Evidence based police recruiting means one simple thing: stop spending your budget on tactics that seem cool or the right idea and start spending it on tactics that measurably fill seats. Right now most agencies are doing the opposite. They pour money into billboards, recruitment videos, and career fairs, then wonder why the applicant pool keeps shrinking while the vacancy list grows.
Safeguard Recruiting was built on what the evidence shows, but after years of meeting leaders in a recruiting crisis, the best practices supported by research still haven’t reached the profession.
The good news is that the research is more detailed than ever. Studies from both public safety and the private sector point to the same handful of decisions that, if made, will help any agency, of any size, recruit successfully. Here is what the evidence says, and what it says to stop doing.
The problem is conversion, not just attraction
Most agencies obsess over chasing more applicants. But a study of nearly 2,000 public safety professionals found that agencies lose most of their candidates after they apply, not before. Slow background investigations, silence between steps, and clunky paperwork bleed off qualified people who had already raised their hands.
The takeaway is blunt. A candidate who applies to your agency and two others will usually accept whichever offer arrives first. Speed and simplicity are not nice-to-haves. They are the whole game.
1. Shorten the application
The single fastest win in evidence-based police recruiting is cutting your application down.
Data from recruitment analytics firm Appcast shows that 92 percent of people who click “apply” never finish. A separate audit found the average online application takes roughly 51 clicks to complete, with candidates forced to re-enter information they already uploaded. Every extra field is a place to quit. Even worse is any application that requires the candidate to register an account. We have found a drop-off rate of between 75% – 90% with our clients that are mandating a candidate to register for an account before applying.
For police work, where interested candidates often have other job options, a bloated 45-minute application is a self-inflicted wound. Keep the first step short. Collect name, contact information, and basic eligibility, then move the deep background paperwork to later stages once the person is committed. You are trying to start a conversation, not conduct the full investigation on screen one.
2. Communicate fast
Once someone applies, the clock starts, and the research on response speed is striking.
A study led by researchers at George Mason University analyzed millions of real hiring interactions and found that replying just one hour later than a competitor cut the odds of winning that candidate by roughly 46 percent. A full day of delay dropped the odds by close to 90 percent. Fast responses signal that you are organized, reliable, and genuinely interested in the person.
Now compare that to a typical police hiring timeline, where background investigations alone take 30 to 90 days at nearly half of agencies. If your process is long, communication is what keeps candidates warm. Automated status updates, a named point of contact, and a quick human reply to every inquiry are cheap, and they directly protect the candidates you already earned.
We built Safeguard Connect to fix all of this. The application is mobile-friendly and fully open, and as soon as a candidate expresses interest, automatic messages begin. We call it “nurturing” the candidate and combine that with an active recruiter calling within 24 hours, and the results are immediate.
3. Target the right people on social media
Broad advertising sprays your message at everyone. Targeted digital recruiting puts a specific message in front of a specific person, and the experimental evidence for it is strong.
In a randomized field experiment, researcher Elizabeth Linos tested recruitment messaging on prospective police applicants. Messages that emphasized challenge and career, rather than generic public service language, doubled and even tripled application rates, and quadrupled applications among people of color. The campaign cost about 500 dollars per recruit. Follow-up experiments on recruiting materials found the same pattern: community-focused messaging consistently outperformed tough-guy “action” framing.
Social platforms let you apply those findings with precision. You can target by age, location, prior military service, and interests, then test which message and image actually drive clicks. That is the difference between hope and measurement. Pair sharp messaging with smart targeting, and you get a larger, more diverse applicant pool for a fraction of traditional media spend. This is also where strong police department marketing earns its keep.
4. Run everything through an ATS
You cannot move fast or measure results with spreadsheets and email chains. This is where an applicant tracking system becomes the backbone of the whole operation.
Recruiters who use an applicant tracking system report clear gains. Industry data shows more than 86 percent of recruiters say an ATS reduced their time-to-hire, and a majority say they surface more high-quality candidates than manual methods. An ATS automates status updates, flags candidates stuck between stages, and shows you exactly where your funnel leaks so you can fix it.
For a police agency, modern police recruiting software does the two things the evidence rewards most: it keeps communication fast, and it keeps the process from stalling. It also gives you the data to prove which police recruitment strategies are working and which are wasting money.
Safeguard Connect is the only applicant tracking system built for law enforcement, and while the research is detailed, we see the benefit with every client served.
What the evidence says to stop doing
Here is the uncomfortable part. The traditional recruiting tools agencies love most, billboards and recruitment videos, show little evidence of actually driving hires.
In a survey of 1,673 officers, researchers Richard Johnson and Matt Dolan of the Dolan Consulting Group found that less than 6 percent credited formal advertising of any kind with influencing their decision to become an officer.
Read that again. Fewer than one in sixteen new officers pointed to any advertising at all. The slick video and the highway billboard are mostly reaching people who were never going to apply. That’s why we leverage an algorithm built over 500 law enforcement-specific recruiting campaigns and target individuals directly, rather than hoping they find a billboard, website, video, or a host of other concepts the profession has tried over the years.
Putting evidence-based police recruiting to work
The pattern across every credible study is consistent. Short applications keep candidates in. Fast communication wins them over competitors. Targeted, well-worded social campaigns bring in more and better applicants for less. An applicant tracking system holds it all together. And broad advertising, no matter how polished, rarely pays for itself.
None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires spending the budget you have on what the research shows works. That is the entire premise of evidence-based police recruiting, and agencies that adopt it are the ones still filling academy classes while their neighbors run short.
If you are ready to build a recruiting system around what the evidence actually supports, Safeguard Recruiting helps agencies shorten their application process, respond faster, run targeted campaigns, and manage every candidate in one place. Book a call with our team and let’s turn your open positions into filled ones.
Note: Our team recently spoke on evidence based police recruiting alongside Maureen McGough, co-founder of the 30×30 initiative, and Dr. Joseph Schafer. If you would like details of that presentation or would be interested in a seminar in your area, reach out to us.
Sources (APA)
Appcast. (2024). Recruitment marketing benchmark data [As reported in Society for Human Resource Management]. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/people-92-never-finish-online-job-applications
International Association of Chiefs of Police. (2024). 2024 recruitment and retention survey results.https://www.theiacp.org/resources/research-study/2024-recruitment-retention-survey-results
Johnson, R. R., & Dolan, M. (2019). Why do people become cops? Dolan Consulting Group. https://www.dolanconsultinggroup.com/news/why-do-people-become-cops/
Linos, E. (2018). More than public service: A field experiment on job advertisements and diversity in the police. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 28(1), 67-85. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/more-than-public-service-a-field-experiment-on-job-advertisements-and-diver
PowerDMS. (2024). Public safety recruitment: Where agencies lose candidates. https://www.powerdms.com/policy-learning-center/public-safety-recruitment
SUCCESS. (2025). Hiring response time: The one-hour rule that costs you. https://www.success.com/hiring-response-time-rule
Taniguchi, T., et al. (2023). Recruiting women into policing: Experimentally testing the effectiveness of recruiting materials. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice.https://academic.oup.com/policing/article/doi/10.1093/police/paad049/7239848
