Report: industry must rethink driver recruitment strategies

There is a plentiful supply of newly-qualified truck drivers, and one in four of all current HGV Driver CPC holders first acquired the qualification in the last five years.

That’s the perhaps counter-intuitive finding of respected transport statistician and logistics consultant Kirsten Tisdale in her latest report for driver agency Blue Arrow: Still Hiring Like it’s 1984? Why Logistics Needs to Rethink Risk, Recruitment and Retention.

It challenges the prevailing narrative that the only people available for recruitment as truck drivers are an ever-diminishing pool of elderly men.

Instead, it evidences that: “We don’t have a driver shortage. We have a driver placement and retention crisis, and it’s one ‘we’ created.”

It cites official data showing that one quarter of Driver CPC holders acquired the qualification in the last five years, and 11 per cent did so two years ago or less.

Kirsten Tisdale says that in many cases employers are: “not good at getting new drivers started in the career. We’re letting water go out of the plughole faster than the water that’s going into the bath – but it’s not that there isn’t enough water, it’s getting spilt and not just one or two stray drops, but gallons,” she says.

She outlines the hurdles standing between a newly-qualified driver and a job behind the wheel of a truck.

“A marked change seems to have taken place at the end of 2023, with specified lengths of experience suddenly being required to a much larger extent than had been the case up till then,” she writes.

“And with longer-serving drivers there’s a growing emphasis on recent, active experience meaning that past or lapsed experience is being valued less than it once was.

“ONS data shows that 50 per cent of HGV job ads where experience is specified require one or more years, double what it has been in the past, and that includes 20 per cent requiring two or more years’ experience.”

To an extent this mirrors a requirement in recruitment across the board, but the increased demand for previous experience is far more likely to be found in HGV driver recruitment than generally.

Insurance costs are another obstacle to younger drivers in particular, although certain insurers are apparently still prepared to take them on.

But Kirsten Tisdale cautions that much fault lies with employers themselves “still hiring like it’s 1984,” or trying to. In reality, she says, a willingness to conform to the long hours culture that traditionally sustained road haulage has gone.

Young people still living with their parents, and older people without mortgage or family commitments are unlikely to be desperate to work every last hour. Equally those with a mortgage to pay and children to support are likely to be sharing home-making and childcare duties with a partner who is also in employment.

“The people you want will already be employed… by someone else,” she writes.

She concludes by pointing out that much of the perceived driver shortage is driven by instant gratification.

“If you are in B2C, do you really need to offer your customer a service level that means there are only four hours to the start of a delivery window… and you need an extra driver to do it?

“It’s those service levels that force last-minute bookings for [agency] drivers. It’s not just bad for the environment, but it’s also leading to the sort of poor working conditions that mean people don’t want to be drivers.

“Here’s the conundrum; do we want growth? Do we want to cover the country with warehouses and fuel rampant consumerism? And, if we do, how exactly are we going to meet the rising demand, especially with 1.5 million new homes to be built by 2030?

“If we’re serious about delivering that future, we need to get serious about where the drivers will come from.

“One part of the solution might be counterintuitive: reducing demand for rapid delivery of non-essential goods.”

The report follows an earlier study by Kirsten Tisdale in conjunction with Blue Arrow, which cited figures obtained through freedom of information requests, indicating that over 117,000 Driver CPC cards had expired between October 2024 and May 2025.

This suggested that more than one in six truck drivers had not renewed their qualification, and thus had been removed from the industry’s potential recruitment pool.