You do not have to be in transportation or logistics to know that truck drivers are a vital part of the American economy. Simply look around you when you are on the highway, and you will see just how many trucks are out on the road, from local delivery trucks to semis tasked with hauling loads across the country.
According to the American Trucking Association, truck drivers account for nearly 5.8% of the American workforce. Companies in the U.S. employed 3.6 million delivery and tractor-trailer drivers in 2019. During that same time frame, trucks were responsible for carrying around 72.5% of all domestic freight by weight, transporting 11.84 tons of cargo.
Still, even with these numbers, the trucking industry has suffered from a chronic driver shortage for more than 15 years. Between the ever-increasing demand for freight transportation and the aging — and retiring — workforce, some experts think we may need to hire as many as 900,000 new truck drivers in order to meet the demands of the future.
Thanks to this labor shortage, the competition to hire the best truck drivers has become intense. Potential drivers have the luxury of being able to choose from several different opportunities, leading many companies to try to sweeten their offers to attract experienced drivers. Signing bonuses, performance bonuses, and other perks are becoming more common, but it does little to hide the fact that there simply are not enough skilled drivers to fill every need.
When you are looking to hire truck drivers, one of the best ways to ensure that you hire the best possible talent is through skills tests, like those offered by eSkill. By making skills testing a part of your hiring process, you will be able to accurately measure a driver’s knowledge and skills from the very beginning. Not only does this save you time, but it can also help you to find the best available drivers to fill your open positions.
An Easy-to-Use Skills Testing Platform
The eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM is a user-friendly method for incorporating skills testing into your company at all levels, from pre-hire assessments to ongoing employee development. With a library of more than 800 standard tests, there is plenty of material to effectively assess the skill level of your potential hires.
For example, you could use the Delivery Driver test to assess a candidate’s ability to organize and load products for delivery, use GPS navigation, read maps, handle required paperwork, and maintain good communication with customers, and the Logistics Manager test to measure candidates’ ability to oversee trucks, forklifts and shipping equipment, manage shipping schedules and inventory, and create and manage budgets.
Tests can be searched by subject or by job category, allowing you to choose from a pre-selected suite of options. If you prefer, you can also build your own tests using eSkill’s materials while also adding your own user-generated content, like voice, video, or text. That way, you can ensure that your skills assessment tests are focused squarely on providing the information you need to make an informed hire.
How Skills Assessment Testing Works for Truck Drivers
While practical road performance is an important part of hiring truck drivers, there are a number of integral skills that can be effectively evaluated in a testing situation as part of the application process. eSkill offers numerous tests specifically tailored to the transportation and logistics industry, including several tests aimed at drivers.
There are many skills you might test during this process. You can assess a candidate’s driving and navigation skills, organizational skills, problem-solving abilities, and a wide range of other relevant skills. It is easy to integrate all of these tests into your company’s human resources (HR) system, making it a seamless part of the application.
Once the employee takes their assessments, you will receive an easy-to-read report, providing you with quantitative data about the candidate’s skills and knowledge base. Our reports will show you which skills a candidate has a firm grasp on, which ones they lack completely, and which skills they may be on the cusp of mastering. This can also give you a sense of their ability to progress in their career.
Skills Testing Can Help to Increase Diversity
One additional benefit of skills tests is that they can help to fight unconscious bias. This implicit, subconscious stereotyping is difficult to recognize, and it can make it difficult to judge a candidate solely on their merit. While unconscious bias is not intended to be mean-spirited, it is important to acknowledge that these biases exist. Companies must do whatever they can to counteract these flawed hiring processes.
With skills testing, you will receive hard data that you can use to compare employees, allowing a candidate’s performance to speak for itself. This can help you to increase the diversity of your workforce. Only 6.2% of truck drivers were women in 2017, and with skills tests, that number should only increase. Minorities, too, can find a more level playing field, making the workforce a better reflection of the rest of the nation.
Interested in Using Skills Tests to Hire Better Truck Drivers?
Learn how eSkill’s testing platform can help you to find the best-qualified drivers for your company. Request a demo today.