Police Recruiting Budget Busters!

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Getting ready to launch a major ad campaign to try and boost your police recruiting efforts? Looking at some new method that they say is going to get you so many applicants you’re not even going to believe it?  🥴

Before you sign that contract or hit send on that acceptance email let me clue you in on the five biggest wastes of your recruitment budget...keep reading! 👀

Hey everyone, it’s Tom Sye your Police Marketing FTO, and this week, let’s talk about that recruitment budget of yours and all of those police recruiting ‘solutions’ that are being pitched to you every single day.  🙄

Believe you me, I get them all the time too, and if you don’t know how to evaluate them properly, you’re going to watch that budget number of yours go bye-bye while your vacancy level stays the same. 😡

Let me save you a ton of time and money by revealing the five biggest wastes of your police recruiting budget…

1.  Billboards

Look, I get it…other agencies are doing it, you see them when you’re driving around, and you think to yourself 'hey, I’ve got to get our agency a billboard too'.  👯‍♀️

Well, before you go running off to the ad agency to spend anywhere between a few thousand dollars to multiple tens of thousands of dollars per month depending on where you're located, I want you think about this… 🤔

How many blogs, articles, webinars, conference presentations, one on one conversations, or any other environment where cops are talking about things, have you heard all about how awesome their billboard campaign was and how it solved all their problems?  😳

The answer is zero…because it doesn’t happen.  Billboards look great.  Salespeople will throw some impressive reach numbers at you.  But they just don’t work. Save your money. 🐖

2.  Airport Ads

Similarly, airport advertisements have become very popular over the past year and in fact, I just saw one in the Chicago Midway Airport when I travelled there last month to speak at a conference.  The ad actually looked awesome!  It was giant, very eye catching, and spread against a large wall. 🤩

There were two problems with it though…

One, it was tucked away around a corner in a very low traffic area. 👻🏚️

And two…I assure you, no one, while traveling, is going to see your airport ad, stop, think to themselves, 'I think I want to be a cop', and start the application process.  They’re going to do exactly what I did and say 'wow, that looks nice' and walk right on by hustling to get down to baggage claim and grab their luggage off the convyeyer belt before someone else does. 🛄

3.  Fancy Websites

This is another major recruiting solution area where some agency, somewhere, purchased a super high-tech and fancy looking website complete with slow motion video graphics for ten thousand dollars, and everyone else said 'we must need that too'. 👨‍🦯⬅️👨‍🦯

The simple fact is that when it comes to police recruiting…simpler is better. 💯

You don’t need all the high-tech fancy stuff.  Just a plain old website loaded with information, smiling faces, and easy to find navigation links to your application is all that's required. Trust me, this is exactly what your applicants really want to see when checking you out online.   

4.  Branding Packages

Often tied in with fancy websites, companies out there are pitching branding packages to agencies where they’ll give them a website, slogan, and in some cases, they’ll even manage your social media for you for the low, low price of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 🤯

Much like with billboards, I implore you to find an agency that has bought one of these things that is telling everyone how amazing it was and what it did for them.  They don’t exist. 🤷

Want more?  Here’s the biggest reason against buying one of these…

What are you going to do six months from now when that campaign and slogan have now grown tired, and no one pays any attention to it anymore?  You see, that’s what happens in advertising…you gotta keep it fresh.  So, are you going to spend another couple hundred thousand dollars or are you going to finally learn how to do it yourself? More on that in a minute. ⏳  

5.  Outside companies doing police recruiting for you

I’m just going to cut right to the chase here.  This is a terrible idea and a tremendous waste of your recruiting budget.  Why?  Well, for starters, you are putting your agencies’ very integrity and reputation into the hands of people who know nothing about you and really, other than getting your money, have no care in the world if you do well or not. 😑

Second, and this is a big one…you can do the same exact thing that they’re going to do for you, for nothing.  Listen, none of these companies have some super-secret method that no one else in the world knows how to do that’s going to get you more people. 🤫

Post ads on social media?  You can do that yourself. ✔️

Send targeted messages to law enforcement related groups?  You can do that yourself. ✔️

Make a video or picture carousel to really showcase your agency?  You can do that yourself. ✔️

There’s literally nothing they do that you can’t.  You just got to learn how… 👍

You know I’m always putting out tips and information through my daily posts, in my weekly videos, my Marketing ‘For Cops’ Newsletters just like this one, and in an array of other free guides and resources on my website.  It’s a great place to start learning. 💪 

If you want to accelerate the whole process, my Road to Better Recruiting online super course is enrolling right now and will teach you everything you need to know to start recruiting like it’s 2025! 🙌

I'll teach you how to use my recruiting MAP to get things heading in the right direction at your agency. I'll show you how to evaluate all of those recruiting solutions being pitched to you so you can stop wasting time and money on ineffective advertising methods. And, I'll introduce you to attraction marketing and teach you how to use it to start not only attracting awesome Police Officer applicants to your agency again, but how to get them both into and through your hiring process!  Buckle up, your brain’s in for a heck of a ride! 🧠🎢

Check it out now on my website by visiting: www.forcopstraining.com/rtbr and start winning with police recruiting! 🏆   

Know someone in recruiting who’s been dumping dollars down a bottomless money pit with no results?  Share this newsletter with them so they can learn too and help me change the future of police recruiting forever.  🤝 

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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