Law enforcement recruiting strategies built around a single tactic, a new social media account, a billboard, or a job fair booth rarely move the needle anymore. Departments across the country are learning that the hard way. If you run a recruiting unit and feel like you are throwing tactics at a wall and hoping something sticks, you are not alone, and there is finally research that explains why isolated tactics keep falling short.
A 2023 survey of police agencies nationwide found that 65 percent reported a rise in retirements, 66 percent reported more resignations, and 69 percent reported a drop in applications, with overall staffing falling by an average of 5 percent. Add a competitive private sector job market, lingering legitimacy concerns after high-profile incidents, and a generational shift in what candidates actually want from an employer, and you get the staffing emergency most chiefs are living through right now.
The good news is that a new academic and practitioner study from the Michigan State University Police Staffing Observatory, based on interviews with 26 recruiting practitioners across the country, provides agencies with a concrete framework rather than a grab bag of tips.
It treats recruiting as a system with organizational-, unit-, and individual-level components rather than a single-department task. That framework is the foundation for the strategies below.
Why Old School Tactics Alone Aren’t Enough
Most agencies have historically thought about recruiting in terms of activities: a marketing push here, a hiring incentive there, maybe a relaxed grooming policy if things get desperate. Those tactics still matter, but research shows they only work when they are part of a larger, well-built program.
Departments that treat recruiting as one officer’s part-time job, with no budget, no metrics, and no leadership backing, tend to lose the war for talent to agencies down the road that have built real infrastructure around it. That is the core insight driving modern law enforcement recruiting strategies: the program around the tactic matters as much as the tactic itself.
A Three-Level Framework for Law Enforcement Recruiting Strategies
The research breaks an effective recruiting program into three levels, each reinforcing the other. Skipping a level is where most agencies quietly sabotage their own efforts.
Organizational Level: Leadership, Culture, Budget, and Goals
Recruiting starts at the top. Leaders who understand what younger recruits actually value, work-life balance, flexible scheduling, and a department with a healthy reputation are far better positioned to build a program candidates want to join.
The New York Police Department offers a useful example. After recognizing that forced overtime was burning out officers, the department piloted a flexible scheduling program in 2023, allowing officers to choose 10- or 12-hour shifts to improve morale and ease staffing pressure.
Culture closes the deal just as often as pay does. One Midwestern department found that lateral recruitment success was driven almost entirely by reputation among current officers in other agencies; candidates were choosing them specifically because word had spread about how the department treated its people. This is exactly why lateral recruitment depends so heavily on culture, not just salary numbers on a flyer.
Budget matters too, but it does not have to be massive. Fairfax County, Virginia, dedicates a portion of its recruiting budget to converting a part-time cadet program into a full-time apprenticeship pipeline, a relatively low-cost move that builds a steady, ongoing source of future officers.
Unit Level: Strategies, Metrics, and Constant Improvement
This is where day-to-day recruiting operations live, and where most agencies either gain or lose ground against competing departments.
Removing application barriers is one of the highest-leverage moves available. Long, confusing, or costly applications quietly filter out qualified candidates before a recruiter ever talks to them. Some agencies now waive testing fees for applicants and station staff at hiring events specifically to walk candidates through paperwork.
Speed matters even more in today’s market. The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. cut its hiring timeline from 18 months to under four months by combining medical and background reviews and outsourcing polygraph and psychological evaluations. Departments still relying on paper files and manual tracking are at a real disadvantage here, which is exactly why more agencies are adopting applicant tracking systems for police forces to keep candidates moving rather than stalling in a filing cabinet.
Metrics turn recruiting from guesswork into management. Three numbers consistently came up as essential: first-year attrition (are you losing the people you just spent months hiring?), quality of hire (are new officers actually performing well?), and cost per hire (what are you really spending to fill one seat?). The Topeka, Kansas, Police Department tracks cost per hire across every recruiting initiative, allowing leadership to shift resources toward what is actually producing results rather than what feels productive.
