Ask three carriers what it costs them to put a driver in a seat and you will get three numbers that are not comparable, because each one is counting something different. One is quoting ad spend. One is quoting ad spend plus the recruiter's salary. One has added orientation, the DOT physical, the drug screen and the hotel.
That difference matters, because the carriers who only count advertising are the ones who cut the ad budget first when things get tight — and then wonder why the seats stay empty for another six weeks.
The four lines that make up the real number
Advertising. What you pay Meta, Google, a job board or a lead vendor to put your opening in front of drivers. This is the line everyone watches and it is almost never the biggest one.
Recruiter time. If a recruiter spends twenty minutes on the phone with an applicant who turns out to have a suspended licence, that twenty minutes cost you money. Multiply by the number of unqualified applications your ads produce and this line gets large quickly.
Processing. Background check, MVR pull, drug screen, DOT physical. These are fixed per applicant who reaches that stage, and you pay them for people who wash out too.
Orientation. Travel, lodging, meals, pay during orientation, and the trainer's time. This is the line where a driver who quits in week three becomes genuinely expensive.
Why cost per hire is the only number worth tracking
Cost per lead is the metric most agencies report because it looks good and moves fast. It is also close to meaningless on its own.
A campaign producing applications at eight dollars each sounds better than one producing them at twenty-two. But if the cheap campaign converts one in forty to a hire and the expensive one converts one in six, the expensive campaign is roughly half the cost per hire. The cheap one is also quietly burning your recruiter's week.
This is the single most common failure we see in carrier ad accounts: the campaign is optimised for the wrong event. It was set up to produce leads, so it produces leads — the largest possible number of the cheapest possible leads, exactly as instructed.
Where the money actually leaks
Optimising for clicks instead of applications. The platform gives you what you ask for. Ask for traffic and you get people who click and leave.
No qualifying questions. Two or three questions in the lead form — CDL class, months of verifiable experience, accident history — removes a large share of the applicants who were never going to work out. Yes, your lead volume drops. Your cost per hire drops further.
Slow follow-up. Driver applications go stale in hours, not days. A driver who fills in three applications on a Tuesday evening takes the first serious call. If your recruiter reaches them Thursday, you paid for a lead that hired somewhere else.
No tracking past the application. If nobody records which campaign produced the drivers who actually got hired, every optimisation decision after that is guesswork.
A reasonable target
There is no universal number — it moves with your lane, your pay package, your home time policy and how strong your safety requirements are. A carrier paying at the top of the market with regional runs and weekly home time will recruit far more cheaply than one running coast-to-coast with three weeks out.
What is universal is the direction. Track cost per hire, not cost per lead. Watch how it moves quarter on quarter. And before you cut the advertising line, check whether the leak is actually in the follow-up.