Does your fleet have a driver pay problem or a messaging problem?

There have been quite a few headlines over the past month about what’s happening with driver pay—and they all seem to be painting a different picture.

Recently, I saw articles promoting a narrative that pay has declined sharply this year. Within the same work week, I saw several other articles saying pay has jumped over the past two years, by about the same amount the prior articles said pay declined.

Are any of them right? Sort of, in a sense. They’re using different sets of data, some more accurate and actionable than others to understand driver pay movement and make critical decisions about pay within your fleet. Some sources rely on drawing pay numbers from recruiting websites with driver job ads, and others surveyed fleets about their drivers’ W2 earnings, among other pay attributes.

Aggregating a number based on the pay that fleets market in their job ads isn’t benchmarking data, and it’s not a realistic picture of what drivers are actually being paid—and thus isn’t indicative of how pay has changed or how you should establish your fleet’s compensation schedules. It’s simply not a reliable number for actual wages or paid income.

However, most importantly in this conversation isn’t necessarily the pay numbers or pay movement. Rather, it’s that driver pay has become so much more nuanced than it was just five years ago, but especially 10 and 15 years ago.

Blending broad-strokes data from a wide range of driving jobs might give us an inkling about what’s happening with driver comp broadly in the industry, but they do not help us understand what our driving jobs pay, how we should establish our pay rates, and how we can effectively market those pay rates to prospects.

No more is a driving job a driving job or a pay package a pay package. Gone—long gone, really—are the days when a fleet looks at its national or regional per-mile rates, compares them to the per-mile pay rates of the companies considered competitors, and picks a number within a comfortable range.

See also: Clark: Keep employees engaged with training and development initiatives

This is undoubtedly clear in the data we track at The National Transportation Institute. Every job within every market has reacted differently to the wage pressures and market dynamics over the past four years.

Some job roles have seen W2 pay climb 10-12%, while others, like certain regional jobs, have seen pay climb nearly 25% due to demand for those hires. And that’s just at the national level. In hiring locations across the country, those percentages will be different, as will the base hourly or mileage pay a fleet offers, its component pay attributes, and drivers’ overall W2 take-home.

Even beyond benchmarking your fleet’s compensation with the right data and the right locations to understand pay in the markets where you hire and retain, and then building a pay package focused around your company’s staffing goals, the messaging and marketing pieces of your pay package are just as critical.

Often, we promote an hourly or mileage pay rate and leave far too much room for drivers to extrapolate and make their own assumptions about what they’ll be taking home hourly, weekly, or annually.

Understanding how to articulate your pay, making a plan for messaging your pay, and being consistent in how you deliver your pay is just as important as the amount you pay.

Also, as you’re evaluating your performance in hiring and retention and you’re not seeing the results you need, your advertising partners might be screaming to spend more money—either by way of higher advertised wages or with a higher marketing spend.

Just like with the whiplash of the driver pay headlines, this can all be disorienting and create a lot of noise internally at your company. I know because I’ve been there. In my 25 years in trucking, I worked as a recruiting and HR leader at a national multi-platform trucking company for the first half of my career, and I’ve been fortunate in my nearly 10 years at NTI to work alongside hundreds of motor carriers and private fleets as they navigate these same questions.

The right approach right now is to drown out the noise of distractions, make sure your team strives to understand your pay package relative to your job nuances and the markets you operate in, and maintain focus in your marketing to articulate your offering effectively to the right audience in the right channels. This is the path to deliver reliable, consistent outcomes for your employees in one of the most trying markets any of us have faced.