Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

New Onboarding Process Keeps Walmart TruckingLock Icon

5 min read

Walmart Inc. of Bentonville has never had a problem finding quality drivers for its private transportation fleet, executives say.

But when the company decided a year ago to expand its driver pool more significantly than it had ever done in the past, the question was whether it could bring enough drivers on board fast enough to accomplish what the company wanted with its fleet expansion.

As it happens, the company has been able to expand its private fleet — Walmart drivers driving Walmart trucks filled with Walmart products — to nearly 9,000 drivers by hiring more than 2,000 over the past two years.

Walmart was able to achieve the massive expansion at a time when other companies are struggling to find drivers by consolidating its hiring and orientation sessions so that all prospective new drivers could be assessed, trained and given their keys in one setting.

Think of it as a trucking version of the NFL Draft Combine, which invites hundreds of professional football prospects to Indianapolis to run drills and be poked and prodded under the eye of scouts from every NFL team.

Walmart’s drivers combine doesn’t use scouts, but rather a team of certified trainers, experienced Walmart drivers who test and train the prospects on pre-trip preparation, driving and operating in reverse.

Walmart holds the sessions twice a month at one of three locations — in Arizona, South Carolina and at its Bentonville base. For every 60 drivers looking to become Walmart drivers, the company has 28 to 30 trainers on hand; the pass rate is about 97 percent.

The company could use the sessions to bring aboard as many as 600 drivers a month if needed, officials said.

“What we have been able to do is fill our pipeline with applicants who fulfill our qualifications,” said Jeff Hammonds, the company’s vice president in charge of fleet. Hammonds is an interim co-overseer of the transportation division in the wake of Tracy Rosser’s recent resignation. “The simplest thing is instead of having a decentralized onboarding process, we decided to make it a centralized onboarding process. We consolidated it so we could process these quality applicants in groups rather than as individuals.”

The new process allowed Walmart to hire about 1,400 drivers in 2018, about 500 more than it did the previous year. The company wants to hire another 900 this year.

Onboard Gantlet
Gary Mars isn’t training anyone in how to drive a truck, he said; anybody Walmart brings to the onboarding site should already know how to do that and do it well.

Mars, who has driven professionally for 28 years, is one of the company’s most accomplished drivers and is a certified driver trainer. He said the onboarding process has prospects assessed, observed and tested repeatedly over a three-day period.

Applicants have to have a clean driving record and spent at least 30 of the previous 36 months driving professionally. Once an applicant receives a conditional offer, the company pays the driver’s expenses to travel to the onboarding site.

“You’d be surprised how many people show up for the onboarding process and expect to get a set of keys when they get there,” Mars said. “Some of them leave right off because it’s not so.”

Mars said there are technical adjustments for many drivers: Walmart is phasing in automatic transmissions but still has many manual shifting tractors, and it requires drivers to do a thorough pre-trip inspection of their tractors, for instance. The other adjustments involve Walmart culture and the importance of appropriate demeanor, dress and comportment. Walmart drivers don’t dress shabbily or use profanity, Mars said.

None of that scares off many prospects; Walmart recently raised pay for drivers so a first-year driver can earn about $86,000 a year, and the company’s set schedules, routes and safety protocols make it a popular job path.

The annualized turnover rate among drivers in the trucking industry is more than 95 percent. Walmart’s turnover rate is holding steady at 10-12 percent, Hammonds said.

“In my opinion, the best thing you can do to retain drivers is to treat them like people,” said Mars, a fourth-generation driver; his son, Weston, is a fifth. “Don’t treat them like robots. One of the things I think Walmart has an advantage, when it is done right, is treating us like people.”

A sample of that is the onboard assessments, which study the drivers’ willingness to learn as much as they test capability behind the wheel. Mars said the pass rate on the first day is about 5 percent but increases dramatically; nearly all drivers pass by the end of the three days.

Targeted Recruiting
As the industry struggles with the well-documented driver shortage, Walmart’s challenge is not finding drivers but finding them in areas where they are needed.

In November, Walmart hired Lori Furnell, a former advertising executive and director of recruiting at Maverick Transportation in North Little Rock, to be the company’s director of driver talent acquisition.

Furnell said Walmart’s driver needs, for example, were for 100 in Sacramento, California, and another 100 or more in the northeast region, so the company’s advertising for drivers has to be geographically precise.

Furnell said Walmart hires within a 250-mile radius of the new driver’s home base. Some drivers are willing to relocate for a Walmart job.

“Walmart is in such a growth state right now; in the past they truly only had to hire for retirement,” Furnell said. “Now we are actually growing our fleet by 900 drivers or so. We want them brought on in a timely manner so we created hiring events to allow us to onboard multiple drivers at one time to expedite that.”

The expedited process also helps trim the application-to-keys timeframe from 73 days to 31 days, Furnell said. In the past, Walmart had lost some driver recruits because of the long hiring process, and the shortened process, while still longer than most companies’, has helped.

“Thirty-one days, compared to our competitors, can be considered a long time, but it’s a long time because we really want to make sure we have a good fit,” Furnell said. “It is a lot shorter than it used to be. When they get there they know they were vetted. They are the cream of the crop and we are proud to have them on board.”

Furnell said Walmart is using other tools to augment the driver hires to better track the recruitment and database of drivers. For instance, if Walmart needs two drivers in North Dakota and has four applicants, the company is much better at keeping connected to the two unhired drivers in case of future openings.

Even though the recruitment is targeted geographically, Furnell said, the number of applications has quadrupled from previous years. That makes having a better process to vet, assess and hire the drivers more important.

“We have a very healthy pipeline,” Furnell said.

Send this to a friend