By Tim Crawford, Co-founder & CEO, Tenstreet
June 11, 2025
The uncertainty around tariffs has spooked many in the US trucking industry. Fleet owners are seeing costs climb and trying to make the math work. Meanwhile, drivers are moving around slightly less than during boom times.
Still, turnover in the industry remains high, which means fleet owners still need to be on top of recruitment and retention. Among our customers, turnover costs between $2,500 and $4,000 per person. A whopping 45 percent of that cost is advertising spend.
So, the question on many fleet owners’ minds is: how can you recruit the same number of drivers for fewer dollars? I’ll lay out what we’ve seen work based on millions of data points from our platform.
Minutes Matter: Respond to Job Applications Within 5 to 10 Minutes
When recruiters respond to an initial application within five minutes, hiring rates are 20 percent higher than when the initial response happens within 30 minutes. They continue to fall as response time increases (Figure 1).
Figure 1: How recruiter responsiveness impacts hire rate among Tenstreet customers
The simple takeaway here: get response time to sub-five minutes. Sub-10 is probably okay too.
Actually, making that happen is anything but simple. In most organizations, managing toward a sub-five-minute response would likely require reimagining compensation structures and redefining team members’ roles and expectations.
It will require, in some cases, recruiters to follow up with applicants even if they don’t own the relationship through hire. Another option: invest in software that automates tedious manual steps and uses generative AI to respond to driver questions that come in after hours.
When you shrink response time, you’ll reduce ad spend, which in turn means fewer dollars per hire. What would a 20 percent increase in your hire rate mean for your needed ad spend? That’s the math to take to the C-suite as you propose a restructure or a new software investment.
Days Matter: Reduce the Total Hiring Process to 7 Days or Less
Another big lever trucking companies have is streamlining the end-to-end hiring process.
If your current hiring process takes 10 to 12 days, for example, your hiring rate is likely around three percent. Were you to get it down to eight days, you’d be looking at something closer to four percent.
Get that process under a week, and hiring rates leap to eight percent or higher (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Hiring cycle vs. hiring rate among Tenstreet customers
One common refrain we hear is that there’s not much a trucking company can do about cycle time: driver-side delays often account for four or five days of latency in the process.
To that, we say: When was the last time you completed your own hiring process from the cab of a truck in a truck stop with bad 3G internet?
If drivers are taking too long to complete your hiring process, there’s a good chance your process is too difficult. Your end-to-end process has to work for the population you’re hoping to hire – and they’re rarely working from a desktop with reliable Wi-Fi.
The directive here is straightforward: test your application and adjust what’s not working. Maybe your pretty homepage images are slowing page load on mobile. Maybe you’re not offering autofill for past work experience. Find the pain points and remove them. Hire rates will rise and you’ll spend less on advertising per driver.
In Ad Spend, What’s Easy Isn’t Always Efficient
The final lever to pull is reconsidering where you’re spending ad dollars. The easiest option is to do what you’re familiar with, whether that’s Indeed, Facebook, or something else. This is especially true if the person running the ads is a manager who’s wearing three other hats.
But what if you could be spending more efficiently elsewhere? What if you could get more leads with less ad spend?
To find out, you can place a bunch of bets on different platforms to see what works, then double down there and pull back where results are worse. Obviously, that requires some time and planning. If those aren’t in the cards, software can automate this process, letting you track multiple ads and their performance from a single dashboard. (Our own Job Store is one such tool.)
It’s a Great Time to Root Out Operational Inefficiencies
We don’t know what tomorrow holds, from fast-shifting tariff policy to uncertain enforcement of executive orders to whatever is in tomorrow’s headlines. There’s a lot beyond your control.
That makes this a particularly good time to review what is within your control and make sure you’re doing whatever possible to squeeze the juice out of the lemons you have. The harder you squeeze, the more lemonade you’ll be able to make – and the better positioned you’ll be when the economy picks back up.
About the author
Tim Crawford co-founded Tenstreet in 2006 to provide software solutions for the transportation industry and has served as CEO since 2016. Tenstreet serves thousands of fleets across the country and processes over 40% of employment verifications in the trucking industry overall. 98% of professional drivers have used the platform to apply, qualify, and onboard with fleets of all sizes.
