Driver screening during the recruiting and
hiring process should go beyond the DOT
minimum requirements.
cream of the crop
REPRINTED FROM
I
f there’s a silver lining to the current economic situation, it’s that the driver shortage has eased
somewhat. It’s a perfect time to fill your trucks
with the best drivers out there – but screening
drivers to discover which ones are the cream of the crop
and which are the bad apples is an ever-changing challenge.
The first thing you have to consider is making sure
Deborah Lockridge • Senior Managing Editor
J U L Y 2 0 0 8 • H E A V Y D U T Y TRUCKING
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FOCUS
ondrivers
you satisfy U.S. Department of
Transportation regulations regarding verifying a driver’s employment
history, motor vehicle records, and
drug and alcohol use.
One of the biggest challenges for
fleets is verifying the mandated
information on past employment.
Although previous employers are
required by law to provide this
information, sometimes it’s easier
said than done to get your hands on
it – especially in a timely fashion.
“A lot of big corporate employers
don’t want to give you anything,”
says Sherry Bass, vice president of
capacity development at Texasbased FFE Transportation. “It used
to be ‘name, rank and serial number.’ Now it’s just, ‘Yes, John Smith
worked here.’ You only get the most
recent dates only, or no dates. In
other words, the applicant might
have worked there three times, but
their system only has the most
recent dates he was employed.” And
just that snippet frequently is provided by an automated system that
charges users a fee.
Many lawyers advise their clients
to not provide any information
about a previous employee other
than the fact that they worked
there. Anything beyond that, the
reasoning goes, could open a company up to a lawsuit.
In 2004, a DOT rule on minimum safety performance history
went into effect to try to deal with
this issue. The rule requires previous
employers to respond within 30
days to questions by prospective
employers investigating an applicant. Previous employers are
required to go back three years to
confirm employment and provide
other information about employees
such as crash involvement, alcohol
and controlled substance violations,
rehabilitation efforts, and reversion
to illegal alcohol or controlled sub2
HEAVY DUTY TRUCKING • JULY 2008
Most experts agree
that in the real world,
you should do more
than the federally
mandated
background check.
stances if rehabilitation was unsuccessful. The
rule also limits the liability of those required
to provide and use driver safety performance
information.
Most companies do provide this information, says Chad Govin, corporate managerbusiness services sales with J.J. Keller, but not
always. “It’s kind of a gray area. The rule says
you have to do it, but there’s not a ton of
enforcement. The burden of the regulation is
on the hiring company to make a good-faith
effort and to document the attempts made to
retrieve this information.” Documentation
includes items such as copies of faxes, letters
sent via certified mail, copies of e-mail, and
notations of telephone conversations including date, time, the name of the person you
talked to, and what was said.
Sometimes the issue is not so much getting
the information, it’s getting it quickly. Speed
is of the essence these days to get the best
drivers to come to work for you before someone else snaps them up. Although regulations
don’t require you to get this
information before you hire a
driver, only before he's been
on the job for 30 days, you
really want to find out early
in the process if a driver’s
work history is going to disqualify him.
The current state of the
economy, with trucking companies going out of business
every day, adds another challenge: How do you verify
employment with a company
that no longer exists?
So FFE and other companies often turn to other
methods of verifying employment, such as getting copies
of W-2s or pay stubs from
the drivers to fill in the
blanks.
One of the oldest tools to
help accomplish verification
of drivers’ work history is the
DAC Employment History
File offered by USIS. DAC
Services, which stands for
Drive-A-Check, was a company founded in 1981 to
help trucking companies
comply with the regulations
on background screening.
USIS, which offers employment screening, drug testing
and background investigations for a broad range of
industries, bought them several years ago.
“The nice thing about the
DAC file is that right now,
[previous employers] have a
minimum of 14 working
days [to respond], and in
some cases 30 days or the first
safety-sensitive function,”
says Steven Spencer, senior
director of transportation
sales for USIS. “The DAC
file is pretty much an instantaneous response.”
DAC is a database of previous driver employment information provided by participating carriers. Fleets provide
what USIS calls the termination records, which contain
You might want to consider
criminal background checks
for drivers and other
employees who will have
access to sensitive materials
or will be handling high-value
or theft-prone loads.
answers to the questions required by DOT.
There are also optional information sections
on topics such as drug and alcohol results
and accident details. All that information
goes into the system and then can be
accessed by any other subscriber.
