Why Your VOE Process May Be Hurting Your Bottom Line

As a recruiter for CDL drivers, one of your primary obligations is to ensure that all the individuals you hire have the necessary qualifications and experience to operate a commercial vehicle safely. Among the tasks you take on with hiring, one of the most critical is verifying their previous employment history, their driving record, and any other relevant information.

One of the most significant pain points in this process is that many previous employers may not have thorough or easily accessible records. This can make it difficult to confirm a driver's employment history and can even lead to hiring individuals not adequately or properly qualified to operate a commercial vehicle. Pair that information gap with the actual time it takes to respond to a request, and you encounter significant bottlenecks in the hiring process. And in an economy fighting for drivers, that downtime can be the difference between filling a seat and losing an ideal candidate to another more efficient carrier. 

Maybe you’re a new recruiter intimidated by these numbers or a seasoned recruiter looking for a little more method to the madness. Either way, we’re here to help. 

Two Sides to the VOE Process 

Depending on your role in your company, VOEs can mean different things. Here’s how we break it down at DriverReach:

Requestors are those seeking a VOE from another company. You’re trying to comply with the regulations of properly qualifying a driver, which includes verifying an applicant’s Safety Performance History for at least the past three years. You often have to jump through a number of hoops, depending on where that driver previously worked. While necessary, it can be a painful, frustrating, and often manual process.

Responders are the other side of the VOE process, usually handled by people in HR or Safety. They are the ones actually providing the requested previous employment information to each requester. Regulations require that information be provided within 30 days of receiving the request. Some employers respond immediately, but others can take days or even weeks to respond. And, as you can imagine, when you have a driver who has worked at multiple carriers in the last three years, this wait time can hamper an applicant’s speed to being fully hired. 

Manual Processes are costly!

Every verification of employment your company runs has a variable cost, absorbed into the time and effort it takes to request or process these verifications manually. A recent study across multiple industries revealed that performing a single manual task—producing forms, reviewing data for accuracy, or transferring information into a digital system— costs companies $4.70 every time that task is completed. You don’t want VOEs to be costly in losing drivers or costing your company money it could better spend elsewhere. 

People come and go in any office, so having documentation of your internal “to-do’s” can ensure that your processes remain consistent no matter who is serving as the requestor or responder. But even if you have some digital solution to help ease the burden of requesting or responding to VOEs, there may be a manual task associated with the process in the form of checking for accuracy or even logging into a system to acknowledge a request. So, it behooves you to ensure you’ve accounted for these variable costs as part of your budget because they add up! 

But by far the best bang for your buck (both in time and money) is to leverage existing technology. By using an active database, you can immediately access available previous employment records as well as eliminate manual tasks (like constantly responding to requests) as much as possible.  

VOE databases save time and money

There are many advantages to accessing a database like VOE+ to run verifications of employment for CDL drivers: 

• It’s faster. A flexible, growing database means records are immediately available, and you don’t have to wait for someone to eventually respond to a VOE request (whenever that might be), allowing recruiters to devote more time to higher or more complex priorities. For responders, it’s even more of a time savior—once a record has been added to the database, a requestor is able to immediately access it, sparing the responder from the administrative burden of even having to engage with the request whatsoever.
• They are more economical. It’s true what they say—time is money. In the long run, it’s more cost-effective to incorporate an employment verification database into your hiring processes because it removes the manual task of running—or answering— the query. This means recruiters can divert those hours to what they do best—recruiting.  Additionally, databases (like VOE+) compensate carriers for contributing records! Learn more about how you can earn money by adding your driver employment records to our database.
• You get the advantage of fast accuracy and compliance. Employment record databases put measures in place for data integrity and accuracy so that access to these records is simple and immediately satisfies compliance requirements. This extra layer of credibility ensures that the employment verification process is conducted in sync with relevant laws and regulations. 

Getting started with easy VOEs

You wouldn’t be reading this far if you weren’t already asking, "How do I make my employment verification process faster?” And no, we’re not mind-readers here at DriverReach, but we do work with carriers struggling every day to find and hire quality (and qualified) drivers every day. 

At DriverReach, we focus on one thing: making the recruiting and hiring process easier for both carriers and drivers alike. We know that recruiters would prefer to spend their time doing the work that they’re paid to do —bring on new drivers — and less of the necessary but burdensome administrative work of chasing down VOEs. 

That’s why we’ve built the VOE+ Database to help make employment verification faster and also made it a seamless experience for recruiters using the DriverReach platform. So whether you’re a customer looking to standardize your process further within DriverReach, a recruiter seeking a fast VOE on a deadline, or looking to eliminate the administrative burden of constantly responding to VOE requests altogether, you can consider us a partner. 

With VOE+, you'll save hundreds of hours avoiding long wait times for verification returns, inconvenient follow-up requests, and backlogs of work. It's a simple and modern solution designed to immediately increase your speed-to-hire and alleviate the burden of ensuring compliant employment checks. See what VOE+ can do for you!