Recruiting Proposals That Work

We break down why many police RFPs fail to deliver hires and how to fix them with outcome-based language, clear metrics, and real guarantees. We also connect retention to recruiting math and show how end-to-end workflows speed hiring and reduce waste.

• rising demand and persistent attrition in law enforcement recruiting
• retention as leverage to reduce front-end cost
• integrated tools for tracking, testing and backgrounds
• why marketing-heavy RFPs miss hiring goals
• RFI first to source ideas and case studies
• outcome-based RFPs focused on hires, not ads
• Philadelphia case study and lessons learned
• guarantees, forecastable pipelines and vendor accountability

Safeguard Recruiting is owned and operated by first responders, and it is a public safety recruiting firm with a proven recruiting system that staffs agencies across the country. 

Reach out today for a free consultation and learn about our guarantee that will increase the number of candidates for your agency. 

Transcript

Busy Landscape In Police Recruiting

Travis Yates 0:00

Welcome back to the podcast, the only podcast dedicated solely to law enforcement recruiting. As usual, I have my co-host here, Doug Larson, the COO of Safeguard Recruiting. And Doug, it has been busy. I'm glad to have you back. What's been going on in the world of police recruiting lately?

Doug Larsen 0:19

Yeah, it sure has been busy. A lot of departments doing their best to get as many people hired as they can. It's you know always going to be an issue with the attrition for one with these larger departments and just them sourcing enough people and enough quality applicants and get them through the process and hired. So it is busy and it's sure picking up lately.

Retention As A Front-End Fix

Travis Yates 0:43

Well, that's I'm glad you mentioned that because we don't talk a lot about retention a lot. And obviously, there's an aspect of hey, you need to talk to enough people to get enough people hired, but then if you can slow the back end out, which is retention, you know, you can actually help the front end. And so I think a lot of people are ignoring that aspect. And part of that is because you know, it's hard to correct, right? It's hard to correct if if people are leaving your department quicker than you want them to, that's probably a uh cultural issue or a bigger problem to correct. But you guys have uh just recently partnered with a company that's really helping with that. Are you ready to talk about that at all?

Doug Larsen 1:19

Um, yeah, we we are we've been in the beginning stages talking to a group that it does really well with retention, and we're gonna bring on a bunch of their practices and we're gonna work together on this to be able to help departments slow that flow and and just help not only officers when they're new in the game, what they should do and what they should expect, what their families should expect, but how do people get help when they need it as they go through their career?

Travis Yates 1:46

That's one thing I love, Doug, is what Safeguard does is you guys attack things as an all-encompassing solution, right? I mean, if you've been listening to this show over the past year or two, you know that you know, if you go to the early episodes, there were so many things we that we weren't doing. And as we move along, I mean, now you're not only looking at retention, you've already brought up brought on Safeguard Connect, which was sort of the organizational applicant tracking problem you were encountering with some agencies that needed it. And

Safeguard’s End-To-End Solution

Travis Yates 2:13

now, you know, you can now take people all the way through. You're doing psychological testing and background testing and and and everything, and so you're not really openly advertising that because you know you're a recruiting company. But if an agency calls you and says, Hey, we need a test, and we need background checks, we need psychological testing, you're now providing all that as well.

Doug Larsen 2:32

Yeah, we are, and we can be a one-top stop shop for people. We we can handle all of that now. And you're exactly right. Safeguard just keeps growing in the features they have, and it's out of needs for what departments need and what they ask for. And so we are we're adding all these features in here. So it's a you can come to one place, you can get your officers sourced, and you can get them tested, you can get everything done, and the backgrounds it's pretty slick how it all works, and it can feed together and be tracked through Connect really easily.

Travis Yates 3:03

Yeah, it is pretty amazing. I've seen some of the work there, it's

Why Most RFPs Fail Recruiting

Travis Yates 3:06

pretty amazing. And when you talk about needs, that sort of brings us to our topic of the day, which is immediately going to get everybody to fall asleep. That is request for proposals. We awfully commonly refer to those as RSPs, right? And so, just to make sure if the audience isn't aware, if an agency is spending a lot of money and it's different barriers, different agencies, it may be 25,000 or it may be a hundred thousand. If you're gonna spend more than that from a government, you've got to go to bid, right? You've got to get bidders, and so when you do that, you have to write a request for proposal, meaning this is what people are bidding on. And so if and we hear this routinely, Doug, is is we say, hey, we need to hire more people, and then they put out a request for proposal that literally won't help them hire more people. Are you yeah, it's talk about that a little bit?

