Driver Recruitment: How to Improve your Cost per Application (CPA)

The trucking industry is becoming increasingly more digitized. One of the areas most suitable for digitization lies within the recruitment marketing space. Specifically, driver sourcing.

There are several key performance indicators trucking companies need to monitor to validate the performance of the recruiting department. In this blog, we'll focus on cost per application (CPA).

What is cost per application (CPA) and why does it matter?

Cost per application is the amount of money your company spends to acquire a full application to a driving role. It is measured by total spend over total applications in a given time frame. It is a critical performance indicator for all recruiting functions, but perhaps even more critical for driver recruiters who are often tasked with hiring in large volumes.

How to Improve your Cost per Application for Truck Driving Jobs

First, when we think about cost per application we must differentiate between what is paid acquisition and what is unpaid.

Paid acquisition encompasses all channels that have an associated fee or cost of doing business. This includes (but is not limited to):

Google ads
Social media advertising
Media buys on strategic websites
Job board advertising on sites like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Craig's List, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.
Job board purchases (such as bulk resume downloads)
Paid driver referral programs (i.e. refer a friend and earn X dollars)

Essentially, any time you spend money to acquire the application, it falls under paid acquisition. Most trucking companies in the enterprise sector today will spend between $50,000 and $150,000 per month on truck driver recruitment with paid advertising.

Unpaid acquisition is any application that comes to your business organically. There is no direct fee associated with this type of application, though there may be some business overhead to manage it. Consider the following to be forms of unpaid driver acquisition:

Word of mouth
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Database or lifecycle marketing (typically fueled by email, forms, phone calls, etc.)

Paid acquisition is always a valuable short term growth lever, particularly for carriers who need to hire in volumes. However, blending unpaid acquisition tactics with your paid tactics is what will help you win big in the long run on CPA - no matter what size fleet you manage. Let's dive into paid acquisition optimization.

Increase Driver Applicants Through Paid Channel Optimization

You wouldn't put $150,000 in the stock market each month without watching it, and managing paid channels is no different. Robust tracking, reporting, and analytics help you reveal the highest performing channels and where to funnel spend to achieve the best results. Here's what you need to do.

Diversify channel spend.

Depending on your available monthly budget, you should be testing at least 3 channels each month to acquire drivers. You don't need highly sophisticated tools to measure channel performance, and in many cases excel will be sufficient for tracking and monitoring spend. You'll want to ensure to track:

Channel of spend (i.e. job board, social network, google, etc.).
How much spend (i.e. total investment on that channel per month).
Number of leads per channel (if you don't market a full application, this would be a lead).
Number of applicants per channel (measured by full-apps sourced by channel).

If you hire for a diverse range of jobs, you may also want to break spend down further by:

Job location
Job type (i.e. OTR, Regional, Local)
Average Pay Rate

By getting more granular with your reporting, you can prevent reporting and benchmarking false positives. For example, a local job in Miami, Florida will always give you a different CPA than an OTR job in Wichita, Kansas. This may have something to do with channel, but it also reflects the demand of a specific market.

Continuously test and experiment with new channels.

While traditional job boards can help you increase lead flow and app volume, they have their drawbacks. Specifically, there is no industry specific filtering to help recruiters ensure that leads and applications are actually qualified for the role. New and niche job boards are available to assist recruiters in nearly guaranteeing a qualified lead or application. For this reason, it's important to try new niche platforms to see what type of results you can yield.

TransForce has developed TF1, a next generation driver recruiting platform that outperforms other channels including Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, and other job boards.

TF1 is unique to CDL driving jobs and uses an intelligent match algorithm to match you with quality candidates. Jobs posted on TF1 are immediately distributed to a network of drivers who meet your jobs’ criteria and are actively seeking employment opportunities. TF1 considers key characteristics of drivers and driving jobs, like license class, endorsements, years of experience, and more to connect with an ideal candidate.

While there are other driving job specific job boards in the market, TF1 is the only platform that actually scans and validates the drivers' CDL prior to their ability to apply to your open role.

Be prepared to fail fast, but not too fast.

If you're not getting results in one day, don't give up. Two to three weeks should be enough time to give you the proper assessment of a tool if you are running advertisements for good paying local jobs. For OTR or regional jobs, you may expect to wait up to 6 weeks to properly benchmark a result. Any amount of time shorter than this is unlikely to give you accurate results, because most platforms need time to optimize and learn your advertisement.

Because the benchmarking process is relatively short, it's important to keep flexible contracts with your channel partners - especially if you run a tight budget, or are forecasting a downturn in the economic climate.

Performance based models can offer companies of all sizes a significant advantage. For example, with TF1 you only pay for the leads you receive. There is no monthly fee or annual contract standards, so you are free to swap channels as needed.

Increase Driver Applicants and Lower CPA by Putting Your Database to Work

Every resume, every email address and phone number collected in the recruitment process is an asset to your organization - even if they don't immediately turn into an apply. Learn to leverage this information to build your brand perception and lower CPA over time.

Implement lifecycle marketing.

Lifecycle marketing is a common term in business to business marketing, which can be seamlessly applied to the recruitment marketing process. Lifecycle marketing is the process of guiding potential applicants through stages in the employment journey.

It informs your business of where each contact in your database lies in relation to your business, so you can actively tap into segments of your DB with "free" actions - such as calls, texts or email.

Leverage e-mail marketing.

With a lifecycle marketing model in place, you can set up automations to point your target audience toward a desired behavior - in many cases: an application to a job.

If you don't have the means to implement lifecycle and email marketing, then consider a channel partner who can offer you more refined ad targeting. For example, with TransForce's TF1 platform, your jobs are advertised immediately to active driving job seekers who's skillsets, license and endorsements and financial objectives meet your job criteria.

Develop custom programs.

When it comes to recruitment marketing, you are competing with several other employers in a limited talented pool. You need to stand out as a great employer and differentiate yourself on more than just pay.

Talk to your current driving staff and learn what drew them to you in the first place and why they value you as an employer. Get ready for detractors and be willing to lend an ear and learn what you could be doing differently. Then work with your marketing team to bring custom programs to life that speak to your value for your driving workforce, so you can start to organically attract others like them.

Is Cost per Application (CPA) the Most Important Metric?

The short answer is no. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how low your CPA's are if you never make a hire. You can't start moving freight and earning revenue (or eliminating wasted cost) until you've hired someone. Monitoring and benchmarking CPA on a routine basis does however give you an indication of general supply and demand trends in a market, how they change over time, and give some indication of which channels are most competitive for you.