Truck Driver Job Boards Evolve to Stave Off Bigger Competitors

Trucking job boards are transforming to stay relevant in the wake of changing preferences for how companies recruit employees.

Job boards — digital matchmakers between drivers and carriers — have been a mainstay of online recruiting since the dawn of the internet. Lately, though, they have been overshadowed by social media, employee referrals and other recruiting methods.

To keep up, job boards are evolving into recruiting platforms offering multiple services for employers and job hunters, including company reviews, wage data, user forums, and more.

A Trucks.com review of job boards serving the trucking industry reveals sites are spiffing themselves up with modern-looking user interfaces and mobile-responsive designs that work as well on smartphones and tablets as laptop or desktop devices. Some have iOS and Android apps.

Gary’s Job Board, started in 2014, is one example included in the Trucks.com capsule of reviews of trucking industry job boards below. Gary’s distinguishes itself by offering mainly local jobs and by shielding job hunters’ identities from hiring companies so drivers aren’t barraged by recruiters’ emails and calls.

“These drivers get harassed all day,” said Gary’s owner Eric Haney, whose family has been in the trucking business since the 1960s.

If a driver’s profile in the Gary’s Job Board database matches the qualifications a company is looking for, the carrier can send him or her a request to apply. Not unlike some dating websites, Gary’s only shares a driver’s name and contact information after they give permission.

Common Applications and Generating Recruiting Leads for Carriers

Industry expert Jeff Dickey-Chasins estimates as many as 50 job boards serve the trucking business. Many still function primarily to recruit for major carriers looking for new labor. The boards invite drivers to fill out a common application and provide leads to carriers for a fee.

One way to decide if a job site is worth paying for is looking to see if any competitors use it, said Dickey-Chasins, who consults with job boards and blogs at The Job Board Doctor.

“If all your competitors are on it and you’re not, you’d be damned sure to sign up,” he said.

Trucking industry boards face competition from big players such as Glassdoor and Indeed.com, generalist job sites whose biggest advantage is the sheer quantity of driver job openings they list. Some treat job board giants like frenemies – competing, but allowing the bigger boards to re-list jobs posted on their respective sites. Local job sites such as Gary’s continue to compete for local job postings with Craigslist.

Trucking Job Boards

The following are a handful of trucking industry job sites whose characteristics separate them from the pack in some way. Entries are in alphabetical order and include jobs listed as of late August, monthly unique visitors, mobile offerings, prices and more.

ClassADrivers.com

Year established: 2000

Total truck driver job listings: 27,236, including owner/operator, company drivers, trainee positions

Traffic: 150,000 unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: ClassADrivers.com – CAD for short – maintains a database of 326,194 driver profiles, and lists jobs from 102 companies. More than 30% of applicants have at least two years of OTR driving experience, according to a company spokesman. The site is owned by Internet Brands, which generates revenue from advertising and lead-generation services on dozens of consumer and b2b websites, including CarsDirect, Fodor’s Travel and Nolo.

Related services: Trucking industry news, driver forum. Integrates with Tenstreet, a trucking industry- specific applicant tracking system, or ATS.

Mobile: Mobile-responsive website

Pricing: Not disclosed. Sells job listings separately or packaged with access to driver database; premium listings that show up higher in search results; and membership plans with additional services, including banner ads.

Gary’s Job Board



Year established: 2014

Total truck driver job listings: 1,970 including Class A, Class B, local and OTR

Traffic: 25,230 unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: Owner Eric Haney’s father owned a Denver-based local carrier. Haney operates a Denver commercial driver’s license, or CDL school, is a state of Colorado CDL tester, and sells a cloud-based driver management service. He spun Gary’s Job Board – named after Haney’s former operations manager – out of the latter two years ago to compete with Craigslist for local job postings. The board’s current postings come from approximately 800 regional and national companies. Listings include about 650 local, non-over-the-road, or OTR jobs, of which 150 are entry-level paying $17.50 to $25 an hour with no experience required. Gary’s also has 7,994 drivers in its driver database.

Related services: Carriers can use Haney’s Safety as a Service driver management platform – a fancy name for an ATS – to recruit and onboard drivers, manage driver documents, and offer safety training videos.

Mobile: Mobile-responsive website

Pricing: One free job listing, then $25 per job post, or $300 a year for unlimited job posts and all Safety as a Service features.

Glassdoor

Year established: 2008

Total truck driver job listings: 48,530

Traffic: More than 31 million unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: By combining standard-issue job listings with wage data and anonymous reviews of companies by current and past employees, Glassdoor helped create the latest generation of job boards. The site isn’t specific to the trucking industry, but multiple carriers use it. Job seekers can customize searches by job type, posting date and how well a carrier rates on Glassdoor’s employer scale of 1 to 4 stars.

Related services: Glassdoor blog for job seekers

Mobile: Mobile-responsive website; free iOS and Android job search apps

Pricing: Prices for job postings, display advertising and Enhanced Profiles recruiting products run from free trials to “thousands of dollars” based on a company’s size and location, according to a spokeswoman.

Indeed

Year established: 2004

Total current truck driver job listings: More than 620,000

Traffic: 180 million unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: Indeed is the uber-search engine for job listings, indexing open positions from company career pages, recruiter websites and other job boards. Job seekers can filter job listings by type, years of experience required, location and wages, and read company reviews. Indeed aggregates data from all those job listings to compile monthly job trends, including a snapshot of the transportation industry employment.

Related services: Forums, browser plugins and other tools.

Mobile: Mobile-responsive website; free iOS and Android job search apps

Pricing: Carriers pay a minimum $5 a day to have their job listings appear higher in search results.

JobsInTrucks.com

Year established: 2004

Total current truck driver job listings: Fluctuates daily but monthly average is around 30,000, according to a spokeswoman, including Class A, Class B, OTR, regional, specialty, trainee, full-time, part-time, temporary and contract.

Traffic: 250,000 unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: JobsInTrucks.com is one of the trucking industry’s most-visited job boards. It’s also one of seven job sites operated by Don Firth, who started the business following more than a decade in logistics and supply chain management with such firms as PwC and Deloitte. JobsinTrucks.com claims to have more than 475,000 driver resumes on file. It ranks 252,253 among all commercial websites in the world, far surpassing runner up ClassADrivers.com, which comes in at 411,660, according to Alexa, the web traffic analytics firm.

Related services: Allows drivers to post resumes anonymously if they want.

Mobile: Separate mobile site

Pricing: Not disclosed, but job listings are sold separately or packaged with 1, 3, 6 or 12-month access to driver database, with differing prices for local, regional or national listings. Carriers can pay extra for listings to appear higher in search results, as well as for banner ads, personalized newsletters, email campaigns, retargeting, Facebook campaigns and other services.

Layover.com

Year established: 1996

Total truck driver job listings: 1,505, including Class A, OTR, regional, refrigerator, company, moving van, experienced and entry level

Traffic: More than 250,000 unique visitors a month

What sets it apart: The job board describes itself as an independent recruiting agency specializing in the trucking industry. “We are the Internet’s oldest continually running site dedicated to helping drivers in their career choices, and we were built by truckers for truckers,” said Bruce Martin, who started the site after working as a highway motor dispatcher and grocery chain driver. In addition to running Layover.com, Martin is v.p. of biz dev for UrgentCare Travel, a chain of for-profit medical clinics for truck drivers.

Related services: Driver forums and chat rooms, trucking industry newsletter, CDL practice tests, recruiting services, and links to other resources.

Mobile: Mobile responsive

Pricing: One 30-day listing is $99 for local, state and multi-state jobs, or $199 for LTL, nationwide jobs.