Drivers frequently complain that their
DAC files are inaccurate or misleading. One
driver, for instance, complained in an online
forum that he was disqualified by a potential employer for falsifying his application
because he didn't list as an “accident” an
incident where a piece of tire tread on the
road ripped out his trailer air lines.
DAC is governed by the same rules that
apply to consumer credit reporting agencies,
so if any driver disputes his or her information, USIS under law is obligated to investigate. If the previous employer verifies that
the disputed information is correct, it
remains in the file, but the driver can file a
rebuttal, which also is kept in his file.
“We’re an aggregator of information, not
the creator,” Spencer explains.
Digging Deeper
Most experts agree that in the real world,
you should do more than the federally mandated background check.
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“There's a whole realm of
things like negligent hiring and
negligent retention that those regulations were never designed to
address,” says USIS’s Spencer.
USIS and other companies
offer different types of background checks beyond the
employment background, drug
and alcohol and MVR checks
required by law. There are criminal records checks, sexual offender checks, consumer credit
reports, Social Security Number
verification traces, CDLIS checks,
etc.
For instance, iiX, College
Station, Texas, specializes in providing motor vehicle records
searches. ExpressNet, a secure
4
The current state of the
economy,with trucking
companies going out of
business every day, adds
another challenge – how
do you verify employment
with a company that no
longer exists?
HEAVY DUTY TRUCKING • JULY 2008
Internet application, lets customers pull up
MVRs instantly in most cases. This is a lot
faster than trying to get MVRs from each
state yourself, says Stefanie Haggerty, sales
and marketing manager. In most states, it's
still a mail-in process to request that information directly. The company also offers
criminal background checks, SSN verification, sex offender registry information, and
it recently started offering outsourced DOT
employment verification services.
You might want to consider criminal
background checks for drivers and other
employees who will have access to sensitive
materials or will be handling high-value or
theft-prone loads, Haggerty recommends.
For some driving jobs, checking sex
offender registries might be desirable.
“Especially if you have drivers that are doing
home deliveries or are in any situation
where they are segregating themselves with some part of
the public, you really want to be aware if there's any
kind of sex offender history there,”
says USIS’s Spencer.
But even the most detailed factbased checks can only go so far. If
you want to truly get useful information about what a driver's really
like on the job, that's going to take
some skill, persistence, and knowledge about the trucking industry.
An intern in the human resources
department doesn't fill the bill.
“I think many times companies
have a clerk-type person that they
don't pay much money, and they
expect to somehow have a critical
part of the selection process done
very thoroughly, and that's typically
not going to happen,” says Greg
Mechler, a former trucking executive who now offers consulting services through Prelipp and Mechler
Associates. “A skilled person doing
the background investigation is
worth their weight in gold. I've
seen some very skilled people who
can do these and get hold of people
at companies, even big companies
that tend to put you into an automated queue and all you get is
name, rank and serial number. The
right person can sometimes get to
the person's driver manager and get
some meaningful information.”
That’s exactly what MTS Driver
Recruiters, Southfield, Mich.,
which provides outsourced driver
recruiting services, has learned.
“The biggest thing when you talk
about being able to distinguish between
drivers who are more qualified and
[those] likely to become a safety issue,
it’s a matter of truly understanding their
background and their potential to do
damage,” says MTS CEO Ken Walker.
“We take more of an investigative
approach to background rather than an
administrative approach.”
While many trucking companies do
their DOT-required due diligence,
Walker says, “we're responsible for having answers for our customers. That
means we have to actually do whatever
is necessary to actually investigate that
person’s background and talk to that
employer. I think a lot of employers, if
FOCUS
ondrivers
Sometimes the issue is
not so much getting the
information, it’s getting it
quickly. Speed is of the
essence these days to get the
best drivers to come to work
for you – before someone
else snaps them up.
they took the same approach,
while it may be time-consuming and costly to go that extra
mile to get those answers, they’d
make it up on the other end.”
MTS has specialists who
know who to call at various
companies, who have developed
relationships with those people,
and who know what questions
to ask and how to listen to the
answers.
“A lot of times, the people
doing background checks don't
understand the operational side
of it,” Walker explains. “If
you've got an administrative
person with a list of questions,
they don't understand how to
interpret the data and probe in
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the right areas.”
