When I first came up with the idea for Supir, one of the biggest pushbacks I’d received from people I had talked to was, “If the transportation industry is short 65,000 people how do you plan to get them?”
As a transit operator, I knew that there were thousands of drivers available. It was just a matter of convincing them to want to join our company.
Driving the bus is a tough sell, generally — most media outlets never paint transit in a favorable light. Typically, when you turn on the news or sign in to your favorite social media site, the message is projected loud and clear: driving the bus sucks.
Hiring is already difficult, but when people don’t think highly of the job it can become near impossible. My thinking was “If we were going to be able to scale this on-demand bus driver app, we were going to have to find a way to change a lot of those sentiments about driving the bus”.
Here’s how we got nearly 7,000 drivers to sign up for Supir in less than 2 months during our pre-launch phase.
Targeted ads about them…not us.
So, in my journey, I’ve noticed whenever a bus company posts a hiring ad…they typically all look the same regardless of the agency. They are usually very generic, with headers like “health…
