How to Stay Engaged in Your Police Recruiting Process!

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Having a hard time staying engaged in your job as a Police Recruiter? 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

When you work a lot of backgrounds it’s easy to forget the basics and fall into the trap of going through the motions.  If this is you, I’ve got the background process refresher that will get you engaged again and remind you of why we’re doing what we’re doing...keep reading! 👀

Hey everyone, it’s Tom Sye your Police Marketing FTO, and this week, let’s give you a little refresher here.  As you know, I’ve been back at my old agency for the past couple of months now and I can tell you firsthand, because it’s all new to me again, how exciting it is to be working in the backgrounds and recruiting unit. 😁

This got me thinking about you and your recruiting problems and how I’ve heard from so many of you how exhausted you are from being overwhelmed with applicants and going through long stretches without any breaks.  Believe you me, I remember exactly how that feels too. 😩

So, with my newfound rejuvenation in hand, let me pass on some quick tips in three key areas to help bust you out of that funk you may be in and take you from going through the motions to being excited for working applicants again. 🙌

1. Police Recruiting Contacts

Whether it’s emails, telephone calls, social media comments or DM’s, being out at testing, recruiting events, or simply just letting your applicants know where they’re at in the process, this is a really easy area to lose focus in and just start going through the motions. 😴

This usually shows up in the form of short one or two line message replies, commenting by only pasting a link, providing minimal information, or worse still, not returning phone calls, messages, or leaving your applicant to figure out on their own exactly where they’re at in the process. 😒

Listen, I know you’ve got a lot going on in the course of your day.  Talking to people and returning calls or messages is probably the last thing in the world you wanna do.  💯

But remember, police recruiting is all about building relationships.  If you slack off here, you’re going to lose applicants to other agencies over and over and over again.  That does not make this job very fun.  Set aside 15 or 20 minutes every day just to reach out to people.  Be friendly, even if you have to force yourself!  Be engaging and have fun with your contacts.  Soon, you’ll start to see that happy attitude of yours becoming a regular part of your day again.  😀

2. Background Interviews

This is another key area of the relationship building process and one that is super simple to skip the basics and rush through just to get it done. 💨

If you find yourself rushing applicants into the interview room, sitting them down, and firing away at them with question after question within the first 5 or 10 minutes of them being there…you my friend, are going through the motions. 😳

Let’s fix that. 👍

There’s two points to remember here.  One…taking your time, building rapport through some basic and friendly banter, and introducing your applicants to your co-workers are all excellent ways to make them feel welcomed and valued.  Translation…it cements their belief that this is the kind of place where people like them work. 👯‍♀️

Two…if you are speeding through the whole interview, firing off questions like they’re coming from a Tommy Gun, it is much easier for a person to lie, omit, or simply forget to tell you information.  This leads to polygraph failures and information being discovered later that then eliminates the applicant from your process. 🥴

Get back to the basics and give each interview the time it needs to breathe.  The time it takes for applicants to thoroughly think about things and then to feel comfortable enough to actually disclose them to you. When you start doing this again, you’ll start seeing the molehills of an applicant’s background stay that way. 🤏  

3. Background Investigations

No triumvirate of going through the motions would be complete without talking about the background investigations themselves.  This is by far the easiest area for recruiters to sleepwalk through because it involves a lot of menial tasks and box checking.  We’re talking about running information through databases, making reference calls, and reviewing testing reports to name a few.  Not exactly enthralling stuff, I get it. 🥱

But hear me out…this is the true meat and potatoes of every background investigation.  This is where you have an opportunity to discover things, both good and bad, about your applicant.  This is also where those tiny things now that become giant things later get missed. 👺

So, if you’re just running a name through a database and barely paying attention to the results, calling a reference, asking scripted questions, and moving on with your life, or if you’re getting polygraph or psych reports back, simply checking to see if they passed or not and ignoring the rest of the report, get yourself dialed back in and protect yourself, your agency and your community from a bad hire by putting some meaning and focus behind your investigations again. 💪

If these resets have been eye-opening for you, you’re not gonna believe the strategies and insights I teach you in my Road to Better Recruiting online recruitment training course which is enrolling right now. 🙌   

I’ll teach you everything you need to revamp your hiring process, make sure you have the right assets in place and show you how to start attracting high quality police officer applicants to your agency again.  All in an easy to understand and digest online format you’re gonna love.  😍

Check it out now on my website by visiting forcopstraining.com/rtbr and start recruiting like it’s 2025. 🚀

Know someone in recruiting who’s been going through the motions themselves?  Share this newsletter with them so they can learn too.  Our profession is much stronger when we all work together, and they’ll be pretty stoked that you shared this with them. 🤝

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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