Author
DAVE RICHMOND
Driver recruiter. I write everything on this site, and I check every figure in it against the data before it goes out.
14 YRS
recruiting drivers for carriers, not writing about it from outside
8 YRS
of carrier reviews read through before the first piece went up
EVERY
figure on this site traced back to the query that produced it
WHY I STARTED WRITING THIS DOWN.
Every recruiter I know runs the same reports. PSP, MVR, the Clearinghouse. They are good at what they were built for, and they are silent on the thing that actually costs a fleet money: how the last job ended.
CDLScan has eight years of carriers writing that part down. They gave me access to it. What I found was not a set of horror stories — it was a handful of patterns that repeat often enough to be worth naming, and that show up on an application before anyone signs anything.
So each piece here starts from a share in that data and works backwards to the question you could have asked. If I can’t reproduce the number, it doesn’t run.
HOW A PIECE GETS PUBLISHED.
Four steps, in this order, every time. The third one is the one that kills most drafts.
A number, not an idea
STEP 01
The starting point is a share pulled from the review data — a category, a year, a pair of things that keep appearing together.
Back to the application
STEP 02
Then the work is figuring out what that pattern looks like before it happens: the gap, the request, the answer that doesn’t quite land.
Every figure re-run
STEP 03
I re-run the query behind each number. If it doesn’t come back the same, the sentence comes out. Nothing gets rounded up for effect.
The caveat stays in
STEP 04
Reviews get written when something went wrong. Every share on this site says so out loud, next to the number, not in the footer.
WHAT I’M CONNECTED TO
CDLScan gives me access to the review data these pieces are built on, and the links on this site point to CDLScan. That is a commercial relationship and you should read everything here knowing it. What it does not buy is a number: no figure gets softened, and nothing runs that the data doesn’t support.
- No figure is estimated or rounded up
- No review is ever quoted word for word
- The sample caveat sits next to the number
THE DATA IS ONLY USEFUL ON A NAME.
Everything I write here comes back to the same move: run the driver in front of you and see what the last carrier said.
Search runs on CDLScan.