The One You Don't See Coming.

A truck driver came driving over the crest of a hill on a deserted highway only to see another driver out of his truck with his ear to the ground ahead. The driver stopped, went over to the other driver and heard him mumble.
“Highway patrolman pass this way 30 minutes ago.”
“Wow, you can tell that by listening to the ground?
“No, he ran over me.”

Sometimes it’s the one you don’t see coming that gets you. The past several articles have dealt with criminal records and accidents. A criminal history or history of accidents—even if the accidents are not on the MVR—can make it difficult to find a commercial driving job.

And yet, the majority of you don’t have criminal records. Most of you have not been involved in crashes and if you have, studies repeatedly show it was probably the fault of a car driver.

If you are an experienced driver with a clear criminal history, reasonably clean MVR and good work record, you should not have a problem getting hired by most of the truckload carriers. If you have been turned down for a job you really wanted, you should look into the situation. It may be the one you didn’t see coming that got you.

One of the things you can do is review information that has been provided by your previous employers. The Federal Motor carrier safety regulations give you this right along with several related rights if you don’t like what you find after you have reviewed the information.

Here are 3 basic rights under §391.23 of the regulations.

• The right to review information provided by previous employers.

If you wish to review previous employer-provided investigative information, you “must submit a written request to the prospective employer, which may be done at any time, including when applying, or as late as 30 days after being employed or being notified of denial of employment.” The prospective employer must provide you this information within five (5) business days of receiving the written request

• The right to have errors in the information corrected by the previous employer and for that previous employer to re-send the corrected information to the prospective employer;

The previous employer must either correct and forward the information to the prospective motor carrier employer, or notify you within 15 days of receiving your request to correct the data that it does not agree to correct the data. If the previous employer corrects and forwards the data as requested, that employer must also retain the corrected information as part of the your safety performance history record and provide it to subsequent prospective employers when requests for this information are received. If the previous employer corrects the data and forwards it to the prospective motor carrier employer, there is no need to notify you.

• The right to have a rebuttal statement attached to the alleged erroneous information, if the previous employer and you cannot agree on the accuracy of the information.

If you wish to rebut information you must send the rebuttal to the previous employer with instructions to include the rebuttal in your safety performance history. Within five business days of receiving your rebuttal, the previous employer must:

• Forward a copy of the rebuttal to the prospective motor carrier employer;
• Append the rebuttal to your information in the carrier's appropriate file, to be included as part of the response for any subsequent investigating prospective employers for the duration of the three-year data retention requirement.

To summarize, if you have a clean history but can’t get the jobs you want, find out why. Motor carriers are not spending millions of dollars to attract good drivers only to turn them away for no reason.

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