Police recruiting has a spending problem, and most agencies don’t find out until invoices pile up and academy seats stay empty. Somewhere in your budget right now is a line item for a slick recruiting website, a cinematic recruitment video, and maybe a billboard on the highway into town. Even worse, you’ve already spent the money.
A marketing company sold you all of it. What they did not tell you is how little of it puts a qualified name on your desk.
This is the part of the business vendors don’t put in the pitch deck. Here are the dirty secrets of police recruiting, and what actually works instead.
Secret 1: You are paying for impressions, not applicants
Read your last marketing invoice and look at what you were charged for. Reach. Impressions. Views. Engagement. Notice what is missing from that list: names. Real people who filled out a form and asked to talk to you.
Impressions are not recruiting. An impression means a phone screen flashed your logo for a second and a half while someone scrolled past it. A view means a video autoplayed on mute. None of that fills a seat. Yet agencies routinely pay five figures for campaigns measured entirely in metrics that never touch the hiring funnel.
A good vendor should be able to tell you how many candidates their work delivered and how many of those candidates got hired. If the only numbers they report are eyeballs, you are funding their portfolio, not your patrol shifts.
Secret 2: The billboard almost never gets credit
The billboard is the sacred cow of police department marketing, and the data on it is brutal.
In a survey of 1,673 officers, researchers Richard Johnson and Matt Dolan found that fewer than 6 percent credited a recruiter or any form of formal advertising with influencing their decision to become an officer. Fewer than one in sixteen.
Read that again before you approve the next billboard renewal. The people who become cops didn’t do so because of a fancy advertisement.
Secret 3: A pretty video does not fix a broken funnel
Recruitment videos are the other favorite upsell, and they run from a few thousand dollars into the tens of thousands. The uncomfortable truth is that a video does not convert anyone by itself. At best, it warms up interest. What happens next is where candidates are won or lost, and that part usually has nothing to do with the video.
The leak is after the click, not before it
Most agencies lose candidates after they apply, not before. Recruitment analytics firm Appcast has reported that 92 percent of people who start an online application never finish it. A separate audit found the average online application takes roughly 51 clicks. So a candidate watches your beautiful film, clicks apply, hits a 45-minute form that asks them to re-enter their own address three times, and quits.
You did not have an attraction problem. You had a conversion problem. No amount of production value fixes a form that punishes the people who already raised their hand. This is exactly why evidence-based police recruiting starts with the funnel, not the ad spend.
Secret 4: The expensive website that collects nothing
Agencies pay a premium for custom recruiting sites that look impressive and capture almost nothing usable. They send a visitor to a PDF, a generic careers page, or a “check back for openings” message. The visitor came ready to act, and the site had no way to catch them.
A recruiting website has one job: turn an interested visitor into a name and a way to reach them. If it does not have a short form, an obvious next step, and a system behind it that alerts a human, it is a brochure. A costly one.
This is where law enforcement recruiting strategies and real tooling separate from marketing theater. Modern police recruiting software captures the lead, sends an instant confirmation, and drops that candidate into a pipeline where someone follows up fast. An applicant tracking system for police forces exists precisely so no interested person falls through the cracks between the click and the call.
What recruiting actually looks like
Strip away the sales pitch and the pattern is simple. Recruiting is a name, a conversation, and a fast, respectful process that carries that person all the way to the academy.
Speed is the whole game. Research analyzing millions of hiring interactions found that replying just one hour slower than a competing employer cut the odds of landing that candidate by about 46 percent. Your candidate is often applying to two or three agencies at once and will usually accept whichever real offer arrives first. A billboard cannot compete on speed. A tight funnel can.
So spend your money where it produces names and moves them:
- Fund your own officers as recruiters, because personal contact is what the evidence says actually moves people.
- Shorten your application so interested candidates finish it.
- Reply fast and keep candidates warm with real communication.
- Run everything through an applicant tracking system so nothing stalls and you can prove what works.
The bottom line
The dirtiest secret in police recruiting is that a lot of what agencies buy is designed to look like recruiting without doing the work of recruiting. If a vendor cannot tie their invoice to names and hires, they are selling you visibility, not a solution to your staffing shortage.
The next time a marketing company pitches you the next best idea, ask them one question: how many candidates will I get every month?
If they can’t answer that, run… don’t walk away.
If you are tired of paying for attention and want a system that delivers actual candidates, Safeguard Recruiting builds recruiting around what fills seats: fast follow up, short applications, targeted outreach, and every candidate tracked in one place with police recruiting software made for the job.
Book a call with our team and let’s turn your open positions into filled ones.
Sources
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
Johnson, R. R., & Dolan, M. (2019). Why do people become cops? Dolan Consulting Group. https://www.dolanconsultinggroup.com/news/why-do-people-become-cops/
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
SUCCESS. (2025). Hiring response time: The one-hour rule that costs you. https://www.success.com/hiring-response-time-rule
