Transforming Driver Recruitment

Through Intelligent Automation

The Challenge

As a contractor managing comprehensive transportation operations for municipalities, government agencies, colleges, and corporate campuses, this leading transportation company faces a massive hiring challenge: 90% of their 8,000 annual hires are drivers across diverse service types — from paratransit to fixed route and school bus operations. Each role requires navigating complex FTA regulations, safety requirements, and regional pay variations across multiple cities.

With 54,000 unique visitors to their career site monthly, their previous technology stack captured only 5% of potential candidates. The company relied on basic chatbots and manual processes that couldn't support their sophisticated hiring needs.

"We were existing on some pretty old technology. It didn't really give us a lot of data," revealed the organization’s Director of Talent Acquisition. With hundreds of applications flowing in, the team struggled to identify qualified candidates efficiently and risked losing top talent due to delayed response times.

Beyond improving their capture rate, the company set ambitious retention goals. "We're aiming to reduce turnover to the 40% level, which is impressive for a company where we have many slightly above minimum wage positions," said their Director of TA.

The company needed a solution that could:

• Modernize their career site technology

• Improve candidate capture rates

• Streamline the screening process for high-volume driver hiring

• Enhance the recruitment experience for both candidates and hiring teams

• Support complex compliance requirements for safety-sensitive positions

The Solution

To facilitate reaching their goals, the transportation service provider implemented Phenom High-Volume Hiring to transform their recruitment process. Why Phenom? The decision came down to user experience.

"The smoothness of the system and the user interface is very straightforward," said their Director of TA. "We're an hourly-worker company with hundreds of people working on recruitment at various levels of technology knowledge. I needed something that was easy to use but also had the ability to handle our complexities and really automate."

Through Phenom’s AI-driven automation and sophisticated screening capabilities, the team created five custom driver hiring workflows based on specific service types — paratransit, fixed route, and school bus — while accounting for whether divisions offer training.

This comprehensive solution delivers:

• Immediate candidate engagement through automated scheduling

• AI-powered chatbot for enhanced candidate support

• Custom screening questions to assess qualifications and compatibility

• Integration with FTA-regulated safety-sensitive applications

• Integration with automated personality assessments and predictive tenure scoring

• Embedded generative AI for context-rich communications — from job descriptions to email and text campaigns

By including pay rate screening and commute feasibility checks early in the process, they’re ensuring alignment before candidates invest time in detailed applications. "We're able to filter out candidates early if the pay or commute doesn't align with their needs," noted their TA Systems Administrator.

"After initial screening, they go through a streamlined process including phone screening, personality assessment results, and tenure prediction through our AI integration. Hiring teams use all these data points to make informed decisions on drivers. "This saves time for both our recruiters and candidates, especially in areas where our pay rates might not be competitive."

The Results

The implementation of Phenom has dramatically transformed the company's recruitment capabilities, delivering measurable improvements across every aspect of their hiring process — especially screening and scheduling.

Time and Efficiency Gains:

• Reduced time to hire 69% (from 91 to 28 days)

• Streamlined candidate journey to just 5.5 minutes from application start to interview scheduling

• Automated 749 scheduled interviews

• Saved 774 administrative hours in five months: 68 hours in candidate review and 706 hours in interview scheduling

• Freed the equivalent of one full-time employee’s time through automation

Scale and Impact:

• Increased hires from 37 to 429 in comparable five-month periods

• Processed 3,500 candidates monthly

• Increased candidate capture from 5% to 15% of career site visitors

"We now have the capability to capture leads that we were previously losing and help recruiters get to those better-qualified candidates faster," said their TA Systems Administrator, also crediting Phenom Campaigns and SMS for enhanced efficiency. In addition, their Director of TA highlighted the impact of Phenom X+'s generative AI capabilities for streamlining the creation of contextually relevant job descriptions and email campaigns.

The company’s improvements extend beyond just driver recruitment. "Our management recruitment has really excelled with Phenom, too," noted their Director of TA. "We need sharp general managers with financial acumen, plus safety managers for risk management, and maintenance managers in a very difficult market,” they explained. “Phenom’s projects feature in the CRM helps us build talent lists that we can utilize in different scenarios."

The Future

Moving forward, the organization is preparing to integrate Phenom with Workday as its new ATS. "I really want to make Phenom my hiring system of choice," said their Director of TA. The company aims to:

• Deepen automation capabilities

• Enhance system adoption across all recruiting teams

• Explore additional Phenom tools and functionalities

• Integrate seamlessly with their new Workday implementation

"We still have many capabilities within the system that we haven't fully explored yet," they noted. "Moving into 2025, we're focusing on driving adoption across all our recruiting teams and really showing people how to more deeply use the tools."