Long before the pandemic, urban and rural communities alike reaped the benefits of delivery drivers bringing goods and services right to their front doors. Now, with the increasing need for more on-demand services and consumer preferences leaning even more toward ecommerce, companies are facing a shortage of delivery drivers and fighting competitors for a limited pool of talent.
Considered to be a high-turnover role with many transferable skills, there’s not much stopping delivery drivers from hopping from company to company when perks or incentives run out. Below, we’ve presented a few strategies to help you win delivery driver talent over the competition and retain the delivery drivers you have.
Provide a Lightning-Fast Hiring Experience
While there are nuances to every job, delivery drivers in particular possess many transferable skills that can apply to multiple organizations. For this reason, you’ll want to focus on speed-to-hire: the time that starts when an applicant enters your system to the moment they are hired.
Organizations should be doing everything possible to drive this metric down; the faster you process and hire applicants, the faster critical delivery driver talent is out of reach from the competition.
Among Fountain customers, the median time-to-hire in the logistics sector in 2021 was 12.13 days—fewer than two weeks from application submission to job offer in hand!
To learn more about how to streamline and improve your hiring processes, read this article.
Offer Driver Education Programs and Resources
Does your business operate vehicles that require special licenses? Consider offering to sponsor license renewals or assist in obtaining any other credentials your drivers might need to do their job well.
Additionally, offering education courses or seminars on how your workforce can level up and climb the ranks to become a manager or supervisor shows investment in your workforce and incentivizes them to stick around for the long haul.
Build a Comprehensive Retention Program
The key to retaining your workers is to create a work environment they want to be a part of. Retention programs for delivery drivers should focus more on “remote-worker”–type benefits and perks that appeal to a dispersed workforce.
A recent study by Shiftboard determined that 87% of hourly workers view having control over their own schedules as critical to job satisfaction. Offering positions with flexible schedules opens the door for applicants with caretaker responsibilities, school or classwork conflicts, or other obligations. In addition to empowering delivery drivers with flexible schedules, incentivizing them with tenure options at your company or going certain numbers of days without traffic incidents.
As the post-pandemic world continues to evolve and as consumers demand even more delivery services, delivery companies will need to keep the evolution of the worker experience at the forefront of their minds when attracting and retaining delivery driver talent. Focusing on hiring delivery drivers faster is a great first step, but building and developing programs to keep those workers engaged and retained will give you a leg up in competition for the best talent.
