A Driver’s Story

You’re a driver.

The road is your home. When you leave, you’re not sure when you’ll be back again.

Your dispatcher is one of your only points of contact while you’re on a route, and you’re pretty sure he has it out for you. You never get enough home time, and on top of all that, your benefits suck. You decide you should look for a better job.

So what will you do?

You heard from a buddy not too long ago that there’s another company hiring in your area. So, you give the company a call to see how you can apply. They tell you you’ll need to come in to their office and fill out a paper application if you want to be considered. You haven’t been home in two months and aren’t sure when you’ll get around to the terminal, so you ask them to fax you the application on the road. Fortunately, they agree.

At the next truck stop, you pick up the faxed application. You sit there and spend an hour filling it out—you’ve written this same information down dozens of times, so it’s tedious but easy work. You fax your application back. Now you wait.

While you’re driving and waiting to hear a response, this potential new company is sending more faxes to every carrier you’ve driven for in the past ten years to confirm your employment history. Now they wait. And wait. And wait.

Some of your previous employers respond that day, some of them the next, and some of them later still. Several days later, the company you applied to has confirmed the same information that other carriers have spent their time assembling before—turns out you worked where you said you did.

The potential new company runs other reports, checks your driving record and your safety history. You fax them a copy of your CDL when you’re at a rest stop one night, and you keep waiting to hear back, wondering if you should be spending more time applying to other companies.

After all this waiting, you get a response – they’re ready to hire you! It’ll be a few days until you can start, so you buy your bus ticket to the new terminal. You have to take a drug screening test before you start, and if you’re lucky nothing will get messed up with the paperwork along the way and delay your start date. In the meantime, you hang around and wait.

Once you get to the terminal on your first day, you can’t start driving yet. There are forms to fill out, safety videos to watch, orientation to sit through before you can start making money.

Finally, after you’re done with all the training, the applying, the waiting, you can get into your truck and drive.

So far this company seems better. Maybe. You can’t tell yet if the dispatcher will like you. You wonder if you’ll ever get the sign-on bonus you were promised. Will they give you home time around the holidays? But even if you hate this job too, you can’t imagine going through that process again.

Maybe you don’t have to. Maybe you could do it differently.

The next time around, your buddy from before tells you about a mobile app called Driver Pulse. It lets you set your preferences for the kinds of driving jobs you’re looking for, and once it learns what you like, it shows you carriers and jobs that match your settings. You swipe through a few different companies on your phone and find several employers in the area that seem to have what you’re looking for, and who are looking for drivers just like you.

These carriers all have IntelliApps on their company profiles. You filled out an IntelliApp once before, so the system remembers most of your information, and you’re able to fire off several applications in just a few minutes from your phone while you’re at a rest stop.

Minutes later, you’re getting emails from companies who use Drip Marketing to let you know they’re processing your application. They’re interested in you and engage you by requesting documents like your CDL, which you can upload straight into Pulse using your phone camera. You get notifications from the app whenever companies request more information, and you can also track where you are in the application process.

Meanwhile, the companies that want to hire you are confirming your employment history with Xchange. It just takes a button click from previous employers to send back the verification, and if they’ve verified you before, the response is instantaneous and automatic.

Before long, you have a job offer! You accept it—you’ll start in a few days. The recruiter buys your Greyhound ticket through their Xpress dashboard and sends you the ticket info through your Pulse app. Your employer has their onboarding forms online, so you’re able to fill them out before you show up at the terminal and watch safety and training videos from your phone. Your new company can also schedule your drug screening at a center near where you live and track your progress in real time using Pulse MD, so they get the results back from the lab electronically as soon as they’re available.

You start your first day on the job. Orientation is short because you did so much of your onboarding through Pulse before you showed up. Before you know it, you get in your truck and start driving.

You can tell this company will be good. They care about your experience, checking in with you often and sending surveys about how your job is going. They made things so fast and efficient that you can’t imagine ever going back to the old way of doing things again. And now that you have Tenstreet’s Driver Pulse, you won’t have to.