A Natural Experimental Study of Truck Driver Retention and Recruitment

Truck driver shortages impose higher costs and reduced service levels in many regions of the world. The shortages persist, despite decades of recruitment and retention programs that emphasize compensation and time at home, which suggests a gap in our understanding of the problem. In order to help address this gap, this study reviews the existing truck driver shortage, recruitment, and retention literatures. From this literature we generate, hypotheses about how to improve recruitment and retention by improving truck drivers’ quality of work life. Then, this study analyzes a natural experiment in a set of U.S. regional trucking routes, where a shipper and a carrier changed their policies to address often-overlooked quality of work life factors: overnight parking and restroom access. We find that overnight parking doubled driver retention rates and improved recruitment compared to routes without it. Adding restroom access increased retention further, but had no significant effect on recruitment. Unlike previous studies relying on intent-to-quit survey scales, this research measured actual driver turnover behavior. These findings contribute to the logistics literature and have policy implications for trucking companies worldwide.