Are You Underfunding Recruiting Without Realizing It?

Are You Underfunding Recruiting Without Realizing It?

Every year, transportation companies build budgets around fuel, equipment, maintenance, insurance, technology, and dozens of other operating expenses. Those numbers are usually tied to expected business activity. If the fleet plans to grow, haul more freight, or enter new markets, the budget changes with it.

Recruiting doesn't always get treated the same way.

A fleet may need more drivers this year but still give recruiting roughly the same budget it had last year. Another may expand into a more competitive market without adjusting what it expects to spend per hire. Sometimes the recruiting budget isn't based on the number of drivers the company actually needs at all. It's simply the number leadership is comfortable spending.

Then the hiring goal gets missed.

The assumption is that recruiting needs to perform better. But before changing the advertising strategy, adding another job board, or pushing recruiters harder, there may be a simpler question worth asking:

Did we actually fund recruiting to accomplish the hiring goal we gave it?

Start With the Hiring Goal, Not Last Year's Budget

One of the easiest ways to build a recruiting budget is to look at what you spent last year and make a few adjustments.

If $500,000 was enough last year, maybe $525,000 should be enough this year.

But what if the business needs 20% more drivers? What if turnover has increased? What if you're opening a terminal in a harder recruiting market? What if the positions you're trying to fill require more experience or endorsements?

Last year's budget tells you what you spent. It doesn't necessarily tell you what you'll need.

A better approach is to start with the business objective and work backward.

If operations needs 200 hires, how many qualified candidates will recruiting need to produce those hires? How many applicants will it take to generate those qualified candidates? What does it typically cost to acquire those applicants in each market? And how much additional recruiting capacity will be required to work them effectively?

Now you're building a recruiting budget around an outcome instead of a historical number.

Not Every Hire Costs the Same

This is where budgeting gets more complicated.

It's tempting to say, "We need 100 drivers, our target cost per hire is $2,000, so we need a $200,000 budget."

That's a useful starting point. It isn't necessarily a realistic plan.

Those 100 drivers probably aren't all being hired for the same job in the same market.

Maybe 30 are needed in a market where your company has a strong brand, a large available driver population, and a competitive position. Another 30 may be needed in an area with significantly more competition. The remaining 40 could require specialized experience or a schedule that's naturally harder to recruit for.

Those hires shouldn't automatically be expected to cost the same. Your recruiting budget should reflect where you're hiring, who you're trying to hire, what you're offering, and who you're competing against.

That's why a single company-wide cost-per-hire target can sometimes create the wrong expectations. A $2,000 cost per hire might be excellent in one market and disappointing in another.

Context matters.

Your Competitors Help Determine Your Recruiting Costs

Recruiting doesn't happen in a vacuum.

If you're hiring 50 drivers in a market where several other fleets are aggressively pursuing the same people, you're competing for attention before your recruiter ever gets involved.

Those competitors may be spending more. They may be advertising across more channels. They may have stronger brand recognition. And as we've discussed in previous articles, they may simply have a more competitive job.

All of that affects what it may take for your fleet to generate a hire.

This is why understanding the market before assigning the budget is so important. A hiring goal might look reasonable on a spreadsheet but become much harder once you understand the number of available drivers and how aggressively other employers are pursuing them.

If you're entering a market where competitors are investing heavily and you give recruiting a budget built for an easier market, you've created a performance problem before the first ad ever runs.

Underfunding Doesn't Always Look Like Underfunding

This is what makes the problem difficult to recognize.

An underfunded recruiting campaign doesn't necessarily produce zero results. It might generate applications. Recruiters might make hires. Reports might show reasonable costs. The problem is scale.

Suppose recruiting is efficiently producing 20 hires per month, but the operation needs 35. Leadership may look at the 15-driver gap and assume something isn't working. But if the campaign is already converting candidates efficiently and the available budget is only producing enough opportunity for 20 hires, optimization alone isn't going to create the other 15.

At some point, the math has to work.

That doesn't mean every hiring shortfall should be solved by spending more money. Far from it. Increasing the budget when the job isn't competitive or the recruiting process is leaking candidates can simply make an inefficient system more expensive. But the opposite is also true.

You can't expect recruiting to consistently produce a $1 million hiring outcome on a $500,000 recruiting plan just because that's the budget you would prefer to have. The hiring goal and the resources behind it have to match.

