Recruitment and Retention
To ensure we can deliver a quality service we need to recruit and retain the right people. The recruitment and retention of bus drivers remains a challenge due to a highly competitive market and an increasing shortage of qualified drivers in parts of the country. Our high safety standards and extensive background checks further restrict the pool of employees available to us.
Understanding the reason for our high turnover rates and improving our recruiting processes therefore continues to be an important focus for us.
First Transit's driver turnover has increased since last year. During the year we recruited two full-time driver recruiting managers to help reverse this trend. They will remove some of the burden of recruitment from the location managers and provide additional experience to the recruiting process. They will be looking at alternative routes to sourcing candidates and will screen candidates on behalf of the operating locations.
The focus to date has been on high turnover locations where we are trying to obtain a better understanding of the recruitment process and to identify when and why employees leave. We are already gaining useful insights into some of our recruitment and retention challenges and the significance of location-specific issues.
First Student's driver turnover rate has reduced by 3.5% which reflects well on our ongoing strategy to target problem locations. We also conduct local wage surveys to ensure that our wage rates remain competitive. To encourage greater driver retention we have been working to improve communication. Initiatives include an increased emphasis on open forum meetings and mechanisms to allow employees to raise their concerns.
Across the operating companies we continue a general managers' training programme with an emphasis on recruitment and employee relations.