Resume Optimization for Transportation Careers

Yes, though the pipeline runs through two separate systems. Most carriers post and manage applications through trucking-specific hiring platforms like Tenstreet, used by more than 4,300 carriers and roughly 75% of the Transport Topics Top 250 largest fleets, rather than general-purpose ATS software (Tenstreet). Separately, federal law requires every carrier to run a mandatory pre-employment query in the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse before assigning any CDL holder to safety-sensitive driving duties, and to repeat that query annually for every driver already on staff (FMCSA Clearinghouse). An application that doesn't clearly surface CDL class, endorsements, and clean history can stall before a recruiter ever sees it.

The largest US passenger carriers run recruiting through Workday: American Airlines and Delta both post open roles, including pilot and ground-operations positions, on Workday-hosted career portals, and Southwest Airlines has publicly described migrating its HR and recruiting functions onto Workday (airline career sites; Workday customer stories). For pilot hiring specifically at major carriers, seniority lists and union bidding rules shape outcomes as much as the initial application, so an optimized resume matters most for getting in front of a recruiter at regional, cargo, and charter carriers, and for maintenance, dispatcher, and ground-operations roles at any carrier size.

Yes. Both Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern — two of the largest Class I freight railroads in the US — run their employee and applicant systems on SAP SuccessFactors, confirmed directly on each company's live careers site. Because conductor and locomotive engineer roles require Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) certification, applications are also checked against that credentialing requirement before a candidate can be considered safety-qualified to work a train, on top of whatever keyword and experience screening the ATS itself performs.

Maritime employers increasingly use dedicated crewing software rather than generic ATSs — Martide is the sector's leading example, built specifically to track seafarer certifications such as STCW and MLC endorsements alongside standard application and CV data (Martide). Because a USCG Merchant Mariner Credential, or the equivalent STCW-compliant licensing in other flag states, is a hard legal prerequisite for many shipboard roles, these systems are typically configured to flag missing or expiring credentials automatically, before a human recruiter ever opens the application.