting, vice president of recruiting, things like that. And so one of the biggest takeaways I've had so far is that relationships build retention. Again, write that down.
Aaron Craddock:Relationships build retention. And so all of the different retention lines we had, they were all drawn back to how is the recruiter building those relationships. Like, how are they working the leads? How are they following the leads through to hire? How are they following the leads post hire?
Aaron Craddock:And it's all relationships. Drivers, if you look at most of the data, they stay for people, not for pay. I think that's in any industry. Usually, it's bad manager, bad dispatcher, poor equipment can be a reason to. But that's why they leave.
Aaron Craddock:And so if you want to keep your people, you've got to stay engaged with them. You've to really care about what they want. And so my quote for lesson one is from Luke Wimberly, who's on the show. If you can offer a driver a personal relationship, that's gold. And we've seen that recurring theme from some of the best recruiting departments in the nation focusing on that personal relationship, really focusing on the driver.
Aaron Craddock:Retention is just a byproduct of relationship. So next, lesson two from the show is support the driver. This is one of my favorites. There's two jobs in trucking drive and support the driver. So within a trucking organization, there are two jobs.
Aaron Craddock:And this is a quote I like from Tracy Rushing with Ari Garrison. If you're not driving the truck, your role is to support the person who does. So again, if you're not driving the truck, your role is to support the person who does. And again, I think this is from C level to office people to dispatchers. Everything is centered on none of you make any money.
Aaron Craddock:Nothing moves forward. The business goes away if we don't have these drivers. And so, having that instilled into the company culture across the board is huge. So lesson three, communicate with honesty. This is the third lesson from the podcast.
Aaron Craddock:So honesty converts better than hype. So there are several fleets out there that'll just hype a position, like hype the position in the ads and maybe oversell it. But then more than anything, it's the recruiter's one on one conversations with a driver where they're hyping it too much. And so how do you communicate truthfully? I even think some of the better fleets and recruiting departments communicate in a way where I think this quote sums it up really well.
Aaron Craddock:So if the phone rings, answer it. Communicate truthfully. You can't win without trust. And so sometimes, I think being like, hey, you're going to get all these miles. You're going get all the miles.
Aaron Craddock:You're going to get home as much as you want. Everything's perfect. There are no complaints from any drivers. I think that's how you, a lot of times, don't get the driver because they don't trust you, which they're accurately not trusting you. And then, if you do get them, they're that type of driver that will bounce in the first thirty days.
Aaron Craddock:And a lot of fleets, that's one of their their biggest challenges is those fleets bouncing in the first thirty days. And so one of our values at Trucking Cliques Hire Truckers is radical honesty. And so it's really cool on the shows to hear what fleets are doing that's working. Think literally, I think there are five different director recruiting we've interviewed where that's been one of the number one things is just communicate with honesty. That's even like saying, here is the thing that's going to be challenging about a particular job.
Aaron Craddock:So lesson number four, culture overpay. Culture overpay. So hire for culture, not just compensation. And so Lance Christensen, who I had on the show, says, if you attract drivers for money, they'll leave you for money. Build culture, and that'll stay.
Aaron Craddock:And so culture is cheaper and stronger than constant pay wars. And so we see that a lot in transportation. You're like, hey, if I just raise the pay and don't focus on culture, I can be the highest paying in this market, and I can pick up all these drivers. And it does actually work. You will hire more.
Aaron Craddock:However, the net benefit isn't what you anticipate because you're going to have a lower retention rate in that scenario. So you have to value culture overpay. So lesson five is fixed retention first. And so don't fill a leaky bucket. So this is from a quote from Sadie Church.
Aaron Craddock:You're recruiting drivers into a bucket full of holes unless you fix retention first. And so, we really encourage fleets to dive into retention and focus on that. And again, it's back to one of the earlier lessons, communicate with honesty and support the driver and build a relationship. So all those things are related. And how does the recruiting process so as you're why we're successful at Hire Truckers Trucking Clicks is how we help the fleet with how does this process help get higher quality drivers.
Aaron Craddock:And some of that is they're the drivers that are willing to have the honest conversations with you. And then how do you keep those, filling that leaky bucket? So the next lesson, lesson six, is small changes create big shifts. So small changes are big results. I know you've all heard the 1% better every single day.
