What to Ask a Broker Before Your First Tender
Eight questions whose right answer is a document, not a reassurance, plus two that sound useful and are not.
Ask for artifacts, not descriptions
Every question below has a right answer, and every right answer is a document. That is the whole design. A brokerage that has the material sends it in a day. One that does not sends a paragraph about its commitment to safety.
None of this requires you to know how a brokerage works internally. It requires you to notice the difference between a process and an intention.
The written carrier qualification standard, as a document.
Not a summary, not a page on their site. The internal standard itself. If it does not exist as a document, that is the answer to the question, and it is worth knowing on day zero, not in year two when a claim asks who qualified the carrier.
What is verified at onboarding, and what is re-verified at tender.
Authority and insurance can lapse at any time, so a check done at onboarding can be months out of date. We re-check at every tender. The distinction between these two lists is the single best indicator of whether vetting is a process or a form somebody filled out once.
How the certificate of insurance is obtained.
The right answer is from the producer or agent named on the policy, with the broker named as certificate holder so cancellation notice reaches them. The wrong answer is that the carrier emails it. FMCSA states publicly that certificates presented to brokers can be fraudulent, so a PDF is a claim about coverage, not proof of it.
The disqualification criteria, and the override rule.
Every brokerage makes exceptions when a market tightens. The question is not whether exceptions happen. It is whether an exception is made by a named person, against stated criteria, and written down at the time. Ask what the last override was.
The double-brokering and fictitious-pickup controls.
How do they confirm the truck at your dock belongs to the carrier on the rate confirmation? Look for mechanisms: driver name and tractor and trailer numbers sent before pickup, a call to a number the broker sourced, not one the carrier supplied, a photograph at the gate. "We only use trusted carriers" is not a mechanism.
Retention: how long, in what system, who can pull it.
Cargo and liability claims arrive well after delivery. A process that cannot be reproduced in year three is not much of a process. Ask them to pull the file for a load they ran last quarter while you are on the call.
The insurance requirements in their carrier packet, and their own coverage.
Market convention is $1,000,000 auto liability and $100,000 cargo. Understand what those are: contract terms, not regulation. FMCSA sets no cargo minimum for general freight. Then ask the harder question, which is their contingent cargo limit and what their broker liability policy responds to.
Who is accountable for your freight, and is that the person who would be deposed? "Your account team" is not a name. On a small desk this question is easy. On a large one the answer tells you how many hands your load passes through.
Two questions that sound useful and are not
"How many carriers are in your network?"
Every broker sources from the same carrier pool. A large number describes a database, and a small number describes a narrow one, which may be exactly what you want. The count is unfalsifiable and uninformative in both directions. Ask instead how many carriers ran your specific lane for them in the last ninety days.
"Do you have capacity in my lane?"
The answer is always yes and it is nearly always true, because capacity exists in almost every lane at some price. It is not a lie, it is just not an answer. Ask what they would do on a Tuesday in peak when the first two carriers reject.
Why the file matters to you
Courts now allow shippers to sue brokers over careless carrier selection, which is why we keep verification records you can request. In a proceeding where your company is often a co-defendant, the quality of that file affects your exposure, not only theirs.
How to score the answers
Not by whether they say yes. By how long it takes to produce the document, and whether the document matches what they described on the call. A brokerage that has run this process before recognises the questions and has the material to hand. One that has not will treat the request as unusual, which is itself the finding.