Most recruiting leaders in transportation are chasing the wrong problem. They're optimizing pipelines, sourcing new channels, and debating whether the driver shortage is real. Meanwhile, the drivers are already out there. They just don't trust the companies calling them.
Tommy Valenzuela, Director of Recruiting at Hansen & Adkins Auto Transport, knows this from the ground up. He started behind the wheel before working his way into talent acquisition, and that path shapes everything about how he builds a recruiting function. Earlier this year, Transport Topics named him their 2025 Recruiting Professional of the Year.
On this episode of Don't Get Played, host Carlo Solórzano sits down with Tommy to get into what it actually takes to build a process that holds under pressure, and why candidate trust, not volume, is the real failure point.
The argument Tommy makes is deceptively simple: when you understand what the job actually costs a driver, physically and mentally, you stop trying to sell them on it and start being straight with them. Honesty is the foundation on which everything else is built.
Tommy's entire hiring philosophy starts in a place most recruiters never go: the cab of a truck.
Before he moved into talent acquisition, he drove. He knows what bad dispatch feels like. He knows what it means to miss time with family, to sit alone on a long haul, to manage not just miles but sanity. That experience isn't a talking point for him. It's core to his beliefs about hiring.
He requires his entire recruiting team, including his onboarding coordinator, to load cars onto trailers at Hansen & Adkins. Not as a stunt. As a job requirement. “So they can speak from the reality of what they can look forward to, what the job's gonna be.” When you can describe the job from lived experience rather than a job description, drivers notice. And when you can't, they notice that too.
The leaders who miss this, Tommy argues, optimize for headcount, while drivers are dialing in for something closer to survival. Health, family, the basic dignity of being seen as a person rather than a seat to fill. “If you don't understand that,” he says, “Then your process is already gonna be broken.” Hiring has to be human.
Tommy spent time in the Marines, and it shows in how he runs recruiting. “It really just comes down to something super simple: standards and accountability,” he says. Close enough for good enough gets people hurt.
At Hansen & Adkins every candidate gets a response within 24 to 48 hours. Every step has an owner. Every status is documented. If it isn't tracked, it didn't happen. That's not bureaucracy. That's the structure that keeps standards from eroding when a carrier is desperate to move freight and the temptation to bend the bar becomes real.
Because the bar always bends when there's no structure holding it. Candidates sit in review for two or three days, and what feels like a backlog to a recruiter feels like a silent rejection to a prospective driver. “That sloppiness can cost you drivers, it can cost you reputation,” Tommy says. In a market where good drivers are fielding multiple offers, a 72-hour non-response isn't a delay. It's a decision.
His rule when pressure hits: fix the funnel, not the standard. Lowering the bar to fill a seat doesn't solve the problem. It relocates it into turnover, safety incidents, and a reputation that takes years to repair.
Tommy draws a hard line between the partners he counts on and the vendors who just show up on an invoice.
The distinction isn't about product features or pricing. It's about ownership. A real partner, he says, acts like they have skin in the game. They flag issues before you see them. They reinforce your standards when your team is stretched. “When your internal team is maybe stretched out too far, I would expect my partners to keep me from breaking and not just become another variable.”
A box-checker waits for instructions. A partner shows up like the outcome matters to them, too.
This extends to verification of employment as well. Tommy is clear-eyed about the complexity there. VOEs carry real stakes, but they're not infallible. Former employers can be slow, inaccurate, or occasionally driven by personal grievance rather than fact. Speed and accuracy both matter. And the people supplying that information need to be held to the same standard of honesty that the rest of the process requires.
Tommy sees complacency as a real risk in the industry. Too many people in positions of authority are still running the same playbook from fifteen years ago, unwilling to examine what it's actually costing them.
“The industry doesn't necessarily have a driver shortage,” Tommy says. “It has a trust shortage.” That's not a branding problem. It's an operational one. And the fix starts with whether your recruiters understand the weight of the job they're asking someone else to carry.
The companies that are winning on retention aren't winning because they found a better sourcing channel or executed recruiting fundamentals better. They're winning because drivers trust them. That trust is built through communication, follow-through, and treating a driver like someone whose time and career actually matter.
“We're not here to just hire those drivers, man. We're here to raise the standard of how this industry treats them,” Tommy says. “And if we get that right, everything else takes care of itself.”