Law enforcement recruiting strategies have been broken for years, and most agencies have no idea why their pipeline keeps shrinking. Doug Larsen, CEO and founder of Safeguard Recruiting, spent five years running campaigns for departments ranging from small rural agencies to major urban forces like Philadelphia and Milwaukee. His conclusion is blunt: there is no shortage of people who want to become law enforcement officers. The shortage is in how agencies are reaching them, communicating with them, and processing them once they show interest.
This article draws from a recent podcast detailing Larsen’s experience building Safeguard from the ground up, the patterns he has seen across hundreds of campaigns, and the specific process failures that are costing agencies candidates every single day.
From Trucking to Policing: How a Cross-Industry Insight Changed Law Enforcement Hiring
Larsen did not come to law enforcement recruiting from a marketing background. He retired from Utah Department of Public Safety after a full career in law enforcement, then began consulting on simulator training before stumbling into the recruiting side of the trucking industry.
Trucking operates with turnover rates that regularly hit 100 percent or higher. The industry has no choice but to treat recruiting as a continuous, process-driven operation rather than a passive one. Larsen absorbed those lessons and brought them back to law enforcement, where departments had grown accustomed to a very different reality: candidates used to find them.
That era is over. The departments that have not accepted this shift are the ones struggling most. The ones that have embraced the process changes Safeguard Recruiting introduced are filling seats faster than they thought possible.
Why Police Department Marketing Budgets Are Not a Recruiting Solution
One of the most consistent findings from Safeguard Recruiting’s early consulting work was that agencies were spending heavily on marketing and seeing little to no improvement in actual hires. Philadelphia is the clearest example. The department spent more than three million dollars on a marketing campaign before engaging Safeguard Recruiting. According to their own command staff, their recruiting numbers actually got worse during that period.
The core problem is that marketing and recruiting are not the same function. Marketing generates impressions and website traffic. Recruiting generates completed applications, qualified candidates, and eventual hires. Confusing the two leads agencies to measure the wrong things, celebrate metrics that do not matter, and wonder why their academy seats are still empty.
Larsen describes the distinction plainly: a marketing campaign makes the candidate find you. A recruiting campaign goes out and finds the candidate. Safeguard’s approach runs targeted outreach 24 hours a day, seven days a week, filters candidates against agency qualifications before a recruiter ever sees a name, and delivers warm, interested applicants rather than a general traffic spike.
The Real Reason Candidates Are Dropping Out of Your Process
Most agencies lose candidates not at the top of the funnel but in the middle of it. A candidate sees an ad, expresses interest, and then encounters a process that loses them through friction, silence, and confusion. Larsen has identified several patterns that appear repeatedly across agencies of all sizes.
Demanding Too Much Too Soon
Asking a first-touch candidate to complete a 60-plus page application before any meaningful communication has occurred is one of the fastest ways to drain a pipeline. The candidate has no relationship with the agency yet, no confidence that the process will move efficiently, and no incentive to invest that kind of time upfront. Many simply move on.
Dead Periods With No Communication
When a candidate submits materials and hears nothing for weeks, they do not assume the process is moving along. They assume they have been rejected or forgotten. In a competitive market where that same candidate may be in contact with multiple agencies and employers from other industries, silence is functionally the same as a rejection. They self-eliminate and you never know you lost them.
Self-Elimination Over Misunderstood Disqualifiers
Larsen notes that many candidates drop out because they believe something in their background will disqualify them when it actually would not. Without consistent communication and a clear process explanation, candidates make assumptions that cost agencies qualified people. Regular automated touchpoints address this directly by keeping candidates informed and engaged through each stage.
The Registration Wall
Requiring candidates to create an account and register before they can even begin an application produces documented drop-off rates as high as 90 percent at some agencies. The newer generation of candidates navigates mobile-first and has low tolerance for friction in digital processes. If the first step is a registration wall, a significant portion of your audience never takes it.
What an Applicant Tracking System for Police Forces Actually Changes
Safeguard Connect, the applicant tracking platform Larsen built specifically for law enforcement, was designed to eliminate exactly these failure points. It is not a general HR tool adapted for public safety use. It is built around the specific workflow of a law enforcement hiring process and the specific behaviors of candidates moving through it.
Removing Friction From the First Touch
Candidates can engage from a mobile device without registering for an account, without downloading anything, and without navigating a clunky government portal. The application experience is smooth, fast, and meets candidates where they already are.
Automating Candidate Communication
When Philadelphia is generating more than a thousand candidate contacts per month and has only a handful of recruiters on staff, no human-driven communication system can keep up. Safeguard Connect automates outreach at each stage so every candidate receives timely, consistent, professionally written messages that keep them moving through the process instead of dropping off.
Preserving and Reactivating Cold Leads
One of the most underappreciated capabilities of a well-built police staffing software platform is the ability to go back to candidates who engaged but did not apply. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado sent a simple July Fourth message to their full list and generated new applications from it. Philadelphia went back to 5,000 unresolved contacts before the holidays and saw an immediate spike in applications. Cleveland reactivated interest from old lists through automated messaging. These results are impossible to achieve through a spreadsheet or individual recruiter email.
Full Visibility for the Whole Team
Every communication is tracked and visible to every authorized team member. If a recruiter is out for a day, another team member can see exactly where a candidate stands and pick up the conversation without starting over. This matters in an environment where recruiter turnover is common and institutional knowledge about individual candidates typically lives inside one person’s inbox.
The Agencies Getting It Right: Real Results From Real Departments
Across five years of campaigns, certain agencies stand out as examples of what happens when a department fully commits to the process change.
Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado
Seth Graham’s agency has become something close to a model program within Safeguard’s client base. They embraced every element of the process, invested in the technology, and gave Safeguard’s recommendations full implementation. The result has been as many as 20 hires in a single week. The department spends less than ten thousand dollars a year on their recruiting program and has quadrupled their hires. The variable that made the difference was not budget. It was willingness to change the approach.
Philadelphia Police Department
Philadelphia came to Safeguard after spending over three million dollars on a marketing campaign and watching their numbers decline. After implementing Safeguard’s process and the Connect platform, they went from struggling to source candidates to processing more than a thousand contacts per month. The department’s success came not just from the technology but from leadership buy-in that drove the process change throughout the organization.
Milwaukee Police Department
Milwaukee is an example of a full-service partnership in which Safeguard has produced videos, built web assets, generated monthly applicants, and worked alongside the department’s internal recruiting team. Their recruiters actively collaborate with Safeguard on collateral, campaign adjustments, and messaging. That feedback loop is part of why the campaign continues to improve over time.
Why Small Agencies Have the Same Access to These Tools
One of Larsen’s founding commitments was that no agency should be left behind because of budget or size. The majority of law enforcement agencies in the United States are small departments that cannot afford a dedicated recruiting staff or a large campaign budget. Safeguard structured its software tiers to make the same tools available regardless of agency size. A small department with a limited budget gets access to the same core capabilities as a major metropolitan department. The scale adjusts. The process does not.
This philosophy extends to how Safeguard engages with clients. Departments in genuine need have received complimentary support to help them rebuild a pipeline that had collapsed. The mission, in Larsen’s framing, is not strictly commercial. It is about making communities safer by helping agencies get fully staffed.
The Mindset Shift That Everything Else Depends On
Technology solves a process problem, but it cannot solve a mindset problem on its own. Larsen is direct about this. The agencies that see the best results are the ones with leadership willing to acknowledge that the old approach is not working and to commit to something different. The ones that struggle are the ones that want to adopt pieces of the process while holding onto the assumptions that created the problem in the first place.
HR resistance, recruiter hesitation, and civil service constraints are all real. Safeguard has learned to work within those structures rather than against them. But the departments that achieve the most dramatic results, Larimer County being the clearest example, are the ones where leadership from the top down has said yes to the full process and means it.
Recruiting millennials in law enforcement and attracting Gen Z candidates is not primarily a messaging challenge. It is a process challenge. These candidates expect speed, clarity, and mobile-native experiences. An agency that delivers all three wins the candidate. An agency that does not loses them to one that does, or to another industry entirely.
What Agencies Should Do Right Now
If your department is understaffed and your current recruiting efforts are not producing the volume or quality of candidates you need, the following steps reflect what the most successful agencies have done.
- Audit where candidates are dropping out of your current process and identify the friction points
- Stop measuring recruiting success by website traffic or impressions and start measuring completed applications and hires
- Implement a law enforcement specific applicant tracking system that removes registration walls and automates candidate communication
- Build a candidate database and use it proactively, not just reactively
- Ensure your recruiters are spending their time on personal relationship building while the platform handles volume communication
- Get leadership alignment from the chief down through the recruiting team because technology without process commitment produces limited results
Conclusion: The Departments That Modernize Will Win
The law enforcement recruiting crisis, as widely discussed as it has been, is not fundamentally a supply problem. There are people who want to serve. The agencies that create a modern, efficient, respectful candidate experience are finding them. The agencies still waiting for applications to come through the door or spending budget on marketing campaigns that cannot be tied to a single hire are falling further behind every month.
Five years of Safeguard Recruiting campaigns across departments of every size and region have demonstrated what works. It is not complicated. It requires the right tools, the right process, and the willingness to change. The community safety implications of getting this right are real. Every unfilled vacancy is a gap in coverage. Every officer hired is a direct investment in the people a department exists to protect.
Is Your Agency Ready to Change the Outcome?
Safeguard Recruiting works exclusively with law enforcement and public safety agencies. Our team comes from the profession and understands the staffing challenges you are facing from the inside. Whether you need a full recruiting campaign, a smarter applicant tracking system for your force, or a strategic review of where your current process is losing candidates, we are ready to help.
Visit safeguardrecruiting.com to connect with a specialist who can assess your current process and tell you exactly what it will take to build a pipeline that performs. Your community deserves a fully staffed department. Let us help you build one.
References
International Association of Chiefs of Police. (2023). Recruitment and retention resources for law enforcement executives. IACP. https://www.theiacp.org/resources/document/recruitment-retention-toolkit
Larsen, D. (2026, May 19). The recruiting crisis is a myth: Five years of law enforcement recruiting campaigns [Podcast episode]. Safeguard Recruiting Podcast. https://safeguardrecruiting.com/podcast
Morabito, M. S., & Shelley, T. O. (2020). Organizational factors and police recruitment: Implications for diversifying law enforcement. Police Quarterly, 23(1), 3-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098611119876492
Police Executive Research Forum. (2023). Staffing challenges in policing: What the data show and what agencies are doing about it. PERF. https://www.policeforum.org/workforcestudy
Society for Human Resource Management. (2024). Talent acquisition benchmarking: Time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and candidate experience across industries. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/benchmarks.aspx
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2022). Law enforcement recruitment and the staffing gap: A national overview. COPS Office. https://cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/Publications/cops-w0917-pub.pdf
Wilson, J. M., Dalton, E., Scheer, C., & Grammich, C. A. (2022). Police recruitment and retention for the new millennium: The state of knowledge. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG959.html
Workforce Institute at UKG. (2023). Candidate experience and the cost of a broken hiring process. UKG. https://www.ukg.com/resources/article/candidate-experience-hiring-process
