5 Police Recruiting Reality Resets That Will Get You Back on Track!

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Have you been feeling like no one wants to be a police officer anymore or worse yet...doesn’t want to be a police officer for your agency?  Tired of dumping dollars into an endless sea of recruiting solutions with zero results?  Recruiting in 2024 can be frustrating, but I’ve got a five-part reality reset that will help get you out of that funk and going again...keep reading! 👀

Hey everyone, it’s Tom Sye your Police Marketing FTO and this week, let’s work on something a little different than what we normally address here in this series and that is...you.  🥰

So often in the police recruiting world we get caught up in the latest and greatest ways to recruit and all of the pressure that comes with doing it, that we forget about the biggest asset available to all of us that can really help accelerate your police recruiting...and that is your mindset.  🧠

So, if recruiting’s got you down lately and you’re not feeling good about the future of your agency or our profession, here’s a five-part police recruiting reality reset to help power you into the summer recruiting months.  😎

Reset 1 - No one wants to do this job anymore.

This is, by far, the biggest misconception facing police recruiting today and has spread across the entire world like wildfire.  Whether here in the United States, up in Canada, over the pond in England, all over Europe, and even in Australia, everywhere you look, everywhere you turn everyone’s talking about the police recruiting crisis and how interest and hiring is down with no end in sight. 😒

I see agency after agency talking about opening up for applications and no one puts in so therefore, no one wants to do this anymore...but the simple fact is...there are plenty of people who still want to be police officers.  The problem is those old, antiquated methods of reaching them don’t work anymore. 📉

The reality:  Look, the days of opening up and thousands of people putting in are long gone and they’re not coming back.  You’ve got to get the good old days out of your head and realize things have changed and if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to change right along with them.  🙌

If you want to start finding those people who do want to do this job...you’ve got to meet them where they’re at, build a relationship with them, and show them that people like them, work for you.  👍

Reset 2 – You can solve your recruiting problems quickly.

Whether it’s a fancy new website, advertising campaign, recruiting video, performance coaching, or the latest proprietary system that’s gonna get you so many applicants you’re not even gonna believe it, the sales pitch is always the same...our ways will get you back to full staffing quickly.  🙄  

The problem with all of these recruiting ‘solutions’ is that none of the people pitching these things to you really understand police recruiting in 2024.  Sure, everything they’re selling you sounds great, they seem genuinely interested in helping you so you tend to believe what they’re saying, and since it’s all stuff that you’ve never tried before, you figure, hey we’ll start doing this stuff and applicants will start rolling in.  🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

Well, here's a serious question to consider.  If you had a hundred police officer vacancies and I dropped a hundred qualified applicants on your desk tomorrow morning...what they heck would you do with them?  Is your unit staffed enough to handle that?  Would you have a plan for working them all quickly before they lost interest and went elsewhere?  How would you pull off a hundred backgrounds in a hundred days? 😳

Here’s the reality: recruiting is a long game.  There is no quick fix, nor should there be.  You can only handle what you are set up to handle...everything else is a waste of both time and resources. By taking a more targeted and direct approach to recruiting, you can easily attract the right number of quality applicants that you can reasonably handle, get them through your process, and start a new batch over and over and over again.  Remember: recruiting has no end date.  You will need to do it forever!  💯 

Reset 3 – It’s discouraging only having a small number of people showing up for testing. 

Whether it’s monthly, quarterly, or however your testing rotation is set up, it can be incredibly disheartening when only a small number of people show up to testing and you begin to wonder why on earth people would apply when they had no intention of showing up. 🤨

I actually get asked this question quite a bit...why do people spend all of this time applying only to no-show to the police testing?  This one used to leave me perplexed as well...until I realized the reason for it.  It’s a simple one...It’s because – they’re the kind of people who apply and don’t show up.  🤯

The reality: you can spend all of your time being frustrated that no one’s showing up, or you can change your mindset to one of appreciation for the one’s that did.  These are the true folks who want to work for your agency after all, and there’s a sure-fire way to prove...they’re there.  Treat them right, help them through your process, and then do the same thing all over again next testing.  🤩

Reset 4 – You have to spend a lot of money on police recruiting. 

It’s no wonder why people think this these days as it’s highly publicized that a lot of agencies are spending tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars on recruiting solutions to try and attract more applicants to their department.  When you spend some time researching the costs of advertising campaigns, billboards, recruiting videos, website creation, and even applicant generation systems, you can see how those costs can really add up quickly month after month and year after year.  So, since others are doing it, it must be normal right? 🤔

Wrong.  Everyone is always shocked when they learn that my agency spends very little on any of these methods.  They’re even more dumbfounded when they learn we don’t take out of state recruiting trips, attend job fairs regularly, have never produced a recruiting video, and have the most basic police website in the world but somehow always have a nice turnout at police testing and a steady stream of awesome applicants. 👮‍♂️👮‍♀️👮‍♂️👮‍♀️👮‍♂️👮‍♀️

Here's the reality of it:  Recruiting doesn’t have to cost you anything when you know where your applicants are hanging out.  Facebook – free.  Instagram – free.  YouTube – free.  TikTok – free.  X – free.  LinkedIn – free.  Snapchat – free.  Threads – free.  Whatever social media platform that will be the next big thing – free. 😁 

You not taking advantage of all of those free platforms and going with an outside company...you don’t even want to know what that’s costing you. 😲 

Reset 5 – One is enough. 

From out of state billboards encouraging officers to come to your agency to be a cop again, to rolls Royce recruiting cars, to posting that awesome recruiting video you spent thousands on, agencies are banking on they’re one big idea bringing in the applicants.  🏆

Here’s the thing...put up a billboard in another state and everyone takes notice?  Great.  What are you going to do tomorrow?  Fancy recruiting car?  Awesome.  What about tomorrow when no one cares about it anymore?  Recruiting video gets a ton of likes/shares on a Monday?  What are you going to post on Tuesday to keep the momentum going? 😬

The reality of this philosophy: One thing...no matter how awesome it is, is never enough.  You need a strategy.  A consistent plan of what you are going to do every single day.  It has to be well thought out, calculated, and designed with a purpose.  Every day, you have another chance to attract someone to your agency, but you’ll never do that by using the same thing over and over and over again or going with a one and done strategy.  👎  

Ok, now that we’ve got your mind reset, let’s keep you on the Road to Better Recruiting with my new course that is open right now.  You can check out the course and everything that's included by visiting my website at forcopstraining.com/rtbr.

Know someone at another agency who’s gotten of course with any of these five common recruiting roadblocks?  Give this video a like or share it with them so they can learn too.  Look, we’re all in this together and it’s going to take all of us to restore the future of this profession that we love. 🤝

Have more questions about police recruiting, marketing, or anything else you're struggling with? Don't hesitate to reach out...I’m always here to help. ⛑

Until next week my Police Marketing Squad, happy recruiting! 😃

Tom

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👋 I’m Tom Sye, your Police Marketing FTO. I founded ‘For Cops’ Training to teach Police Departments how to attract more qualified candidates through the same tried and tested methods I’ve used for the past ten years at my own department to keep up with turnover and stay ahead of vacancies.

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