Aaron Craddock:You'd think, Okay, that makes me 300% better. But it's actually 37 times better in a year if you just improve 1% a day. So think even if we challenge our recruiting departments to do any of these things we just mentioned, 1% better every day, like the change that you can see. Even if it's just a 25% bump in retention for the year, just think about how much marketing costs you'd save there. You don't need a massive overhaul.
Aaron Craddock:Small results add up to huge change. It's a quote from Luke Wimberly. Consistency compounds in recruiting and in leadership. So I think if a fleet expects the drivers to lead by that radical honesty and put people first, well, then that leader better be doing that as well. And the next lesson, lesson seven, is never assume no.
Aaron Craddock:So ask boldly, lead boldly. And so you don't know the answer until you ask. We had one of these exercises when I was in grad school where we had to go ask everybody in the class. So I was doing my MBA at Alabama. Had to go ask for 10 different things, but they had to get no as an answer.
Aaron Craddock:It's called collecting no's. Your goal was to ask for things that you thought you would get no as the answer and see if people would say yes. And so I think someone asked for a four wheeler, and somebody just gave it to them. One of my craziest things was I went to Taco Bell and asked for, I think it was like 200 hot sauce packets, they and gave me 200 hot sauce packets with my mobile order. We were just amazed.
Aaron Craddock:So just never assume the answer is no. Never assume what the driver's thinking. Just ask what they're thinking. Personal transformation story. So again, losing the 100 and how this ties into.
Aaron Craddock:So here's the before picture of me over here. And then here's the after picture. So I and again, if you're just listening to the audio, you can see this on social media. I've posted about it. So I was one hundred pounds heavier.
Aaron Craddock:I don't even look like the same person. And I'm not the same person in a lot of different ways. And so I spent years just chasing more and more success, more output. But the true transformation came from quality in my life. The quality of food, quality of relationships, quality of workout, thinking about the quality of what media I'm consuming.
Aaron Craddock:All those things have been a huge journey. And again, wouldn't have allowed us to grow in the different businesses if I hadn't grown that way personally. And I couldn't lead my team in the way that I am if I hadn't grown in this area. And so I just had to include that today just as I just wrapped up 75 Hard and getting back into the best shape of my life. And again, this all started with a vision of we need quality hires at scale.
Aaron Craddock:Well, I have to be a quality human being. I have to be good at communicating. I have to be good with relationships. I need to have a thriving marriage. What does that Aaron look like that can accomplish those goals?
Aaron Craddock:And he needed to, in this case, lose 105 pounds. So I'm actually getting close to my goal. Like today, I'm 11 pounds away from my annual goal here, and that'll be 105 pounds down total. So my leadership challenge to you guys, rethink what's possible. So I kind of talked about that at the beginning, and that's been the biggest journey the last six or seven years of building a business in the transportation industry.
Aaron Craddock:So I thought it was going to be easier when I cast the vision. I was like, Oh, I have all this experience. It'll be super easy and happen really quickly. That hasn't been the case, but I did have a vision of where I was going. And so it starts with vision and then aligning who you need to be as a person to accomplish that vision.
Aaron Craddock:And so that may be scaling your your third party recruiting services. That might be on the fleet side, improving retention, having just the best culture in the industry, you have to start with the vision. And so I encourage you just either to think about your businesses right now. What's a vision that you've kind of shrunk back from, but something you want to accomplish? And then think about your health.
Aaron Craddock:Is there a vision, something you want to accomplish there? Think about your faith. Is that an area you want to grow in? Think about your family. Do you want to change how you spend time with them?
Aaron Craddock:Because I've applied this area to all of my life the last few years. And so, stronger relationship with the Lord just from daily reading the scripture, better health, tracking everything, having accountability, like it takes all the things, better relationship with my wife. We just do weekly date nights. Like, our goal this year was to get 35 date nights in. We actually just did the date night on Wednesday.
Aaron Craddock:And so now we're already over the goal for the year. But it it and, again, that's with a six month old, two year old, five year old. So I encourage you to rethink what's possible. Another thing we do that I do with my boys, my two year old and my five year old, I do a little mini adventure with them. So the goal I set this year is to do forty minutei adventures.
