Six role families built around how a brokerage actually runs.
Every role below can be staffed offshore as a dedicated Nova team member, and most can be recruited onshore into your own US payroll. The screening is role-specific — a carrier rep and a billing clerk are not tested on the same things.
Carrier sales representative
The seat that covers your loads. Sourcing capacity, negotiating, and building a carrier base that answers the phone next time.
Works your lanes and your margin targets, on the boards and in your TMS. Good carrier reps are made of persistence and memory — they remember which carrier ran Laredo last month and what they took for it. That’s what we screen for.
A day in the seat
- Posting and working loads on the boards you subscribe to
- Cold and warm calls to carriers, negotiating rate and terms
- Verifying authority, insurance and safety rating before booking
- Sending rate confirmations and confirming pickup details
- Logging everything in the TMS so the next shift isn’t guessing
- Rebuilding a repeat carrier list for your recurring lanes
What we screen for
- Clear, confident spoken English under pressure on a live call
- Negotiation instinct — tested with a mock rate call, not a quiz
- Knows equipment types, accessorials and what drives a spot rate
- Tolerance for rejection and a high call volume
Track & trace / night operations
Freight moves while your office is dark. This is the desk that watches it.
Check calls, ETAs, appointment changes and exceptions escalated to the right person at the right hour — not dumped in a morning email. This is the role offshore staffing is best at, because a US overnight desk is a normal daytime shift somewhere else.
A day in the seat
- Scheduled check calls and driver location updates
- Monitoring ELD and tracking feeds for stalled or off-route trucks
- Confirming and rescheduling delivery appointments
- Escalating breakdowns, detention and service failures by your rules
- Clean, timestamped notes in the TMS for the incoming shift
- Customer status updates so shippers aren’t chasing you
What we screen for
- Reliability on an overnight schedule — verified, not assumed
- Written English good enough to be read by your customer
- Judgement about what is an exception and what is a phone call
- Comfort with repetitive, high-accuracy work
Back office & accounting
The paperwork that decides whether you actually get paid, done by someone whose only job is that.
Invoicing, AP/AR, collections, carrier packets and document chasing. Unglamorous and completely load-bearing — a missing POD is a payment that ages another thirty days.
A day in the seat
- Building and sending customer invoices with complete paperwork
- Chasing PODs and signed rate cons before billing
- Carrier payables, quick-pay handling and factoring paperwork
- AR follow-up and structured collections on ageing invoices
- New carrier packets, W-9s, insurance certificates and setup
- Reconciling what was quoted against what was billed
What we screen for
- Accuracy under volume — tested on a real document set
- Spreadsheet fluency and comfort in an accounting system
- Willingness to make a polite, persistent collections call
- Discretion — this seat sees your customer and margin data
Sales development / cold calling
Your closers should be closing. Somebody else should be finding them people to close.
Shipper prospecting, list building, cold outreach and appointment setting. An SDR who books three qualified shipper conversations a week changes what your sales floor is worth.
A day in the seat
- Building targeted shipper lists by lane, mode and commodity
- Cold calling and email sequences into decision makers
- Qualifying volume, lanes and current provider before handoff
- Booking discovery calls straight into your reps’ calendars
- Keeping the CRM clean enough to be worth reporting on
- Following up the pipeline that everyone else forgets about
What we screen for
- Neutral, easily understood spoken English on a cold call
- Ability to hold a conversation past the first objection
- Basic freight literacy so the prospect takes them seriously
- Consistency — outbound is a volume game before it’s a skill game
Safety & compliance support
For brokerages with an asset side, a captive carrier, or customers who audit you.
Driver qualification files, hours-of-service review, drug and alcohol program administration, IFTA preparation and DataQs challenges. This is deadline-driven document work — exactly the kind of role that suffers when it is somebody’s fourth priority.
A day in the seat
- Building and maintaining driver qualification files
- Reviewing logs for HOS violations and coaching flags
- Administering the drug and alcohol testing program calendar
- Collecting fuel and mileage data and preparing IFTA returns
- Filing DataQs challenges on inspections worth disputing
- Assembling document packs ahead of an audit or customer review
What we screen for
- Working knowledge of FMCSA rules, not just a certificate
- Deadline discipline — compliance work is calendar work
- Precision with records and an audit trail habit
Nova staff support your compliance function. Legal responsibility for compliance stays with your company and its designated officers.
Customer service & account support
The shipper-facing seat that keeps accounts from quietly going quiet.
Status updates, quoting support, appointment scheduling and issue resolution. Takes the reactive half of account management off the person who owns the relationship.
A day in the seat
- Owning the shared account inbox and its response times
- Proactive status updates before the customer has to ask
- Quoting support and entering orders from customer portals
- Scheduling pickup and delivery appointments
- First-line handling of service issues, claims intake and OS&D
- Weekly reporting to the account owner on what needs attention
What we screen for
- Written English a US shipper reads without noticing it
- Calm handling of an unhappy customer on a recorded line
- Ownership — closing the loop rather than passing the ticket
They work in your stack, not ours.
Nova staff log into your systems with their own named accounts. If your TMS runs in a browser, we can train someone on it. Common ones we see include McLeod, Aljex, Turvo, Tai, Revenova and in-house tools, plus DAT and Truckstop on the load-board side.
Don’t see your role or your system?
The list above is what brokerages ask for most, not a menu limit. Send us the job description you’d post and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can staff it well — including when the answer is no. If you are looking for a general virtual assistant for freight brokers, that page explains what one seat can realistically cover.
Which seat is costing you the most right now?
Tell us the role, the shift and the systems. We’ll come back with what we can staff, how quickly, and what it costs for your setup.