For example,
Walker says, if a
driver has had an
accident or an
incident, the details
of that event could make a big difference in whether or
not you want to hire that driver. “An administrative person may not understand the significance of the seriousness of incidents in a vehicle going forward versus a vehicle going backward,” he explains. “A guy backing a 53foot trailer into a tight dock may have in his history one
or two instances of hitting another trailer,” and still be a
good driver. “But a guy who hit a trailer going forward is
an entirely different animal.”
Automating
The Process
All of this has been made easier than it used to be,
because one of the biggest changes in the driver screening process in recent years is the increasing ability to
automate parts of the process.
“One of the big events we’ve seen are applicant tracking systems or workflow processing,” says USIS’s
Spencer. “We used to handle everything on paper; now
they’re relying a lot more on electronics. We do a lot of
partnerships and integrations where our information is
flowing into someone else’s [automatic screening] system.”
For instance, at Tulsa, Okla.-based Tenstreet, a program set up to screen electronic driver applications can
go ahead and “score” applicants based on factors important to the company based on the applicant’s self-disclosed information, such as clean MVR, amount of
experience, drug and alcohol testing, criminal record,
etc.
“It's very, very important that you get to those top
guys first,” says Tenstreet CEO Craig Johnson.
“Everybody wants the ‘good apples,’ so if you have a way
that the application comes in and you use software to
process it faster, you can make a bona fide offer faster. If
you’re continually losing out to the companies that have
a faster hiring process, the cream of the crop is taken by
other companies, and you have no choice – you have to
hire what’s left.”
Tenstreet also has an automated master checklist to
help recruiters get all the little steps done that they have
to do before they can make an offer. Then there's seamless integration with USIS/DAC and other major driver
background screening services. With one click, you can
run an MVR or criminal record check.
“What we’re trying to do, we’re trying to get rid of a
lot of the grunt stuff so the recruiters can concentrate on
talking to drivers and hiring the good ones,” Johnson
says.
J.J. Keller also offers an online driver management
product that helps automate the recruiting, screening
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HEAVY DUTY TRUCKING • JULY 2008
and hiring qualification of drivers, Govin says. Fleets can
build a customized driver application on their own web
sites. As drivers apply via that web site, the information
is pushed through a “filter” based on a company’s particular requirements, such as minimum age, maximum
number of jobs in a given time period, maximum gaps
between employment, maximum number of accidents or
traffic convictions in a set period of time, whether
they’ve even had a license denied or revoked, etc.
Govin recommends that companies be selective in
publishing all their job requirements up front. “Anyone
who’s smart will make sure they fill out the application
to meet those requirements,” he says.
One problem with driver application filters is that
while they can work very well on a company’s own application, if you’re getting generic driver applications from
online recruiting services, they may not work as well,
says FFE’s Bass, who uses Tenstreet’s system.
“It’s not because the system doesn’t work,” she says;
“It’s garbage in, garbage out.” For example, Bass says, on
a question asking about experience, a driver could
answer five years. “Maybe they drove for five years, then
worked in a factory for 10 years, then went to truck driving school,” Bass says. “That five years that long ago isn’t
going to help me today.” The filtering is most useful for
more “high-level” screening, Bass says – up-front,
straightforward things such as age or state of residence.
Personality Screening
If you really want to hire the right drivers and avoid
the “bad apples,” you should go beyond a simple look at
driver history and background checks.
“Most companies don’t divulge much information
other than the bare facts that that person worked there,
so it’s more challenging today to get any insight into how
this person’s going to function in [your] company,”
Mechler says.
Trucking companies tend to weigh past experience
very heavily, says Richard Scheig, CEO of Scheig
Associates, Gig Harbor, Wash., developer of the Scheig
Hiring & Performance System. “But practice doesn’t
make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. There may
be a very good reason that guy’s out looking for a job.
Just because you’ve been something doesn’t mean you
were a good something. Experience is not the be-all and
end-all that lots of [employers] think it is."
Keller’s Govin says that the best companies have a profile of the type of driver they want, based on the past
experience of people who have been successful at the
company. “They look at, ‘Who are our best drivers now,’
and they kind of profile the candidate they want to be
looking for. The companies that are successful have a
good idea of the attributes that are going to make a new
hire a successful driver.”
There are several behavioral assessment tools, or personality tests, that aim to help companies do exactly
that.
Many people are skeptical of pre-employment
testing, but that’s
because many preemployment screening
methods don't really do
the job, Scheig says. IQ,
aptitude, psychological
testing and skill testing,
he says, are all more predictive of job success
than the traditional job
interview, but they all
have flaws.