Aaron Craddock:And so I'll take one of our boys, like, on a hike, one of our boys I might take to lunch. There's an arcade thing here in Austin called High Five, arcade, bowling, ax throwing. We haven't done the ax throwing yet with the five year old, but he loves just the arcade. That's one of the adventures he likes to go on. And again, I needed to become this person.
Aaron Craddock:I still have to become a different person and grow in different areas to get where we're wanting to go with my different businesses. So everyone in here today, I want you to raise your hand if you're thinking about growth. And I know this is silly if you're listening to podcasts, but do you need to grow an area? Okay. If you just raised your hand or thought you should raise your hand, I encourage you to just, whenever you get stopped, do a voice memo if you're driving.
Aaron Craddock:Or if you're at a spot where you can go and write it down, write down that goal. And again, what's the crazy goal? And then have a clear vision of how that's going to happen. Identify the alignment and then take just relentless action towards that goal. So in all the things I shared about some of my growth journey, like the losing 100 pounds, having a healthier marriage relationship, healthier relationship with my kids, my faith, the growth in the business we've had, acquiring and building hiretruckers.com, all of those took relentless action.
Aaron Craddock:And so, yeah, what are the actions? So maybe write down three actions relative to that goal you have. And another prompt I have for you guys is, right now, think about what is your 10x opportunity. In one of those areas, is there an area that you can 10x? Maybe you don't think so, but maybe there's an area you want to 10x.
Aaron Craddock:It doesn't matter if you think it's possible. You just got to start putting the vision towards that. And then, what does success really look like beyond the numbers? And so again, right after I got laid off to tie back to the initial story, I met with a few different people. I said, Hey, I want to build X dollar business, like this big private business.
Aaron Craddock:And I had three different mentors in that season ask me why. I'm like, What do you mean why? It's a goal I haven't hit. But they really challenged me. They're like, You have to have a why because in any of these areas you're trying to grow in, you're going to hit resistance.
Aaron Craddock:And if you don't have a powerful enough why, you'll quit. And so why did I not quit the fitness journey? Because I want to be around a long time for my kids. Why did I quit the fitness journey? Because I can't hit my business goals, I don't think, without being a certain type of person.
Aaron Craddock:And that's part of the person I think I need to be. Why did I build a business the way I've built the business so that I do have a little bit of flexibility in my schedule? That doesn't mean I work less hours at all. I work probably more hours on average than the average person. However, I do have that flexibility to go on a date night.
Aaron Craddock:I do have that flexibility to take an hour during the day and go spend time with one of my boys. And so those are some of my whys. And so everything has to have a why. It can't be just a number to hit a number. So one of the calls to action for you guys is to, if you've had a vision and you've kind of sloughed off on it a little bit, I encourage you to just reopen that chapter again, reopen that idea.
Aaron Craddock:Chase your dreams. I know so many people that have amazing visions of what they could do. Maybe it's a side hustle. Maybe it's seeking a promotion in your organization. But whatever it is, just go after it unashamedly.
Aaron Craddock:Be committed to it. So when I stopped chasing quantity and focused on quality in my health, family, and business, that changed everything. So somewhat I was just talking about. And so my challenge you today is dream big. Think bigger.
Aaron Craddock:Can I say that again? So dream big. Think bigger. And so, yeah, I hope you guys were encouraged today. There were a little bit of just recruiting tips, ways to think about the industry, ways to think as a room that we can make this better, just focusing on people, focusing on honesty.
Aaron Craddock:And I think we can all grow together. So connect with me on LinkedIn if you're not already. Connect with me. Follow the show if you're not following it yet. You can also go to truckingclicks.com or hiretruckers.com and contact our team if you're interested in potentially working with us.
Aaron Craddock:And so that's it. So hope you're encouraged today. I just encourage you to dream big, think bigger. Anyway, that that's it. I'm Aaron.
Aaron Craddock:I'm a host of the Hire Truckers podcast. Hope you got value from the show today. Thanks. Thank you for joining us today. Our goal with the Hire Truckers podcast is to provide industry insights, marketing trends, and motivation to level up your recruiting game.
Aaron Craddock:If we added value, take a few seconds to share this with your network. Have a great week.