There is a fundamental irony in how many public safety agencies handle the current staffing crisis: to get more officers on the street, they take their best officers off the street to manage recruiting.
It is common to see highly trained, experienced detectives or sergeants reassigned to “personnel.” Instead of investigating crimes or training rookies, these sworn officers are spending their days sifting through incomplete applications, cold-calling leads, and managing spreadsheets.
While the background investigation phase requires a sworn officer’s expertise, the “top of the funnel”—marketing, initial screening, and candidate engagement—does not. It’s time to rethink resource allocation.
The High Cost of Misallocated Resources
Using a sworn officer as an administrative recruiter is an expensive inefficiency. You are paying a premium salary and benefits package reflecting their specialized law enforcement training for them to perform tasks that could be handled by civilian professionals or automated software.
Furthermore, officers are trained to be skeptical investigators, which is necessary for background checks, but often counter-productive in the initial “sales” phase of recruiting where warmth and engagement are required.
Removing the Bottlenecks with Outsourced Support
The most significant delays in public safety hiring often occur at the very beginning (attracting enough applicants) and the very end (the background check).
By outsourcing the front-end recruiting efforts to specialists like Safeguard Recruiting, you remove the initial bottleneck. We handle the marketing, the inbound lead generation, and the initial automated follow-up to ensure application packets are complete.
Badges Back on the Street
When you utilize dedicated recruiting services and software to manage the intake pipeline, you deliver a smaller, highly vetted pool of qualified candidates to your background investigators.
This allows your sworn personnel to focus solely on what only they can do: deep-dive investigations, polygraphs, and final interviews. The result is a faster, more cost-effective hiring process that keeps your sworn staff doing the jobs they were trained to do.
Stop pulling officers off patrol to manage paperwork. Let Safeguard Recruiting handle the top of your funnel with our specialized services and software. Reach out today to discuss how we can support your staffing goals.
