The Insider

When you’re hiring truck drivers, your first goal is to learn as much as you can about the person sitting across the desk from you. Your second is to never forget that it’s his goal to impress you, probably by telling you whatever you want to hear. At a time when a driver will work at two, three, maybe four places in a year, you’re in the hotseat. Due diligence soaks up time, money, and effort you don’t have, and-even if you’re committed to rigorous screening tests corroborated by reference checks-all you really have to go by is what the driver scribbles down on his job application.

Mastering the art of reading between the lines can take years of experience, and even the wiliest guy with the six-pack gut-check can get fooled. Ask Neil Melgaard, who’s been working around trucks and truck drivers for the better part of 30 years. “I was managing a farm and we had three rollovers with one truck in 10 months,” he explains. “And I thought my hiring instincts were pretty good. I figured there had to be a better way for me to know more about the person I was trusting with my equipment and reputation before I hired him.”

Turns out there wasn’t. The provinces do notoriously poor job of exchanging information on driver abstracts, and insurance companies report to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which for years filed accident records by policy number. Unless you know the company the driver was working for and its policy number, you’re out of luck. Besides, most big trucking companies have such high deductibles that accidents aren’t reported to the insurance company unless there’s an injury.

So in 1997 Melgaard founded the Professional Drivers Bureau, a Calgary-based company with a growing cache of information on the working lives of nearly 80,000 truck drivers in Canada. Accident records, employment histories, performance reviews, the works-all are contained in a national database that can be cross-referenced and customized. Carriers pay $78 a year, plus $20 or $30 a month, depending on how many drivers they employ. Each general search costs $12.50, which is waived if the driver is not on file. Melgaard says his company’s response time to a request is eight working hours or you get your money back.

“What we’re trying to prevent is the driver who puts his truck into a ditch in Texas, gets fired when he returns, and then represents himself to the next guy as clean,” says Dr. Chris Page. Page is president of Driver Check, a drug-testing and medical services firm based in Hamilton, Ont., which merged with the Professional Drivers Bureau in February. “How would you know about that accident? Who is going to tell you?”

The answer, Melgaard believes, is the driver’s last employer. The integrity of the bureau’s database relies on carriers filing a termination report immediately after a driver has left, ensuring that the information is accessible when the driver arrives at his next prospective employer. The report asks the carrier to outline the dates the driver was employed, answer a brief survey about his performance, detail any accidents, injuries, or negligent damage to equipment or cargo, and explain the driver’s reason for leaving. The bureau credits companies $4.50 for each termination report they file, since it reduces the administrative hassles of having to chase down missing information. The company also has several insurers reporting accidents to it directly.

“If we have to talk to two or three departments to get the full story, we’ll do it. To get actual dates of employment, we may talk to payroll; for accidents, we’ll talk to safety people; and on performance we go to a driver supervisor,” Melgaard says. “Information has to be accurate or we lose our credibility-and our membership base.”

Floyd Gerber, vice-president of human resources at Erb Transport, a refrigerated carrier in New Hamburg, Ont., has had a year to make up his mind. “We see the database as a useful supplement to our hiring process,” he says. “We look after 600 drivers in Canada, and we’re growing, so we have new seats to fill in addition to the usual turnover. It’s expensive to conduct so many background searches on our own. We need someone who can do the legwork on our behalf.”

There are detractors. One is Neil Woolliams, president of Surrey, B.C.-based West Rim Truck Lines, a heavy-haul specialist with about 45 drivers. The company conducts its own exhaustive background checks, and Woolliams is involved personally in every hiring decision. “When we bring on a new driver, chances are the guy is coming to us on a recommendation from another one of our drivers,” he says. “When one of our own gives us his word that someone he knows well would be a positive addition to our company, you can darn well bet that his word is good.”

Nor is Woolliams convinced that the database would be much use to him considering where his new hires come from. “We’re not pulling in kids who are burning through the big truckload carriers. We get very experienced professional drivers, often out of small operations,” he adds. “Those guys aren’t going to be in Neil Melgaard’s files.”

There are also questions about confidentiality. The bureau operates as an association, which gives it greater legal flexibility to exchange information among its members. It has to have hard copy with the driver’s signature on it-typically the company’s job application-in order to perform a search. No one outside the bureau staff ever sees an actual termination report, and the database itself is not for sale. When a driver asks to see his file, or to add a letter of explanation or refute, we comply.

“We’re not prying into anyone’s sex life or religious issues,” Dr. Page adds. “Where we ask people to rate a driver’s performance, a bad report that comes from a personality conflict is part of the risk you take. But some of these guys have worked at four or five places, so patterns are evident.”

Indeed, a driver who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear. “I once spent an hour talking to a guy who said he couldn’t get another job because of us,” Melgaard says. “This is a man who said he had no accidents when he filled out his most recent job application. When the employer called us and asked us to do a search, we showed that he in fact had five accidents, one major. I explained to this man that he didn’t get hired for two reasons: one, he outright lied, and two, he’s got a problem with accidents. Neither had anything to do with us.”

Melgaard told the man to go take a defensive driving course, and, when he applies for his next job, to be honest about his accident record but explain how he worked to improve his skills.

“If that guy takes my advice he’ll get 10 job offers,” Melgaard says. “The carrier who takes him will have a better understanding of the person he’s putting behind the wheel of his truck. The driver’s not denying his poor record, and he’s not hiding it, either. It’s out in the open where both the driver and the carrier can talk about it and the carrier can ultimately decide how what to do next. That’s our system at its best.”