For instance, he says,
“skills testing is good;
that's what CDL testing
is all about, skills knowledge. But the problem is
that even the most technical job is maximum
30 percent technical; 70
percent to 90 percent is
human factor behaviors
that have a huge impact
on performance.
“So you get drivers
who have a CDL but they’re terrible performers,” Scheig says.
“They don’t show up on time,
they’re harsh with the customers,
all the other factors that make up
that job. We say hire for the
behaviors, train for the skills.
Credentials by themselves don't
mean anything.”
Mark Tinney, president of
JOBehaviors, offers similar jobspecific compatibility assessments
and explains that, “you could have
two drivers in front of you that
could both demonstrate [driving
skill] – only one of them is an
outstanding driver who is going to
bring safety as a behavior to the
job, who knows he’s a representation of his employer out there on
the road, who gets along with dispatch and law enforcement. You
can have your safety meetings and
make everyone watch safety
videos, but if that individual doesn’t bring safety as a core behavior
to the job, it won’t have as big of
an impact as if you identify those
people right up front.”
There are a number of behav-
There are a number of
behavioral or personality
assessment tools that aim
to help fleets build a profile
of the driver candidates
they are looking for.
ioral assessment tools available that
address these shortcomings, matching
traits with ones that are known to be
associated with successful truck
drivers.
For instance, Scheig Associates and
its newer competitor, JOBehaviors,
also located in Gig Harbor, have
developed job-specific behavioral
assessments based on behavioral analyses of people who are acknowledged
to be outstanding in their jobs. They
offer these assessments for jobs as varied as truck drivers and technicians,
childcare workers and school custodians.
“We’re not trying to measure the
person in the abstract or some psychological trait,” Scheig says. “Rather,
we measure the person for the job.”
Both Scheig and JOBehaviors start
out asking a group of superior performers to describe the behaviors that
make one good in that job. At the end
of the first day, they’ll have a list of
300 to 500. The second day they ask
the panel to rate those behaviors to
come up with a list ranked from the
most important for performance to
the least important. Those behaviors
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ondrivers
are then used to
create a screening
assessment. The
applicant is given
pairs of statements
and asked to
answer which one best describes themselves. These
statements have been “controlled for social desirability” so that a person can’t simply choose the one that
“sounds” the best.
“It’s as if every individual being considered has to get
through a panel of some of the best drivers in the
industry,” Tinney says.
Another behavioral assessment is the Professional
Dynametrics Program offered by Prelipp and Mechler
Associates. This test measures four predominant
behavior traits, Mechler explains: dominance, extroversion, patience and conformity. It also measures a
person's logic process or decision-making style; energy
level, and their style of using energy.
Mechler's firm goes into a company and runs profiles on the drivers that company identifies as its best
drivers. Then the software can create a model based on
those best people and you can match applicants
against it. For example, he says, a typical truckload
driver profile tends to be low on the dominance scale
and also low on the extroversion scale (let's face it, an
extrovert is not as likely to be happy spending long
hours alone behind the wheel). On the other hand,
they are high on the patience scale and the conformity
scale. (People who score highly on conformity are
those who pay attention to detail and to doing things
right and tend to have fewer accidents.)
The best use of this program is not so much simply
a matter of screening people out, Mechler says, but
rather a way to understand them better and see how
well they're going to fit in, and what a company
should do to increase the chances the person will be
successful with the company long-term. It can be used
for training drivers more effectively, for instance, and
for training driver managers and other people how to
relate to drivers more effectively. (Perhaps not surprisingly, successful driver managers tend to be opposite
on the behavioral measures from drivers.)
In fact, he says, “if you just run the assessment on an
applicant and put it in the file and never use it again,
you’ve grossly minimized the value of it.”
And that's a key thing to think about. For the most
success in your driver recruiting and retention efforts,
driver screening should be about more than just not
hiring the bad apples. Used correctly, the initial investigation into a driver applicant’s suitability for the job
can help make sure not only that you hire the right
person, but also that you manage that person throughout his or her career with your company to be both a
satisfied and productive employee.
J. J. Keller’s Business Services are designed to make your job easier. Our
applications and services are designed to help you better organize your
compliance and safety efforts, as well as reduce your risk exposure.
Contact us today to learn more about the Technology, Outsourcing, and
Consulting services J. J. Keller offers that can help you streamline your
driver screening processes.
www.jjkeller.com/services
888-473-4638 ext. 8150
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HEAVY DUTY TRUCKING • JULY 2008