What happens if freight comes back? But the drivers don't? That's the question many fleets need to start thinking about, because this month we're seeing some pretty significant movement in the freight market. Load availability is up, spot rates are up, and in some segments they're up substantially.

But on the recruiting side? Well, we're moving in the opposite direction. Driver job-search activity is down. The available job-seeker pool is shrinking, and the cost to generate a lead just hit its highest level in more than four years.

So this month, we've got a lot to unpack. Let's start with the numbers.

Driver search activity on Google fell 11% in September, tying its lowest level of the past year. At the same time, the number of truck-driver job seekers on Indeed fell 10%, and reaching the drivers who are looking continues to get more expensive.

Overall cost per lead increased another 5% in September. That's the highest level since June 2022 and 46% higher than a year ago. For solo company drivers, CPL is now up 55% year over year, so drivers aren't getting any cheaper to recruit.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at what's happening on the freight side of things. Total load availability is up 11% year over year, while total spot rates are up 41%. Dry van has been particularly strong, with loads up 27% and rates up 45%. Refrigerated rates are up 46%, while flatbed rates are up 42% year over year.

Now let's put those two sets of numbers together and you get the situation I mentioned right at the very top of our video: freight may be coming back faster than the drivers are.

And of course, freight and recruiting, well, they don't exist in a vacuum. Everything from fuel prices to construction activity can change the picture pretty quickly. So let's bring in Michigan State University's Jason Miller for a look at what's happening in the broader economy and what fleets should be watching in his latest economic update.

So we take a look back where September spot rates were. The market was still tight. So an index I like to calculate using DAT's broker buy contract rate in comparison to the broker essentially buy spot, right? We take a look. We're below the magical sort of 10% threshold on that index. That indicates that the market is still tight.

Right now for October, data is really preliminary. We have seen spot rates jump up a bit. Hard to tell if that's end-of-quarter loading versus something else going on here. So we'll need to wait another week or two to see whether that's the case. But still a tight market. Not as tight as what it was three and a half, four months ago, but still overall tight capacity out there.

Now, on the diesel front, we've seen diesel come down a little bit. But we're still above $6.30 nationally. We'll wait and see what the developments are right now in the Middle East. We've, of course, had some announcements from the G7 countries of release of diesel stockpiles.

But at the end of the day, this is not changing the fundamental dynamic that the world is just short refining capacity right now in the diesel space. And so what I would tell everybody is let's not get our hopes up for sub-$5-a-gallon diesel this month. And, you know, the days of sub-$4-a-gallon diesel that we were in prior to this, I would not be planning on that anytime soon.

Now when we look at the freight demand standpoint, data center construction, it just keeps accelerating. The latest data from the Census Bureau places data center construction at 6.2 times what it was before ChatGPT and really the popularization of large language models.

So if you think about that, what that's meaning is we're building more data center now in two months than what we were building in an entire year if you go back four years ago. So this has been just an incredible increase in construction, driving a lot of demand for construction steel and HVAC equipment, electrical goods, power and the like.

But when we then turn to, let's say, the single-family housing market, one thing I've done here is calculate what I call the home affordability index. And how this is basically being calculated is taking what a monthly, essentially, price you pay for a mortgage is. This isn't even including changes in insurance costs, but just what you would be paying to the bank, and comparing this back over the last almost 30 years.

And what you end up seeing is right now it costs about 2.25 times as much to pay for a home if you're buying today as if you were buying eight years ago, back in sort of the 2017 through 2019 period.

And when you look at essentially the evolution of that home affordability relative to median household income, this is one of the largest gaps we have seen in the last 30 years, meaning that essentially what you pay for a home has increased so much more than what median household income has increased.

And so, talking about this, given where mortgage rates are at right now, it is good reason to expect as we move into next year, the housing market is not going to be something that's going to be picking up substantially, barring some major geopolitical event that starts to see U.S. Treasuries come down substantially.

And so for those flatbed carriers out there especially that move a lot of building materials for single-family houses, what I'd tell you on next year is probably, you know, base case would be at best neutral to where this year was, if not actually lower.

So that wraps up our update here. When we come to you from November, we should have some clarity on the political front and where that could potentially affect freight markets, and also some further clarity on geopolitical developments.

Thank you, Jason. Now with all of that happening in the market, there's another piece of this month's recruiting picture that I think deserves at least some attention. Because if drivers are becoming more expensive to reach, what happens after you reach them? Well, that matters even more.

And we've got some new data directly from drivers that shows just how early fleets may be losing them. We recently asked drivers who had either stopped responding to a recruiter or backed out of a job when that happened.

And the number-one answer? 35% said they stopped responding while they were still talking with the recruiter, but before agreeing to anything. Not during the background check, not while filling out paperwork, not at or after orientation, but before they'd ever even said yes.

In fact, only 7% said they disappeared immediately after agreeing to the job, and just under 6% said it happened somewhere during the background check phase, drug test or paperwork process.

Now that caught our attention. So we asked another question. For drivers who had said yes to a job and later backed out, well, what was the reason?

Again, one answer stood well above the others. 42% said something about the recruiter or recruiting process just felt off. You compare that with just 21% who said they found a better offer elsewhere.

And that little bit is important because when a driver disappears, it's easy for us to just assume that another fleet got them. Maybe they offered better pay. Maybe they offered better home time, a better route, a better truck. And sometimes, yes, that is true. And that is exactly what happened.

But these drivers are telling us something else, too. Sometimes you're not losing the driver to another fleet. You're losing them somewhere inside your own recruiting process.

And look back at the numbers we started with. Overall lead costs are up 46% from just a year ago. Solo company-driver lead costs are up 55%. And despite some improvement last month, cost per hire is still up 70%.

And all of this is happening while load availability and spot rates are running well above where they were a year ago. If the freight is coming back faster than the drivers are, you can't afford to lose the drivers you already reach.

That makes every driver who raises their hand more valuable and every preventable loss more expensive.

So what can you actually do about the drivers who drop off, disappear or just flat-out ghost you during the recruiting process? Well, that's exactly what we're going to be digging into in this month's download, Busted: 5 Ways to Prevent Drivers from Ghosting Your Fleet.

We've pulled together the data, along with practical ways to identify where drivers may be falling out of your recruiting process and what you can do to keep them engaged.

Because ultimately, you can't control where freight rates go next. You can't control how many drivers enter the market, and you can't control what another fleet is offering. But you can control what happens when a driver decides to talk to you.

That download will be dropping later this month, and we'll also be digging into the data in our next live edition of Digging Deeper. You can join the conversation, submit your questions and take part in our real-time polling. I'll leave a signup link for that down below.

And while you're down there, go ahead and grab your copy of this month's 30 Day Reset download. You'll find all the recruiting, freight and economic data we covered today, plus plenty more that we just didn't have time to get into.

That's going to do it for us on this edition of the 30 Day Reset. Until next time, thanks for watching.