Finally, learning organizations win in the long term. Charleston, South Carolina’s recruitment and retention unit constantly reviews its hiring data to refine messaging and address friction points in the application process, treating the recruiting program itself as something to be improved rather than set and forget.
Individual Level: The Recruiter Still Decides Everything
Software, budget, and strategy only go so far without the right person delivering the message. Strong communication skills, emotional intelligence, and a genuine belief in the agency consistently separated effective recruiters from the rest in practitioner interviews.
Larimer County Sergeant Seth Graham tripled his hires by using a law enforcement-specific applicant tracking system called Safeguard Connect.
Chula Vista, California’s police department selected a recruiter with a sales and marketing background specifically because he could build real relationships with candidates over time, not just hand out brochures at a table. The Vienna, Virginia, Police Department recognized a similar approach when its recruiter hired 10 officers, about a quarter of the department’s sworn force, within two years.
Training recruiters matters just as much as training new officers, yet it is often skipped entirely. Mentorship from experienced recruiters, roleplaying tough candidate questions, and basic social media training all came up repeatedly as gaps agencies need to close.
The Five Components Practitioners Rank as Most Critical
When asked to name the most important pieces of an effective program, practitioners consistently pointed to the same five things, in roughly this order of importance:
* Having the right team and recruiters in place
* Genuine executive support and clear direction from leadership
* A dedicated budget and resources
* A competitive salary relative to the local market
* Smart police department marketing that sells the agency’s actual brand, not generic slogans
That last point deserves attention. Departments that fail to actively market themselves, regardless of how strong their internal program is, consistently struggle to fill seats. Candidates cannot choose an agency they have never heard a compelling story about.
What This Means for Recruiting Millennials and Gen Z Officers
Recruiting millennials in law enforcement (and now Gen Z officers right behind them) requires a real shift in how agencies present themselves. These generations are less drawn to traditional, rigid, paramilitary-style messaging and more interested in flexible scheduling, mental health support, tuition reimbursement, and a department culture that treats people well.
Departments offering education incentives, such as pay bumps for officers who complete a bachelor’s or master’s degree while serving, report that this single benefit is often the deciding factor for younger candidates choosing between agencies. It signals investment in a person’s future, not just a paycheck.
Putting These Law Enforcement Recruiting Strategies into Action
You do not need to overhaul everything at once. Pick one organizational gap, one unit-level metric you are not currently tracking, and one recruiter training gap, and start there. Map your current program against these three levels, identify where you are thin, and build out from there.
Safeguard CEO Doug Larsen often says that recruiting success is about having the right system in place, not necessarily about effort, and this study supports that.
Agencies that treat recruiting as a connected system rather than a stack of disconnected tactics are the ones pulling ahead in a brutally competitive hiring market. The departments still relying on a single job fair booth and hoping applications show up are the ones falling further behind every quarter.
Sources
Bureau of Justice Assistance and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. 2023. *Recruitment and Retention for the Modern Law Enforcement Agency.* Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-J26-PURL-gpo222118/pdf/GOVPUB-J26-PURL-gpo222118.pdf
Kramer, Shelly. 2021. “Millennials in the Workforce: What Really Matters to Them.” Dell Technologies Blog.
Police Executive Research Forum. 2023. *Responding to the Staffing Crisis: Innovations in Recruitment Retention.* Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum. https://www.policeforum.org/assets/RecruitmentRetention.pdf
Police Executive Research Forum. 2019. *The Workforce Crisis, and What Police Agencies Are Doing About It.* Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum. https://www.policeforum.org/assets/WorkforceCrisis.pdf
TeamStage. 2024. “Millennials in the Workplace Statistics: Generational Disparities in 2024.” https://teamstage.io/millennials-in-the-workplace-statistics/
Wilson, Jeremy M., and Rosa Rivera. 2026. *Building Effective Police Recruitment Programs: Organizational, Unit, and Individual Considerations.* East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Police Staffing Observatory.
Wilson, Jeremy M., Clifford Grammich, and Terry Cherry. 2024. “Becoming a Learning Organization for Recruitment.” *Police Chief Magazine.* https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/learning-organization-recruitment/
