Driving Success

J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. is one of the largest trucking and transportation companies in the United States. With a fleet of over 15,000 trucks and 80,000 trailers, the company operates throughout North America, providing transportation and logistics services to a wide range of industries. The company's size and reach make it a major player in the transportation industry, which in turn has a significant impact on the economy, and its operations are a vital link in the supply chains of thousands of organizations.

The company became a market leader through a best-in-class understanding of efficiency and logistics at every level of the market, and by investing in its people. With over 37,000 employees, the company is deeply committed in making sure its drivers have the support they need to keep the entire operation running smoothly.

But after the disruption of the pandemic and the global supply-chain issues that followed, J.B. Hunt needed an edge. Its traditional pay-benchmarking analysis had worked well in the past, but new circumstances required going deeper.

When someone works with J.B. Hunt, they know they are working with people they can rely on to get the job done.

The business problem for the company was how to ensure that reliability while maintaining efficiency and low margins in payroll. Trucking relies on millions of contracts based on billions of pickups and dropoffs, and even the tiniest mismatch can lead to salary inflation or, worse, missed deliveries.

Supply chain issues and labor shortages throughout 2020 and 2021 amplified those issues. In 2022 alone, there were 863,774 unique job postings for Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers, according to Lightcast data—so workers had plenty of leverage and choice in who they wanted to drive for.

The Driving Compensation team at J.B. Hunt turned to Lightcast to make sure those drivers drove for them.

"I’d worked with Lightcast in the past, using their profile data to understand supply and demand in different markets," said Lloyd Trader, VP of Driver Hiring at J.B. Hunt. "So when we realized there was room for improvement in how we looked at our potential talent pool, I knew they would have the labor market expertise we need.”

Setting driver compensation depends on a wide range of factors—pay can increase based on a few key words or phrases in an advertisement. Lightcast data can identify those keywords and distinguish crucial differences between types of contracts, such as “home on weekends,” “over the road,” “teams,” “touch,” and “no touch.”

By using Talent Analyst, J.B. Hunt’s Driver Compensation team could sort through postings based on searched terms, see compensation trends related to combinations of those factors, and benchmark their own pay accordingly. But there was a catch: with such a large and complex people operation, manually parsing individual postings was a huge undertaking.

“I saw that the J.B. Hunt team was making hundreds of exports a month, which is thousands and thousands of job postings,” said Chayce Kowalski, Client Services Enablement Manager at Lightcast.

“That’s a lot, especially to do manually. So I thought: what if we could do a trial run with Snowflake and they could see more of this data? And then we were able to provide them with three years’ worth of data at the snap of a finger.” 

With data delivery through Snowflake, J.B. Hunt was able to pipe all the data they needed right into their compensation model to set the minimum and maximum levels for their pay bands.

On average, the trucking industry deals with a staggering 102% annual turnover rate. In 2022, after integrating these Lightcast solutions, J.B. Hunt achieved a retention rate of over 50%. It hired 18,000 new drivers.

“Logistics is a competitive industry, and our goal as a company is for our relationship with our drivers to set us apart,” said Trader. “We need to be competitively positioned on driver pay to meet the operational needs of our customers with service excellence.”

Its success is a huge step forward, and it matters not just within the company, but for its global customer base relying on timely deliveries. That success hasn’t gone unnoticed—earlier this year, J.B. Hunt was named to Fortune’s list of most-admired companies for the twelfth time in company history. That selection was based on a set of criteria including investment value, quality of management and products, social responsibility and its ability to attract talent.

"We’re always trying to make smarter decisions about how we handle every aspect of the business—in a competitive industry, we have to,” Trader said. “The data-driven approach that Lightcast brought to the table was crucial in helping us achieve that goal.”

The successful result is a testament to the power of data-driven insights and the value of partnerships that are focused on achieving real-world outcomes. By leveraging Lightcast data through Talent Analyst and the Snowflake API, J.B. Hunt was able to gain a deeper level of insight into its talent pool and set standards that better aligned with the company's needs.

Moving forward, J.B. Hunt is set to continue growing and investing in its workforce, delivering efficiency and excellence across North America.

"It's always rewarding to see our tools being put to good use,” Kowalski said. “Honestly, I’m so glad to have been able to help J.B. Hunt achieve such impressive results, because I know it helps not only the company as a whole, but individual workers, too, and everyone who relies on them.”