Epic recruiting failures rarely start with bad intentions. They start with a chief who genuinely wants to fix a staffing crisis and a vendor who promised to solve the problem.
Six months later, the staffing problem remains and is sometimes worse. This pattern repeats across departments every year, and it almost always traces back to the same root cause: agencies hiring a marketing company and believing they hired a recruiting company.
This article is a warning, written plainly, because too many departments learn this lesson the expensive way.
How Good Intentions Go Bad
No chief sits down and decides to waste a recruiting budget on purpose. Every epic recruiting failure begins the same way: a real problem, a real sense of urgency, and a vendor who shows up with confidence and a polished pitch.
The pitch usually focuses on visibility. More followers. More views. A “modernized brand” that will finally connect with younger candidates. It sounds reasonable, especially to command staff who know their current recruiting materials look outdated.
The trouble is that visibility is not the same as staffing, and good intentions get hijacked the moment an agency starts measuring success by attention instead of hires. By the time anyone notices the gap between engagement numbers and actual academy enrollment, a full budget cycle has already passed.
What Marketing Companies Actually Push
Marketing companies sell what they know how to sell, and that is not recruiting. Keep in mind that many marketing companies will call themselves “recruiting,” so watch for these warning signs:
* Heavy emphasis on social media growth, follower counts, and video views
* Vague language about “building a brand” with no mention of how many applicants to expect
* Case studies that highlight emotional response instead of staffing numbers
One question will solve this issue for your agency: If I spend X-Amount, how many candidates will I be talking to? If they give you an answer, make them place that in the contract and guarantee it.
This is exactly what Safeguard Recruiting does, and the practice is so rare that we reached out to CEO Doug Larsen and asked why he does it.
Doug said that the so-called “recruiting” companies for public safety have hurt overall trust from agencies because departments have often been burned by marketing agencies masquerading as recruiting, and Safeguard Recruiting needed to stand out from everyone else.
While Larsen, a veteran law enforcement professional, said that most agencies appreciate the transparency, some simply don’t believe it because their past experiences have been so bad.
“We are so confident in what we provide our clients that we don’t require long-term contracts and will begin working for 4 weeks because we know that the relationship will continue once the agency sees the performance and success,” Larsen said.
A marketing company is doing exactly what marketing companies do. The failure happens when an agency mistakes that service for a recruiting strategy capable of fixing a staffing shortage.
The Stark Warning: They Call Themselves Police Marketers Now
Here is the part agencies need to hear clearly. A growing number of these firms now brand themselves directly as police marketers or law enforcement marketing specialists, which makes the line even harder to see.
A firm can speak fluently about police recruiting strategies while lacking the real infrastructure to move a candidate from application to the academy. The vendor sounds like a recruiting partner, presents like one, and bills like one, but functions only as an advertising agency wearing a recruiting label. Agencies that do not ask hard questions early end up discovering the gap only after the budget is spent and the staffing report has not moved.
Avoiding the Next Epic Recruiting Failure
Epic recruiting failures are preventable, but only if agencies stop evaluating vendors based solely on presentation. A confident pitch and a strong demo reel are not evidence of recruiting capability. They are evidence of marketing capability, which is a different skill entirely.
Public safety recruiting solutions need to be judged the same way every other staffing investment is: by the number of qualified candidates who apply. Anything short of that standard risks repeating the same failure with a different vendor name next year.
Sources
International Association of Chiefs of Police. (2024). *Building the future workforce: Recruitment and retention strategies for law enforcement agencies*. https://www.theiacp.org
Police Executive Research Forum. (2023). *The workforce crisis, and what police agencies are doing about it*. https://www.policeforum.org
Bureau of Justice Assistance. (2023). *Law enforcement recruitment and retention toolkit*. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bja.ojp.gov
National Institute of Justice. (2022). *Strategies for improving police recruitment and retention*. U.S. Department of Justice. https://nij.ojp.gov
Wilson, J. M., & Grammich, C. A. (2021). Police recruitment and retention in the 21st century: A multilevel analysis. *RAND Corporation*. https://www.rand.org
