Answering the phone is the minimum in driver recruiting. We love inbound phone calls. Big intent + lowest cost per hire. We coach our recruiters to have great conversations with qualified truck drivers. So we always answer the phone…right?
Actually, no we’re not. Not even close.
A recent study revealed 70% of drivers calling never talk to a recruiter. And those are missed calls you’re paying for.
So, you think “I can fix this with AI.”
Well, you’re both right and wrong. Here’s why.
If you’ve tested what’s out there, you already know: most tools aren’t built for the trucking industry. They’re built for customer service teams or call centers, not for the realities of hiring CDL drivers.
The problems with AI voice agents
- They can’t really hold a conversation.
- They don’t know @$%& about trucking.
- They don’t deliver anything your human recruiters can actually use.
We couldn’t find a system that could handle the complexity, tone, pacing, and specificity required in a driver recruiting conversation. We couldn’t find one that could “speak trucker.” And we couldn’t find one that did more than just make conversation sounds.
You can’t fake this with a prebuilt model and a few prompts. We tried. So did everyone else.
So we built one from the ground up.
Stratas Agent is a voice-based AI recruiting agent built specifically for fleets hiring drivers. It’s not a repurposed chatbot with a microphone. It’s an engineered system that understands truckers, speaks their language, and produces actual leads your recruiters can act on.
Here’s how we solved those three problems.
The baseline for AI call agents
“Sounding human” is the lowest hurdle you need to clear. But there’s more you need if you’re going to earn a driver’s confidence in the first 10 seconds. It needs to be responsive, clear, and feel human, even though the driver knows it’s not.
To do that, we had to design for:
- Clarity: No mumbling, mispronunciations, or garbled names. We tuned the voice model down to individual words, both for accuracy and for credibility.
- Stability: Our platform doesn’t crash or stall mid-call. This system was designed to perform at scale without losing fidelity.
- Latency: Sub-250ms response time is the starting point. Anything slower, and the conversation starts to feel disjointed … all artificial, no intelligence.
- Tone control: No robot-like monotone. No creepy over-enthusiasm. Just a natural voice that helps the driver feel like they’re really talking to someone who knows the job.
We evaluated around a dozen platforms.
None of them could do all of this.
Our final build was led by Kyle Jernigan, our AI solutions architect, and our resident “most likely to drop a gif in the Slack channel” guy. Kyle crafted the Stratas Agent from best-in-class components, then customized the logic through AI engineering, and then trained those through THOUSANDS of real recruiting conversations.
How we trained Stratas Agent for trucking
Drivers don’t want recruiters spewing the fluff from your corporate brochures. They want straight answers in familiar terms.
That’s why Stratas Agent was trained on language from real recruiters.
Not sanitized scripts, but actual conversations from high-volume recruiting teams. The way they talk about home time, pay structure, equipment, rider policies, route types … we trained Stratas Agent on all of it.
Every response is designed to sound like someone who knows the business intimately. Because anything less breaks the conversation.
It can answer what drivers actually ask.
Driver calls rarely follow a script, and some tools can’t respond on the fly.
Stratas Agent can.
It responds fluidly to wildcard questions like:
- “Is it all no-touch freight?”
- “Do I need hazmat?”
- “Can I bring my dog?”
It can recover if it gets interrupted halfway through collecting an email address. It doesn’t panic, stall, or redirect to a human at the first sign of complexity.
That kind of control doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from layering intent detection, fallback logic, and domain-specific training until the agent is smart enough to stay on track, and helpful enough to keep the driver engaged.
If you’re skeptical, good.
Call (844) 685-4542 and put Stratas Agent through its paces. Ask what kind of home time is available. See how it handles a question about sleeper specs or pet policies. Push it with real-world recruiting scenarios and listen to how it responds.
Because if a voice AI can’t handle questions like these, it has no business being in your funnel.
It Delivers Structured Data, Not Just A Transcript
Every response is captured, validated, and mapped directly into your ATS. Not just as notes or raw text, but as structured, recruiter-ready data.
What makes this different? The logic is dynamic. Stratas Agent maps fields based on your unique ATS setup and your campaign structure. It knows which position a driver is applying for, selects the right tags, and assigns the correct recruiter. All without manual cleanup.
Each call also generates a clear summary so your team doesn’t have to sift through transcripts or audio logs (though you can access those if you really want to).
This isn’t just AI for funsies so you can say you’re using AI. It’s artificial intelligence that delivers fully qualified leads, ready for follow-up, whether that be your ATS automations or your human recruiters doing what they do best: talking to drivers.
Which is a lot better than paying for phone calls that never get answered.
You’ve seen what it can do. Let’s talk about what it can do for you.
Stratas Agent is already replacing missed calls with qualified leads. If speed, accuracy, and coverage matter to your hiring process, it should be part of it.
Fleets using Stratas Agent are doubling their qualified applications.
Fill out the form below to connect with us and get your plan to double yours.