If you’ve been in trucking long enough, you’ve lived through the cycles. Freight gets soft, then it picks back up, and recruiting gets easier or harder right along with it.
Right now, a lot of fleets are starting to feel a little optimism around freight. And if that’s true, there’s a recruiting reality that comes with it: efficiency matters more when things start moving. One of the fastest ways to get more efficient is also one of the simplest to diagnose.
How you manage phone calls.
Because missed calls aren’t just “missed calls.” They add up to real dollars.
Missed Calls Change the Math
Inbound calls are high-intent leads. When they don’t connect, you’re losing opportunities you worked to create.
Every time you miss one, two things are true at the same time:
- You didn’t get to make a critical connection.
- You still paid to generate that lead.
And you want to know the worst part? Only 15–20% of drivers ever leave a voicemail when they don’t reach a recruiter. So a lot of the time, you don’t even get the chance to follow up.
The lead just vanishes, along with the money you spent to get it.
Missed calls aren’t just an inconvenience or an “acceptable” part of running recruiting. They snowball and pop up downstream as fewer conversations, fewer hires, trucks going unfilled, and money left on the table.
A Quick Example
Let’s keep this simple. Say you’re getting 1,000 inbound calls per month. Not all of those are from paid advertising, but stay with me.
Let’s say 70% of those calls never reach a recruiter. That’s 700 calls a month.
Now, you don’t necessarily lose every one of those calls. Some drivers will call back multiple times and a small percentage will actually leave a voicemail your recruiters can follow up on. So to stay conservative, assume you lose half of them.
That’s 350 calls every month that are just going to waste.
Now, we’ll assign a cost per call. For these purposes, let’s use $25 per call:
- 1,000 calls x $25 = $25,000 in call generation costs.
- 350 “lost” calls x $25 per call = $8,750 in spend tied to calls that never had a chance to convert.
We’ll assume about 2.5% of those lost calls would have turned into hires (40:1 is the industry average call-to-hire ratio):
- 350 x 0.025 = ~8 potential hires lost a month.
And if a seated truck generates $13,000 per month in revenue, then:
- 8 x $13,000 = $104,000 per month in unrealized revenue from empty trucks.
That’s why missed calls aren’t something to shrug off. They don’t stay a recruiting problem for long, they inevitably show up in your bottom line.
Why Now Is the Time to Tighten the Funnel
When freight picks up, recruiting usually gets harder in two ways:
- Driver search volume drops.
If drivers are running more miles and bringing home bigger checks, some of them stop casually searching like they may do when things aren’t as good. - Competition increases.
Fleets that pulled back budgets often re-enter the market. More advertisers become more active at the same time fewer drivers are looking at what’s out there.
So you can end up in an efficiency squeeze: fewer drivers looking, more fleets competing.
And that’s when missed calls hurt more.
But here’s the main point: once things get busy, you don’t have the bandwidth to fix your funnel.
When phones are ringing and your team is stretched, it’s harder to:
- Plug leaks
- Install new tech
- Coach recruiters
- Rebuild workflows
If you’re already missing calls and leaving money on the table today, waiting until tomorrow doesn’t make the problem any easier to fix.
Quick Tips for Improving Recruiting Efficiency
This doesn’t have to be a massive overhaul. Think of it as tightening a few loose bolts to keep your funnel from leaking when volume spikes.
1. Start with your call reality
Before you change anything, gather a clear picture of what’s happening on your phones:
- Find out your missed-call rate and how many calls reach a recruiter.
- Learn what percent of missed calls actually leave a voicemail.
- Delineate new job-seeker calls from application follow-ups and other inbound noise.
2. Text smarter to increase contact & conversion
Set recruiters up for success before the call by sending a text the right way:
- Have recruiters send personalized texts ahead of calls (“This is ___ with ___, I’m about to call”).
- Coach them to include a real benefit (home time, pay, bonus).
- Generic texts don’t give drivers a reason to take action.
3. Use automation to protect recruiters' time
Leverage automation to make sure your recruiters have the freedom to actually recruit:
- Eliminate non-recruiting tasks where possible (processing, background checks, retention, admin, etc.).
- Reduce time spent on misdirected calls (dispatch/safety/HR-type inbound noise).
- Pre-qualify leads and preemptively give answers to common questions (i.e., an FAQ page.).
- Capture key details and push them into your ATS so nothing gets lost.
- Push recruiters towards acting more like consultants who sell the job, not just field questions.
- Increase applications taken over the phone instead of having drivers go fill out the app and call back.
How Technology Fits In
Recruiters miss calls because they’re busy doing the work that creates hires: having conversations, screening leads, scheduling, and following-up.
Technology helps when it covers the moments that are hardest to staff perfectly, like peak windows and after-hours. It also helps filter out the “noise” calls that eat up recruiter time (basic questions, wrong department, non-recruiting calls), so recruiters can focus on actually hiring.
That’s exactly what we built Stratas Agent® to do.
Stratas Agent® is like an extra set of hands on your phone line. It’s an AI call agent for driver recruiting that answers inbound calls, captures driver details, and routes them directly into your ATS.
The point of Stratas Agent® isn’t to replace recruiters. The goal is to expand their coverage without adding headcount or overburdening them and free them up to actually recruit.
Want to see it in action?
Fill out the form below to walk through it with one of our reps.
Turn A Recruiting Problem Into A Business Case
If you’re going to make changes (coverage, routing, process, technology), it helps to have a number behind it. Not a vague “we miss a lot of calls,” but cold, hard data you can take to leadership.
That’s why we built the Missed Call Calculator. It helps you estimate:
- Monthly advertising dollars at risk
- Monthly missed hires
- Monthly revenue impact
