You Are Hiring Bad Drivers

In any business, you are are only as strong as your team.  In the trucking industry, the strength of your business is your drivers.  Hiring drivers is not an easy task.  Once a driver begins working for you – you want to ensure that they are actually good drivers, or don’t develop bad habits.  It’s harder to rectify bad behaviour if you let it slide too long.  

Here are some warning signs that you have hired a potentially bad drivers INCLUDING:

• They are not careful or rigorous with their safety checks.  You know the type, the ones that rush through in 10 min, when it should be 60 min.  
• They get distracted fairly easily…while in conversation with you.  You can only imagine how attentive they are on the road.  
• They don’t adapt their driving patterns to the weather.  Whether it’s sunny or snowy, they drive the same way.  
• They don’t sleep adequately.  They stay up late and get up in the rush – not fully rested, only further increasing their chance of falling asleep at the wheel.
• They’ve received tickets for traffic violations before.  The list of violations (in order) include: failure to properly signal, improper passion violation, improper turn violation, speeding and failure to obey traffic signal.  
• They’ve actually got into an accident in the past.

Finding drivers, especially high-quality drivers that get the job done is difficult.  But the great thing is, with the impending deadline for the ELD mandate coming up in December 2017, there are a number of telematic solutions in the market that can help you with managing your fleet and monitoring driver behaviour.
One of these solutions, FleetRover, has the ability to actually rank your drivers based on a number of criteria including the factors listed above.  If you do notice warning signs that any of your drivers are deviating away from what are standard good habits for drivers, you can work with them right away to get this corrected.  If they don’t comply after a few times – it’s time to find a new driver!