Merv Orr, who years ago ran one of the better truck-driver training schools in Ontario-back when there weren’t many good ones-used to say there were only three requirements for being a safe, competent transport driver: experience, experience, and experience. Merv was right, but he knew that everybody has to start somewhere, and so he tried to give neophyte truckers the best possible training.

The longer I stick with this industry, the more I realize the real wisdom in Merv’s words. History and experience are basically impossible to transfer because, of course, “You had to be there.” Because of the massive responsibility our industry carries by using public highways to move our loads, there’s always been a lot of attention paid to regulations and driver and mechanic training. It helps keep people alive out on the highway. Many years ago, some folks in the States developed the basis of our current driver file, and the more you work with it, the more a smart fleet operator should appreciate it.

I guess only the airlines have access to the same “traceability” of vehicle operators that we have in a standard file: background, training, safety performance. Maybe 30 years ago, a fleet owner mostly had drivers he’d known all his life, and, when he needed another, good old Joe knew Bill was a good man, and there you had your next driver. It’s a very different world today.

You can spot your next major accident in your driver file. You can also detect your next bad-attitude headache, and your next unhappy-customer problem there, too. After you’ve studied a few thousand files, a driver’s personality, skill set, and attitude just jump right out at you as you read one.

Years ago, I had a problem with a respected, third-generation family fleet that had suddenly begun to run over everything on the highway. I spent four 12-hour days reviewing every document in more than 200 driver files (you can properly review maybe six files an hour). I picked out 40 drivers who just didn’t seem to fit.

We sent every one for driving and personality testing at a major driving school: 20 were rejected outright, 10 were deemed acceptable after some retraining, and 10 passed as OK.

One of the rejected drivers had been on the highway for 20 years, with a pin-to-pin operation, and had never coupled a trailer, never fuelled a truck, and couldn’t be taught a damn thing. It turned out that this fleet’s new safety and compliance manager (years of experience and a dozen certificates on the wall) was simply too lazy to do it right on new-hires, and created a monster with the driver staff in just eight months.

There are other quirks you have to watch out for when you create driver files today:

o If you’re using independent contractors, don’t give them a standard “worker” employee application. Any reference to such a person as an employee can come back to haunt you.

o Make sure you have a solid and provable three-year insurance history of any applicant (your own insurance company is required by law to have this information).

o Reference checks are vital. You can get a ton of information even in ones that skirt around the hard questions. That alone should tell you something.

(Call my office and we can fax you a sample of a “probably” adequate, safe application to use with owner-operators. I’m not a lawyer, so cannot give any legal advice.)

o Driver abstracts tell a bunch. Just review the past three years. People mature, attitudes change, and a guy who was an animal four years ago may well have seen the light.

o A driver with one speeding ticket in the past three years is 1.6 times more likely to have an accident than a “clean” driver. Two tickets in the period means 2.3 times greater accident risk, and three means a 3.6 times greater likelihood of bending some metal-and neither you nor your insurance company can afford the risk. That driver with three strikes has just tagged himself out.

Finally, from a fleet standpoint, a review of insurance-company loss reports will tell you the whole story on hiring practices, driver-training effectiveness, and management knowledge. In Ontario, that, combined with checking the CVOR (Commercial Vehicle Operator Record), will let anyone perform a complete fleet-management analysis.

As the tried and true saying goes: knowledge is power. Make yourself strong.