Put Driver Loyalty at the Heart of your Driver Recruitment Strategy
Gillet, Head of Content
Driver recruitment starts with driver retention.
If you treat your drivers well then they’ll do the recruiting for you! As you know, drivers often move around between firms. They move because they’re unhappy working for one company, for whatever reason, and they hear that working for the company down the road is better. Drivers talk. So, you want to be on the good side of that talk! You want your drivers to be happy so that other drivers want a bit of what they have and are enticed to come over to your firm.
Investing in driver retention is therefore an investment in driver recruitment and growth. Here are some areas to think about. Can you improve on or try any of these.
Make their job as easy as possible
- Use reliable technology, with no down time, that makes it as easy as possible for drivers to accept and complete bookings.
- Give them good passengers! There are lots of parts of delivering the taxi service that are out of your drivers’ hands – like the customer service they get when they phone your taxi company, or their experience using your passenger app. If passengers get into your drivers’ cars complaining about your company this in turn will lead to negative driver experiences and them complaining too! So, keeping your passengers happy helps keep your drivers happy too.
From Driver Retention to Driver Recruitment
So, how do you turn retention into recruitment? You’ve got two options here and you really need both. The first is the ‘word of mouth’ approach we discussed above. Let your happy and loyal drivers serve as a magnet to attract new drivers to your fleet.
The second is promotion. Actively setting up campaigns to attract enquiries and sign-ups from new drivers. Think about what you’re selling – all of the same benefits you currently offer to your existing drivers which are keeping them satisfied working for your fleet. Promote these benefits when advertising for new drivers. Share details about what they could earn and share testimonials from existing drivers. Finally, factor targeting into how you promote benefits. Think about who, what, when, where and why. Break your target driver groups into different categories and come up with a plan to go after each group with the right channel, timing and most of all the relevant benefits and appropriate messaging for them.