Ask a recruiting team to picture a bad recruiting call, and they’ll usually describe a fumbled pay question or a driver who got frustrated halfway through the conversation.
We went through more than 5,000 recruiting calls to see if that holds true, and we found that “bad” recruiting calls don’t actually look like that. In fact, a surprising number of them never actually made it to a recruiter.
A fumbled pay question can be cleaned up with a follow-up call (assuming you get one, more on that later). But you usually can’t recover from a call that never reaches a recruiter. Drivers will hang up, dial the next fleet on their list, and the hire goes with them.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for calls like that to hit your bottom line. Just one a day adds up to one hire who went somewhere else by the end of the month. For the average fleet, that hire is worth about $13,000 in revenue.
$13,000
average lost revenue per month from just 1 missed driver call a day
So we took a deeper look at how fleets can turn more “bad” recruiting calls into good ones, and a couple interesting trends surfaced in our analysis: the call nobody answers, and the call a driver never should have needed to make.
Drivers Don't Leave Voicemails. They Just Leave.
A driver calling your recruiting line has already done the hard part. They found your ad, liked the cut of your jib enough to pick up the phone, and dialed. The only thing left is for someone to answer.
That call is about as warm as a lead gets. Filling out a form takes a few taps. Calling means a driver set aside time, usually between loads or at the end of a long day, to talk to you specifically.
But too many calls end right there.
34%
of recruiting calls end in a disconnect before reaching a recruiter
That’s one in three drivers who wanted to talk and never got the chance, and every reason they hang up is on the fleet’s side of the line.
Why Drivers Hang up:
- No one answers – 45.4%
- Sent to voicemail – 30.7%
- On hold too long – 14.7%
- Too many IVR layers – 9.3%
Every one of those reasons happens before a recruiter has a chance to say hello. Drivers aren’t hanging up on your pay or your home time. They never got far enough to hear about either.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to call again, either.
22.8%
won’t call a fleet more than once
51%
won’t try more than twice
Half of drivers give you two tries at most. Nearly a quarter give you only one. And 37% say they’ll move on to another fleet as soon as their call goes unanswered.
The call you missed this morning very well may be the only one you get from that driver. Miss just one of these a day? By the end of the month, you’re out $13k.
The Call That Should Have Been Avoided
The most common reason drivers call a recruiting line has nothing to do with pay, home time, or equipment. They’re checking on an application, or they’re chasing a callback that never came.
31.4%
of recruiting calls are drivers checking application status or an unreturned callback
“I did an application online... I haven't received a phone call this morning… so I was just following back up”
Each of these drivers was interested in the job enough to chase down the status of their own applications. But keep in mind that while they wait, drivers are also typically talking to 6 to 8 other fleets during a job search.
With that many applications and calls coming in, it’s easy for one driver to fall through the cracks. The fix happens before the driver ever feels the need to pick up the phone:
- Update them in minutes, not days. Confirm you got the application and when they’ll hear back. If they don’t qualify, tell them early and invite them to reapply down the road.
- Give a real callback time. “Tuesday at 9 a.m.” keeps a driver around. “We’ll be in touch” pushes them to a fleet that shows more interest.
- Track every call. A system that logs every call and triggers a follow-up text or email when it ends keeps anyone from getting lost between recruiters.
A driver who knows where they stand has no reason to go looking somewhere else.
The Rest of the Story Is in Our Latest Report
Missed calls are only part of the picture. The full report, The Anatomy of a Bad Recruiting Call, covers:
- What drivers are really calling about
- The three moments that turn a good call bad, and how to head each one off
- How much noise recruiters sort through before they reach a driver who qualifies
Fill out the form below to download the full report.