The State of Logistics Talent: Insights from Gartner and Lean Solutions Group
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The freight market is a roller coaster, and you're strapped in whether you like it or not. Rates crash. Capacity vanishes overnight. Your customers want more service while paying less for it.
You can't control much in this industry – but your people strategy? That's another story.
The real winners in logistics build future-focused teams that weather storms. They slash turnover and end the constant chaos. Their new hires get productive in days, not quarters. They tap global talent without drowning in red tape. And they cover nights and weekends without burning out their best people.
Gartner’s 2024 Logistics Talent Monitor backs up the importance of this, and we at Lean Solutions Group see it firsthand across the globe.
The Hard Truth About Logistics Talent
Here’s the hard truth. According to Gartner, logistics has a people problem. Not the kind you discuss in quarterly reviews with neat graphs and trend lines. The messy, expensive kind where you're constantly training replacements while watching your best people walk out the door. The kind that keeps you up at night wondering if you'll have a fully staffed dispatch desk tomorrow morning.
The Revolving Door Effect
Only 38% of logistics employees worldwide express strong intent to remain with their current employer. Let that sink in. Nearly two-thirds of your team is considering an exit. Even more concerning? 55% of these employees believe they could find another job immediately if they wanted to.
Such conditions create a workplace where constant recruitment becomes your new normal—draining resources and attention that you could and should devote to efficiently moving freight.
The Talent Conundrum
Here's the even more frustrating part: Gartner's research shows the top five reasons people join your company are almost identical to why they leave:
They join for: competitive compensation, convenient location, work-life balance, vacation benefits, and feeling respected.
They leave because of: inadequate compensation, poor manager quality, feeling disrespected, lack of recognition, and low-quality coworkers.
Coincidence? More like a warning sign. The promises that attract talent are exactly what companies fail to deliver on. You're not losing people to better opportunities; you're losing them because you simply aren’t meeting or living up to expectations.
How We Fix the Talent Hiring Cycle
We've seen enough broken talent approaches to know what works and what doesn't. Now, let's talk about solutions. Gartner identified seven critical pain points crushing logistics teams everywhere, largely thanks to the constant churn you're experiencing. At Lean Solutions Group, we directly address six of them—reducing turnover, cutting payroll costs, accelerating onboarding, eliminating back-office backlogs, enabling 24/7 customer service, and providing clear career development.
Real Teams, Not Just Temporary Help
Our 10,000+ logistics professionals become extensions of your operation—not outsiders who struggle to understand your business. They work across sales, operations, tech, and back office support services as seamlessly as your in-house staff.
Your new hires start delivering results in 30 days instead of 90. When you need to scale, we deploy complete teams in 3-5 weeks. Those impossible SLA requirements and 3 AM customer emergencies? Our Night Ops teams handle them while your core team sleeps. And while industry retention hovers at 40%, our teams maintain 90%+ staying power.
Attacking What Really Drives People Away
We've studied what makes logistics talent quit and built solutions for each factor. We create better manager experiences through comprehensive training. We provide clear career growth paths so people see a future with you. We design flexible global teams that match your exact operational needs.
A freight broker struggling with constant turnover saw a 66% reduction after implementing our onboarding and career pathing programs. After integrating our back-office solutions, another client watched their invoice processing time drop by 60%.
It isn't complicated. When you fix the actual reasons people leave, they don't. And that's what we deliver—teams that stay, perform, and grow with you through every market swing. Everything else is just putting band-aids on a broken system.
The Bottom Line: Why Your Logistics Talent Strategy Can’t Wait
The talent game in logistics is broken. You know it. We know it. Those constant fire drills to fill positions? The rookies who barely learn your TMS before quitting? The late night scramble when someone doesn't show up for their shift? It's exhausting.
Stop plugging holes in a sinking ship. Rebuild your foundation.
Lean gives logistics teams what they're starving for – stability that doesn't crumble when the market changes. A workforce that scales up when you need it and doesn't drain your margins when volumes dip. People who stick around long enough to master your operation, not just pass through it.
The freight recession exposed which companies have talent strategies that work and which are just playing pretend. The winners aren't only surviving – they're using this moment to pull miles ahead of everyone still clinging to yesterday's solutions.
Ready to join them? Contact us today. Let's build something that lasts.
Adam Robinson is the Transportation & Logistics Content Director at Lean Solutions. Adam is a data-driven storytelling marketer who has fallen in love with the quest to make supply chains as high-functioning, collaborative, waste-free, and productive as possible in an altruistic endeavor to maximize human capital. I work at the intersection of sales, marketing, and product, giving me a unique opportunity to build a community around a platform that meets my passion & personal mission of hyper-efficiency.
