Kreilkamp has open seats for 40 drivers. The supply isn't gone — qualified drivers are out there. The bottleneck is speed of response and after-hours coverage. Tenstreet's industry data1 shows recruiters reach only 30–40% of applicants before they drift to another carrier, and 35–40% of driver applications come in nights and weekends when no one is at the desk.
Power BI already runs across Kreilkamp's businesses — Tim has noted the dashboards work well but "need attention all the time," meaning every signal lives in the data but every action still requires a human noticing. The pilot closes that gap for the hiring lane specifically.
The pilot is designed to change what Monday morning looks like for the recruiting desk. Every weekend application gets reached within five minutes. Every after-hours phone call gets a text back. The candidates who reply have answered ten qualifying questions before the recruiter's first sip of coffee.
The pilot does not replace the recruiter's judgment — it routes only judgment-ready conversations to him and gives Tim live visibility into what's happening in the pipeline.
SMS within five minutes of every new application, 24/7. Opens with what drivers decide on: pay (CPM + weekly estimate), home time, equipment age, route type. An AI agent carries the back-and-forth.
Why SMS not voice for the back-and-forth: drivers are mobile-native and reply between loads. Sustaining a 10-field conversation over voice loses candidates to fatigue mid-call. SMS is asynchronous — the driver answers during a fuel stop, conversation persists. Voice is reserved for after-hours intake (#3).
The driver self-attests. The AI flags qualified for recruiter review vs. needs-clarification vs. hard-disqualified (CDL expired, DUI inside window). The AI does not make hire/no-hire decisions.
A driver calls Kreilkamp's recruiting line after hours → AI receptionist asks name + number → immediate text-back opens the same SMS flow as #2. Kreilkamp doesn't lose the 35–40% of inquiries that come in nights and weekends.
Every event the pilot generates pushes to Kreilkamp's Power BI environment via Microsoft's standard push-dataset API. No new dashboard for the team to learn — the driver-hiring pipeline becomes visible inside the same operational layer Kreilkamp already uses across its businesses. Example alert built in week 1: "After-hours call unanswered for more than 10 minutes." From there, Tim and the recruiting team define which other thresholds matter — the dashboard moves from "needs attention all the time" toward "the crucial next action, delivered to the right person, promptly."
OBB has built a clickable mockup of what a Phase 1 view could look like, branded for Kreilkamp as DriverSync: kreilkamp-driversync.pages.dev (also viewable on phone). The pages show a hiring dashboard, candidate pipeline, sample SMS conversation, after-hours capture log, and the Power BI event stream the pilot would generate.
This interface is not required for the pilot. If Kreilkamp's existing tools — iRecruit and Power BI — can already surface these views, the same data flows there just as easily and DriverSync is unnecessary. It exists to make the pilot concrete and to give the team something to react to during week-1 discovery: "this column is useful," "that one isn't," "we'd rather see X here."
What gets observed but is not contracted: drivers signed (the recruiter's decision; depends on Kreilkamp's open roles and orientation cadence) and 90-day retention of pilot-funnel hires.