The real cost of losing a delivery driver (and how to work it out for your station)

Most owners count the ad spend and stop there. The full cost of replacing a driver has five parts: recruiting (ads and recruiter time), screening (background, driving record and drug screen), training (the ride-along and the trainer's lost route), the gap (routes run short or covered on overtime while the seat is empty) and the early-quit risk (a share of every new class leaves inside the first month and you pay for all of it again).

The numbers below are examples only, so swap in your own. Say ads and recruiter time come to $600 per hire, screening $150, training $500 in wages and a lost route, and the gap averages 8 days at $120 a day in overtime and missed volume, which is $960. That is about $2,210 for one replacement. Lose 20 drivers a year and the bill is roughly $44,000, before counting the customer complaints a rushed route creates.

The gap is usually the biggest line and the easiest to shrink. Every day you cut from the time between a resignation and a ready replacement saves a day of overtime or a dropped route. That is why keeping two or three screened candidates waiting is cheaper than hiring from scratch each time.

Screen for the actual job (pace, hours, commute) so fewer new drivers leave in month one. Keep a warm pool so seats fill in days. Use contingency drivers to cover the gap instead of overtime when a seat opens suddenly. Each of these attacks a different line of the bill.