CDL Agency Launches Onboard, Bringing Recruiting Software to Chicago Truck Driver Hiring

MUNDELEIN, Ill. — CDL Agency, the truck driver recruiting agency headquartered on Townline Road in Mundelein, is bringing its Onboard platform to carriers across the Chicago area, pairing what it calls the region’s best truck driver recruiting in Chicago with software that tracks every driver from the first phone screen to the first day in the truck.

The move puts a hiring tool in front of Chicagoland fleets that until now has mostly been used inside the agency. Carriers that recruit through CDL Agency will receive driver submissions through Onboard, review them from a secure link, and follow each candidate through the pipeline without logging into anything.

What Onboard changes for a Chicago carrier

Most driver recruiting in the Chicago market still runs on email threads, phone tag and spreadsheets. A recruiter forwards a résumé, a safety manager asks for the MVR, the driver takes a drug test somewhere, and nobody is sure where the candidate stands until he either shows up for orientation or disappears.

Onboard replaces that with one packet per driver. According to the company, each submission bundles the driver’s CDL class, endorsements, experience and documents. The carrier gets a secure, single-use link, with no login or password, and can approve the driver, request more information or decline directly from that page.

From there the platform tracks the driver through a fixed set of stages, each one stamped with a time: submitted, approved, drug test scheduled, results cleared, flight booked, hired. A carrier can see exactly how long a driver has been waiting on a test result, and a recruiter can see exactly how long a carrier has been sitting on a decision.

Two design choices stand out for fleets that have been burned before. Onboard enforces one identity per driver, so the same candidate cannot be submitted to a carrier twice by two different recruiters. And every carrier profile on the platform is verified against FMCSA and SAFER records, with signed agreements and pay sheets on file before any driver is sent.

CDL Agency describes the result as “decisions in hours, not weeks.”

The recruiting operation behind the software

Onboard is not sold as a standalone product. It is built and run by CDL Agency and comes with the agency’s recruiting service, which is where the driver volume actually comes from.

The company says it places more than 100 drivers a month, has completed more than 3,000 CDL hires, and works with more than 50 carrier partners. New carriers, it says, see their first drivers within 24 hours of onboarding.

Behind those numbers is a screening process that is deliberately old-fashioned. Every driver is phone-screened by a recruiter before a carrier ever sees the packet, and the agency matches drivers on lanes, equipment, pay and home time rather than on whoever clicked an ad most recently.

On the billing side, CDL Agency offers two models. Weekly recruiting is done-for-you recruiting billed as a flat weekly service. Pay-per-driver ties the fee to placements, with half due when the driver starts and half after the first 14 days, so a driver who quits in week one costs the carrier half a fee rather than a full one.

Inside Onboard, that same milestone logic runs the money. When a driver reaches hired status, the platform opens a commission ledger and pays out in installments tied to milestones, with confirmation emails at each step. If a driver terminates early, the remaining installments void automatically. The company says there are no clawbacks.

Recruiting, not lead reselling

CDL Agency has built its pitch around a distinction it thinks the market blurs on purpose.

“Most products sold as truck driver recruiting are not recruiting,” the company says on its Chicago recruiting page. “They’re lead reselling.”

The argument goes like this: a lead vendor is paid per lead, so its incentive is to generate as many names as possible and let the carrier sort them out. A recruiter paid on placement is only paid when a driver actually starts, so its incentive is to send fewer, better-matched candidates and to keep them moving.

Andrius Pletniovas, the agency’s founder, has been blunt about where that leads. “We do not sign a carrier unless we can guarantee enough driver volume for them,” the company states, adding that carriers should “bring your lanes, pay, equipment, and open seats” and pressure-test the claims before committing.

Onboard is the mechanism that makes the claim checkable. Because every stage is timestamped, a carrier can see its own time-to-decision, its own drug-test lag and its own show-rate, and hold both sides of the relationship to them.

Why Chicago first

The company’s home market is also the country’s freight crossroads. According to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, roughly 25 percent of all U.S. freight trains and 50 percent of all intermodal trains pass through metropolitan Chicago. Trucks account for about one in seven vehicles on Illinois urban interstates, CMAP says, and some Chicago-area facilities handle more than 30,000 trucks a day.

Every one of those containers leaves a rail yard on a truck, and every one of those trucks needs a CDL driver. That is the hiring problem CDL Agency is targeting.

The agency’s Chicago recruiting coverage runs from its Mundelein headquarters through the northern suburbs, Romeoville and the I-55 corridor, and Joliet and the I-80 corridor, the belt where most of the region’s intermodal and distribution volume sits. Most of its carrier partners, the company notes, also hire well beyond Illinois, and it maintains secondary offices in Lancaster, Texas and North Miami, Florida.

For a Chicago carrier, the practical difference is that recruiting stays local. Drivers are matched to lanes that actually run out of the region, and the recruiter screening them knows what a Joliet drayage shift or a Romeoville regional run looks like.

Questions to ask any Chicago truck driver recruiting agency

Onboard’s launch is a useful yardstick even for fleets that never use it, because it puts numbers on things most recruiting vendors keep vague. Before signing with any Chicago truck driver recruiting agency, carriers should ask:

• Who talks to the driver before I do? A recruiter phone screen and a form submission are not the same product.
• What is your time-to-decision, and can I see mine? If the agency cannot show how long its carriers take to approve a driver, it is not tracking it.
• What happens if the driver quits at day 10? Look for a fee tied to a retention milestone, not a flat per-lead charge.
• Can the same driver be sent to me twice? Duplicate submissions from different recruiters waste a safety manager’s afternoon.
• Do you turn carriers away? An agency that signs everyone cannot guarantee volume to anyone.

Any agency, including CDL Agency, should be willing to answer all five in writing.

What it costs and how to start

CDL Agency sets pricing per carrier based on the model chosen and the seats to fill. The weekly recruiting model is a flat weekly service; the pay-per-driver model is priced per placement with the split described above. Onboard itself carries no separate license for carriers recruiting through the agency.

Carriers can start by bringing their lanes, pay, equipment and open seats to the agency and asking it to show its volume before signing. The company can be reached at (224) 599-2246 or andrius@cdlagency.com, and its Mundelein office is at 1280 Townline Rd.

What to watch

Onboard’s stated advantages, one identity per driver and timestamped stages, are the kind of thing that either shows up in a carrier’s time-to-hire numbers or does not. Trucking News Chicago will follow up with Chicagoland carriers using the platform on show rates, time-to-decision and driver retention past the 14-day mark, and will report what they find.

For a deeper look at the recruiting side, CDL Agency publishes its own guide to truck driver recruiting, covering speed-to-contact, text-first communication and referral programs for fleets doing some of the work in-house.