Most carrier sales hires go wrong in the interview, not on the floor. The candidate is confident, talks fluently about lanes and rates, mentions a few carriers by name, and everyone in the room nods. Three months later they are covering half the loads a good rep would, and nobody can quite say what the interview missed.
What it missed is that carrier sales is a doing job, not a talking job. Here is how we screen for it — and you can run every part of this yourself.
Stop asking about experience. Test it.
“Tell me about your experience covering loads” produces a rehearsed answer from everyone, good and bad alike. The only thing it reliably measures is how many interviews the candidate has done.
Replace it with a live exercise. Give the candidate a real load — origin, destination, equipment, pickup window, and the rate you’d like to buy it at — and have someone on your team play the carrier. Then listen.
The mock rate call
Your “carrier” should push back the way real ones do: quote high, mention deadhead, ask about detention, say the truck won’t be empty until tomorrow. Ten minutes is enough. You are watching for a handful of specific things:
- Do they ask the right questions before they quote? A rep who fires out a rate without confirming equipment, weight and the delivery appointment will book loads that fall apart.
- Do they anchor, or do they fold? The first counter from the carrier is a test. Watch whether the candidate holds, trades something small, or simply agrees.
- Do they know what they’re trading? Quick pay, a flexible pickup, a reload out of the delivery area — the good ones reach for these instinctively. The weak ones only have the rate to give away.
- Can you follow them? If you have to concentrate to understand the candidate on a calm internal call, a dispatcher on a bad line in a noisy yard will not.
Score it before the debrief, on paper, on those four points. Otherwise the confident candidate wins the room regardless of what they actually did.
Test the boring part too
A rep who negotiates beautifully and then sends a rate confirmation with the wrong delivery date has cost you the margin they just won. Give the candidate a booked load and ask them to write the rate con and the pickup instructions. Then check it the way an auditor would.
This takes five minutes and it is where a surprising number of otherwise strong candidates fall over. It also tells you something about how their notes in your TMS will look at 4pm on a Friday.
Ask about the carriers they’ll bring, then verify
Candidates with experience will tell you they have relationships. Some do. The honest way to find out is to ask for two or three carriers they’ve worked with regularly, and what those carriers ran for them — lanes, equipment, roughly how often. Specific answers come from real relationships. Vague ones don’t.
Be clear-eyed about what this is worth even when it’s true. A carrier who picked up for a rep at their last brokerage may or may not pick up for the same rep at yours. Relationships are portable; the loads that fed them usually aren’t.
The questions that actually predict tenure
Carrier sales has high turnover for a reason: it is repetitive, it involves a lot of rejection, and it rewards persistence more than brilliance. The interview should look for tolerance of exactly that.
- “Walk me through a day where nothing you posted got covered.” You want a description of what they did next, not how they felt.
- “What’s the most calls you’ve made in a day, and what came of it?” A real number and a real outcome, however unglamorous.
- “What do you do at 3pm when the board is dead?” Good reps have an answer — rebuilding carrier lists, calling repeat carriers about tomorrow, cleaning up notes. Weak ones wait.
What to skip
Personality tests, “sell me this pen”, and anything measuring general charisma. Carrier sales rewards a specific kind of stubborn competence that charisma interviews consistently miss. Some of the best reps we’ve seen are quiet on a first meeting and relentless on the phone.
The short version
Put a load in front of them and let them work it. Check the paperwork they produce. Ask for specifics on carriers and treat vague answers as a no. Score the persistence questions, because that’s what decides whether they are still here in a year.
It takes about forty minutes longer than a conversational interview, and it is the difference between hiring someone who sounds like a carrier rep and hiring one.