Hiring an HGV driver
Thirty applications, four things that are legally non-negotiable, and a market where the good candidates are being interviewed by three other operators this week.
Everything that disqualifies is a fact. Everything that matters is not. Licence category, Driver CPC currency, tachograph card and licence endorsements are absolute — no amount of experience compensates for an expired CPC, and getting any of them wrong is a compliance problem rather than a hiring mistake. So the gating half of this role is unusually clean. The screening half is unusually hard: the pool is genuinely short, the strongest drivers are rarely unemployed, and what separates a safe long-term driver from a risky one — the walkaround check done properly when nobody is watching, the decision to stop rather than push through hours — appears nowhere on a CV that lists licence categories and previous depots. Meanwhile any process that takes two weeks loses to the operator who made an offer on Thursday.
Category, work pattern, and how fast you can decide
Selene settles the legal facts first so they can be asked immediately, then goes after the work pattern — which decides who will actually stay.
What they will be driving, and what the week looks like
The category and the work pattern between them describe this job almost completely. Trunking nights, multi-drop days and tramping weeks away attract different drivers, and a driver who took a job with the wrong pattern usually leaves inside two months.
One sentence changes the guide
It is also the most consequential answer on this site. Everything else in this hire is a document check; this is the part that decides whether a vehicle leaves the yard with a fault on it, and it is invisible to every filter an operator normally has available.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The ones who walk round the vehicle properly when they know nobody’s watching.”
→ A reported defect or refused vehicle became a must-have, ranked above years behind the wheel.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria, four of them legal facts. The scored half is deliberately short and pointed at conduct rather than experience — with thirty applicants, a longer guide would be sorting a pile too small to justify the precision.
Four legal facts, asked before anything else
Licence category, CPC, tacho card and endorsements are all yes-or-no or a number, and all four are compliance requirements rather than preferences. Asking them on the application page is not primarily about saving screening cost here — it is that an operator cannot lawfully put a driver in a cab without them, so establishing them on day one is the difference between a two-day hire and a two-week one in a market where two weeks loses the candidate.
Scored on conduct, once the documents are settled
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
What she looks for is the walkaround-check kind of evidence: conduct when nobody was checking, which is the only part of this role a document cannot certify.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning the four legal requirements into application-page questions so nothing surfaces late
- Reading all 30 the day they arrive, blind, against the same guide
- A ranked shortlist fast enough to matter in a market this short
- Drafting the declines, so drivers who do not qualify are not left waiting
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Licence, CPC and DVLA checks before anyone drives; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- The driving assessment and the interview, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Set the gates before you advertise
Category, CPC, tacho, points — have all four asked automatically and answer good drivers on day one.