Your Google profile is a recruiting tool

A driver considering your job does what anyone does before handing over an MVR and a work history: they search the company name. What comes back decides whether the application gets finished.

For a fleet of a few trucks this can be the cheapest credibility gap to close: the fix is free and takes an afternoon.

• Does this company exist outside the job advert — an address, a phone number someone answers, photographs of actual equipment.
• Is anyone home. A listing last touched three years ago reads as a company that may not be operating.
• What do other people say, and whether anyone answered them.
• Does the story match. A job advert claiming a modern fleet next to a profile showing nothing invites the obvious doubt.

1. 1Claim the listing if you have not, and complete every field — hours, service area, category, a description written for a driver rather than a shipper.
2. 2Add real photographs. Your own equipment, your own yard. Stock imagery is recognizably stock and does the opposite of what you want.
3. 3Make sure the phone number reaches a human during the hours you claim to be open. A driver who calls and gets nothing has no reason to call twice.
4. 4Respond to reviews, including the unflattering ones. A measured reply to a bad review shows a prospective driver that someone is paying attention.
5. 5Check that your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear — the website, job boards, load boards, directories, and your FMCSA registration, which has to be updated within 30 days of a change of name or address (§ 390.201).

Reviews are where the temptation to help things along is strongest, and since October 21, 2024 the FTC has had a rule on exactly that. Three parts of it matter to a small fleet:

• No reward for a particular kind of review. A business may not give money, a discount or anything else in exchange for a review expressing a particular sentiment, positive or negative (§ 465.4). Asking for honest reviews is fine; paying for five-star ones is not.
• Insiders say who they are. If an owner or manager asks drivers, other staff or relatives for reviews, tell them to disclose their relationship to the company. When such a review appears without that disclosure, the rule holds the manager responsible if they did not give that instruction or encouraged the reviewer to leave it out (§ 465.5).
• No threats over a bad review. Using a groundless legal threat or intimidation to stop a review or get it taken down is prohibited (§ 465.7). Reply to it instead.

The FTC's own questions-and-answers page on the rule is linked below. It is written for businesses, and it is the place to check before running any review request.

The same profile gets checked by brokers doing informal diligence and by shippers deciding whether a small carrier is worth a conversation. The audiences want different things from your website; from the listing they all want the same thing, which is evidence that the operation is real.

It is not a marketing campaign and it will not fill a truck by itself. It removes a reason to stop, which at this scale is much of what marketing is.