Cliff Beckham
Truck driving is a tough job.
It turns out that finding and keeping truckers is just as difficult.
Driver recruiting and retention — we’ll lump them together as one entity — is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. Recent federal regulations with strict guidelines regarding drive and break times only complicate trucking companies’ ability to attract and keep drivers, officials said.
P.A.M. Transport Services Inc. of Tontitown has to hire about 300 drivers every month, said CFO Allen West. The numbers are similar at another company, USA Truck Inc. of Van Buren.
“The biggest issue in the entire industry is finding drivers,” said Brad Delco, a transportation analyst with Stephens Inc. of Little Rock. “That’s not unique to P.A.M or USA Truck.”
West said P.A.M. has a vice president of driver resources, Clark Gray, whose job is to make sure the pipeline of drivers is always flowing. P.A.M. uses a third-party driving school but is always looking for experienced drivers as well.
That puts P.A.M. among basically every other driving company in the United States. West said that if a qualified driver showed up at P.A.M. tomorrow, the company would have a job for him.
“Someone with a CDL, there’s always a job for them,” said West, using the acronym for a commercial driver’s license. “Demand is that high.”
Cliff Beckham, the CFO at USA Truck, said the demographics began to change about 20 years ago as fewer people entered the driving field. Now there are more drivers retiring each year than there are ready replacements.
“It’s a long-term problem for the industry,” Beckham said. “We are all reacting to that tightening.” He said USA Truck contracts with several third-party driving schools and is also open — i.e., eagerly receptive — to any experienced driver who comes through its doors. Beckham and West said the allure of the highway doesn’t seem to hold the appeal that it once did.
West said his company tries to alleviate driver dissatisfaction by pairing rookie drivers with an experienced driver to start and then having younger drivers avoid the heavier trafficked routes and larger destination cities. But there comes a point, West said, when drivers have to drive because that is how product is moved and money is made.
“It’s an unexpected experience for a new driver out on the road,” West said. “A lot of times it’s more than a person wants to experience again. There’s a certain personality that loves being out on the open road.”
Delco said the simple answer to driver retention is higher pay, but he said that’s no guaranteed fix. During USA Truck’s quarterly report conference call last month, CEO John Simone said the company had a plan to address driver shortage but he wouldn’t divulge it for competitive reasons.
Beckham said, without specifics, that attracting and keeping drivers involves a two-pronged attack: improve compensation and the culture — in other words, pay the drivers more and make the company more enjoyable to work for.
That’s part of the reason, West said, that P.A.M. was improving its shop facility in North Little Rock to upgrade its driver amenities. “A driver is one of our customers as well,” West said. “Retention is pretty much everybody’s job.”
Even with that, Beckham said, the hours-of-service regulations implemented by the Federal Motor Carrier Administration don’t help. The regulations, which went into effect July 1, limit drivers to 70 hours a week with mandatory breaks, and industry officials said those rules will severely hurt production.
“Drivers can’t drive as many miles,” Beckham said. And drivers get paid by the mile.
Beckham and West said spring looks to be a tough time for trucking companies because construction has picked up and many drivers will leave the road and work construction. The advantage, for drivers, is that they can get quality pay, work at home (truckers can be on the road for 25 days every month) and still have a driving job waiting for them when construction season winds down.
West and Beckham said that drivers would find jobs available the moment they came back.
The executives agreed that improving pay is an obvious answer but that’s complicated too. Each of P.A.M.’s about 3,000 drivers covers 110,000 miles a year in a good year, so a 1-cent-per-mile raise would result in $3.3 million in additional expenses for a company that had net income of just under $6 million last year.
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