Recruiting Strategy

[SeaWalka]

Evening folks,

I am here hoping to find some insight into law enforcement recruiting. I am currently a student intern with my local county sheriff's office in Texas while I finish my degree. I just transferred from CID to Professional Standards where I am working with the recruiting sergeant to recruit new deputies.

I was hoping I could get some tips and suggestions from all of you who have worked for your agency's recruiting division to come up with innovative ideas to attract new applicants.

Currently, I have compiled a list of law enforcement academies in Texas that officer basic licensing and am contacting the closest ones so that we can come recruit from them.

I am also trying to work with our School Resource Sergeant to recruit High School Graduates to our Corrections Officer positions in our jail.

Our biggest milestone was being allowed to create a social media account, which appears to be our administration's biggest fear.

My Sergeant is also the FTO Sergeant and one of the Daytime Patrol Sergeants who is working with practically no budget from the Sheriff's Office. I am trying to be as great of an asset to her as I can so that we can fill our ten patrol positions with minimal effort from her and virtually no cost due to our lack of budget.

Thanks for any help you all may be able to provide, I assure you it is truly appreciated.

Just for reference, this agency is a medium sized agency comprised of approximately 500 employees with about 200 of them being sworn law enforcement.

[furetto7]

We put an ad in the paper and on the Texas Municipal League website and hope someone applies.

[sgt jon]

Try leveraging some well developed strategies. A few places to start are the IACP and NSA.

The IACP hosted guide: http://www.theiacp.org/portals/0/pdf...ecruitment.pdf
is a good reference and will give you some very good advice.

As is the guidelines hosted here:

http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=2056&issue_id=42010

You can and may want to post announcements here: http://discoverpolicing.org/

Another guide:

http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/vets-to-cops/e080921223-RecruitmentToolkit.pdf

[steelcityk9cop]

Recruitment video.... YouTube...Facebook... take the video on tour to academies and colleges.

[L-1]

As an incentive for individual officers to actively recruit, we offered them a day off with pay for every applicant they went out and solicited who was hired and passed the academy. We were able to track which officer recruited an applicant because he wrote his serial number on the application he gave out. Putting their serial number on the application was a double edged sword because officers knew recruiting losers would reflect badly on them, so they made an extra effort to prescreen people and make sure they weren't dirt bags before handing out apps.

[PhilipCal]

Not to take anything away from the original question, but recruiting has never been a problem with my Agency. The problem, and I believe this is fairly applicable across the board, is often the lack of funds needed to bring additional personnel on board.

I don't think it would be a stretch to say, that when we have vacancies, we have about 100 well qualified applicants to fill a single slot. That's not counting the would be's, wanna bees, etc who are not qualified.

In common with most state agencies, my Agency hires off an Eligibility Register which is established by written exam scores.

[Mulgrave600]

We do Facebook, television, newspaper, bus stop and railway station advertising as well as radio. We don't need to advertise too often because most of the time the number of applicants is more than the number of vacancies.

The TV ads show the usual nonsense like abseiling onto boats from helicopters and police on jetskis to pique interest.

[Lady Blue]

We get most of our applicants from two sources. The first is from the people who work in our jail or ones from surrounding counties. The other is from the job openings page on the TCOLE website.

[SeaWalka]

Thank you to everyone who has offered advice. The main problem is that the agency has never really actively engaged in recruiting new deputies which is one of the reasons that the office is so understaffed. The county is growing, and so is the budget to hire new deputies but we are also competing with not just the city agencies in the county, but the county that borders us and the large agency that is within that county.

We are at trying to do this with one hand tied behind our back because we literally have no budget for recruiting and the current administration does not view social media favorably and up until a couple months ago has not allowed the creation of a Facebook page.

A lot of the self sponsor academies are fixin' to have their students graduate soon and we have been visiting them which seems to have positive results. The cadets we talk to are extremely interested and have filled out rider applications to come ride out with our patrol guys to get a better understanding of with this office has to offer.

I was talking with some of the brass today and they can't recall the patrol division ever being fully staffed which is probably due to them never actively recruiting.

I will take the advice y'all have provided and see what I can do with it, and if anyone else has any suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em. Thanks!