Before Spending More, Make Sure the Funnel Works

There is an important distinction between underfunded recruiting and inefficient recruiting.

If you're generating plenty of qualified candidates but very few become hires, more advertising probably isn't the first answer. Look at what happens after the lead comes in.

Are candidates being contacted quickly? Are recruiters consistently following up? Are qualification requirements eliminating a large portion of the market? Are applicants abandoning the process? Are candidates accepting competing offers? Are people scheduling orientation and failing to show?

The same applies to the job itself. If drivers are seeing the opportunity but aren't interested because of compensation, home time, schedule, equipment, or another part of the offer, increasing advertising may just put an unattractive job in front of more people.

Before deciding you're underfunded, make sure the recruiting machine can efficiently turn additional investment into additional hires.

If it can, spending more may be exactly the right decision. If it can't, fix the problem first.

What Is an Empty Truck Costing You?

Recruiting budgets can also look very different when they're viewed against the cost of not hiring. Imagine leadership is debating whether to add another $50,000 to recruiting because the company is behind on its hiring goal.

Viewed only as an expense, $50,000 sounds significant. But what are the unseated trucks costing the business?

There's lost utilization. Potentially lost revenue. Existing drivers may be stretched thinner. Growth plans can get delayed. Customers may be harder to service. Operations may have equipment available that isn't producing what it should.

Suddenly, the question isn't simply whether the company wants to spend another $50,000 on recruiting. The question becomes whether spending that $50,000 can economically reduce a much larger business problem.

That doesn't mean throwing money at recruiting without accountability. It means evaluating recruiting investment in the context of what a successful hire is worth to the organization.

Sometimes the more expensive decision is refusing to increase the budget.

Your Growth Plan Needs a Recruiting Plan

This becomes especially important when fleets are growing.

If the company plans to add 100 trucks, recruiting shouldn't find out after the equipment is ordered. Growth creates a workforce requirement, and that requirement should have a corresponding recruiting plan.

How many net new drivers are needed? How many additional hires will be required to offset normal turnover while adding those drivers? Where will they be hired? How difficult are those markets? What does the historical recruiting funnel tell us about the number of applicants required? What budget will realistically be needed to generate them?

Those questions should be answered while the growth plan is being built.

Otherwise, the organization can end up with an ambitious operational target supported by a recruiting budget designed for yesterday's fleet.

HireMaster Can Help Build the Math

This is where we believe recruiting should become much more data-driven.

At HireMaster, we don't simply look at a hiring goal and recommend spending more money. We can analyze the markets behind that goal to understand what the recruiting environment actually looks like.

That can mean evaluating driver availability, identifying the fleets competing for the same candidates, researching what those competitors are offering, understanding how aggressively they're recruiting, and comparing those conditions with your own job and historical performance.

Then we can look at what's happening inside your recruiting funnel.

How much are you spending? What does it cost to generate applicants and qualified candidates? How efficiently are those candidates becoming hires? Which markets are performing well? Which ones are consuming more budget? And where does the data suggest additional investment could actually produce additional hires?

That distinction matters.

If the data shows a strong job, healthy conversion rates, and an addressable driver population but insufficient candidate volume, the campaign may genuinely need more investment. If the research shows your offer isn't competitive, increasing the budget may not be the answer.

And if you're generating enough qualified candidates but losing them deeper in the process, the solution may have very little to do with advertising at all.

The goal isn't to spend more on recruiting. It's to understand what it should realistically take to accomplish the hiring goal.

Transportation Leader Takeaway

Recruiting budgets shouldn't begin with, "What did we spend last year?"

They should begin with, "What does the business need recruiting to accomplish this year?"

From there, work backward.

Understand how many drivers you need, where you need them, how difficult those markets are, what your competitors are doing, how competitive your jobs are, how efficiently your recruiting funnel converts, and what it will realistically take to produce the required hires.

Sometimes that analysis will show that you have plenty of budget and need to improve the process. Sometimes it will show that the job needs to change. But sometimes it will reveal something much simpler:

You gave recruiting a hiring goal that the recruiting budget was never designed to support. Schedule a call with our team today, to get a better understanding of the recruiting budget you need to accomplish your goals!

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