Hi
I am stuck in a really bad job. It’s a permanent job I know but I just can’t get up in the morning to face another day of a ■■■■ storm created by people in the office who never sat in the lorry.
I live in Sheffield so It shouldn’t be that hard to get a normal job around here but the market at the moment seems to be very dry. All jobs I get are agency/temp and I need financial certainty at the moment.
There are a few permanent jobs I have applied but NOBODY is replying. Like not even “no thank you” I applied 3 weeks ago and still nothing to this date - how long more should I wait before I go to work for bloody agency? 
I have 3 years class 1 and 2 years class 2 experience now doing urban deliveries, clean license and don’t mind long days
heres my pennies worth. Before boot camp most of the new pass work was through agency it allowed companies to fill vacancies with out tying themselves to an employee and having the headache of trying to get rid of them. if the face didn’t fit or any reason just ring the agency and bye bye.
then we had the wonders of boot camp so 90% of the agency work that would take new passes and less experienced drivers dried up because the company got paid to train people up and the really savie ones employed a driving instructor so they got even more money. This allowed the companies to mold the drivers in their image and of course the employee is probably tied to a 2 year contract where they cant leave with out paying back the non existent training costs. So they can treat them like dirt
One of the main problems with this industry is driving agencies. They flood the job websites with fake vacancies so as to try and look busy to other agencies. They call it posturing, I call it lying but alas it is legal and the government allow them to advertise “potential” vacancies. This gives the website visiting drivers a false sense of hope because it appears there are many jobs out there but you try applying for them and you wil see how real they are…you will hear nothing.
Your only real hope is to use contacts to find who pays, and what they expect for it, and then approach them directly.
Just read who is posting the jobs on the sites and when you see it is an agency just move to the next ad.
One of the main problems with this country is employment agencies.
Apart from the false adverts etc which you are dead right about the proliferation of agency use and also zero hours contracts is now a problem.
Agencies have a use and suit some employers and some workers. They shouldn’t be banned or anything.
But agencies are widely used to enable companies to circumvent the laws we have that are designed to protect workers from bad employers.
The simple truth is that due to the constant repetition of the lie that there is a “driver shortage”, 
coupled with the additional lies about high wages and good working conditions 
, the marketplace is now saturated by “LGV entitlement holders”.
I had this info first-hand from one of the TMs of a north-east company, now absorbed into Kinaxia: The minimum number of applications they get for every vacancy is 100, the maximum he has seen is 400 applicants, for one job!
It’s like Thatcher’s 1980’s all over again.
This is precisely why the OTC are cracking down on excessive use of agency drivers, and the often associated so-called “self-employed drivers”. O-licences are being curtailed or even revoked purely for this
I find it amazing that HMRC, (because that’s where it stems from) after decades of Ltd Company Driver’s operating in the haulage industry all of a sudden are curtailed. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal.
At the height of the driver shortage, often mentioned was “there is no driver shortage, there is a shortage of people who won’t work for poor money and conditions”. That to me means there was a driver shortage. A bit like the current shortage of carers, plenty of people are “qualified” to do it but choose not to wipe backsides for minimum wage, hence a carer shortage.
what would be interesting though is how many applicants did he get before the wage increase and boot camps and what were the demographic of applicants then compaired to now. did they only get new passes or the desperate with limited experience where as now they are getting better “qualified” drivers etc etc
[quote=“cooper1203, post:8, topic:238015, full:true”]
what would be interesting though is how many applicants did he get before the wage increase [/quote]
What wage increase? Plenty of jobs offering very poor remuneration
Drivers so “qualified” that they get told to hand the keys back even before they’ve finished struggling (and failing) to get out of the yard, others so cluless that they drive onto a beach to turn around
“Whey I saw a car on the sand y’nar, so ah thawt it’d be alreet like”
These “Boot Camps” have produced shedloads of “drivers” who haven’t invested in their own training so don’t take any of it seriously - even to the point where they’re kicking off about having to do Mod 2 and Mod 4 (Initial DCPC) 
They’re not even a qualified driver but they’re already sure they know it all
To say nothing of the impact of Boot Camps on the many dedicated professional driving schools, most of whom (in the north at least) are laying off instructors due to falling demand.
Who are all the applicants for driving jobs?
Are they unemployed?
Career changers?
Drivers on agency wanting a steady job?
Employed drivers with bad jobs?
Other?
Thank you all for good input! I presume it must be proper crap when companies don’t respond to applications within 3 weeks of applying. It really ■■■■■.
I though I have seen wages going down lately as few around Sheffield is offering £11p/h class 1 haha what a joke that is.
Anybody reckon is it get better after April??
Cheers
i dint say boot camps produced better qualified drivers i asked if the qualification of drivers applying had improved ie rather than getting the inept and just qualified they were getting applicants that had a wide range of experience and time under the belt
With 400 applicants to deal with, no one is going to take the time to find out
a wage increase doesn’t automatically mean it is a good or fair wage it simply means it has been increased. there is a transport company in sittingbourne that is renowned in the local area for being one of the worst employers. they used to pay a day rate then got halled over the coals because it worked out less than minimum wage. so then for a few years they paid the minimum wage. now they pay £1.50 approx over the minimum.
I get that just over minimum wage is poor however it is still a wage increase
no one is going to get the life history of 400 applicants but anyone worth their salt would go through each one to see who is suitable and worthy of going on to the next stage of the recruitment process.
I wouldn’t expect a detailed analysis either, but I would expect that as the applications were sorted, a picture might emerge of failure for particular reasons or indeed not!
“look at this, hundreds of bricklayers just got licences”
or
“look at this, loads of new passes”
or whatever?
Those applications binned will have been binned for a reason and whoever doing it might well have seen patterns in them.
Those applications left for consideration will have been large or small? Are there loads of good experienced drivers applying I wonder?
I don’t expect Zac or anyone to know the answers, but I do think it is relevant to know why so many are applying.
People are applying because HGV entitlements are common as muck now and people have bought into the BS I described earlier
Personally I’d probably delegate that to an “office junior”, though I doubt such things still exist, telling them: "Bin the ones that don’t have an attachment (ie a CV), sort the rest based on having experience, bring me ten applicants with minimum X years experience and who can read and write properly and I’ll interview them. "
No one has time to read that many applications, no one is going to care “why” they’ve applied
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the point is someone has gone through them. to get the 10 applicants that meet the criteria.
however i did see a big national parcel company specifically say don’t send a CV in with your application
im not saying that they should note what each person did before they got their licence but they would notice wow we used to get 10 applicants that were new passes now we get 50 or or we only used to get 15 people with experience now we get 200
trouble is this doesn’t fit the narrative
I would argue that point.
If someone is applying because they’ve lost their last job, you’ll want to know why.
If someone is desperate to get a job because they love driving, that’s important.
If someone changes jobs more often than PMs do, then that is an important thing.
If those ten applicants with x years came from the first 20 letters that tells a story. If it took hours to find those ten it tells a different story.
It is possible to form a picture without loads of effort.