Doug Larsen 3:53

Yeah, um, sometimes these uh requests for proposals are lacking in the the recruiting aspect of it, and they're more asking for marketing elements that aren't going to solve their problem. And so we've seen a number of those come out, and even when we go to these meetings on these requests for proposals, um, it's the bulk of them are marketing companies that are trying to get involved, and just based off the questions they ask, they clearly have no idea what goes on in law enforcement or how it functions. And you know, it's it creates some issues because we understand you and I have been on both sides of this. We've been on the government side and we're on the other side. So we understand how purchasing processes work, but if you don't word those right and ask for the right thing, you you might not get what you you think you're gonna get.

Travis Yates 4:42

I think so much of it's education. So, because I'll give you an example. I used to work on RFPs for uh cars, right? Well, it's easy. We want a Ford Crown Vic, and I'm sort of date myself. We want a Ford Explorer with a V8 engine. I knew what to ask for, it was a thing, right? Or we need so many uh licenses of Microsoft Office. You know what you're asking, but this is a philosophy. They're asking for more people, but you've got to know the philosophy that gets you more people because if you don't know that, you're gonna be asking for something that doesn't do that whatsoever. Uh, am I right

Philosophy Over Flashy Marketing

Travis Yates 5:20

there?

Doug Larsen 5:21

Well, you're exactly right. It's it's one thing to have enough people interested in working for you and how you go about that. And that doesn't mean we want more people just looking at our website, we want people that are actually interested in working for us and taking the next steps. And that's an entire process that needs to happen to engage that person from initial interest to all the way to application and to hire, and that is not the process you're gonna get just from a straight marketing company.

Travis Yates 5:52

Well, and Philadelphia is a prime example, and I know people seem to pick on it, but we've got such a great relationship with Captain Walker over there, and he's been on the show before, so he doesn't mind us talking about it. But they did an RFP and spent three million dollars before they called you, Doug. They spent three million dollars, and I believe Captain Walker's quote was it got worse, our recruiting got worse. And so he sat he saw some of this content on this show and went, oh my gosh, I think we just paid three million dollars to marketing. That's why it got worse. And so once he came on board with Safeguard, boom, they've they've surpassed every every uh everything they wanted. They've surpassed every academy, it's been higher than they expected,

Philadelphia’s Costly Lesson

Travis Yates 6:30

they've surpassed all their goals, and they're not spending three million dollars with you, I imagine, Doug.

Doug Larsen 6:35

No, no, they're not. Yeah, I wish they were, but they they're not, and they don't need to because you don't need to spend that much to get the kind of volume they need to be successful. And and Captain Walker, I mean, he's brilliant, he does a lot of research, he's very tuned in, and he knows, he understands because he's done so much research, he's tried things that what works and what doesn't work, and yeah, he's a great leader for the recruiting department.

Travis Yates 6:59

And and listen, we're not bad mouthing police departments because we don't expect them to know. But here's a lot of way all these RFPs work because I've I've been involved in it, so have you, Doug, is you call the purchasing department and you go, Hey, we need a RFP for more officers. Well, they go out and these, and here's the dirty little secret is before Chat GPT, I'm sure it's worse now, is they go out and there's these services that will give you a cookie cutter RFP is you type in marketing, advertising, recruiting, and it's the cookie cutter RFP, and you just copy, paste, send out. Because we have seen a lot of RFPs that all read the same because we know that's happening, and so they're not thinking about, well, I'm gonna get exactly what I asked for here. So let me, I'll just give you my opinion of it, Doug, real quick. Is your RFP should be very simple? In fact, I wouldn't even recommend an RFP. What's the document for the RFP where they just sort of source information? Doug, what's the name of that?

Doug Larsen 7:47

The RFI, the just request for information.

Travis Yates 7:50

Request for information. So you just want to get everyone's ideas and in there, just say, We need to hire more people. Tell me what you can do to do that and give us your success stories and case studies because

Write RFIs And Outcome-Based RFPs

Travis Yates 8:03

the last thing you want to do is hire some local marketing firm that has never done this before and expect them to actually recruit for you, and probably through the RFI process, you'll find some ideas. But when it comes to the RFP, it really is simple. I need to hire X number of people. What is this going to cost and how are you going to do it and prove it to me? That's really all you got to say. But that's not what we're seeing, Doug. We're seeing we need to market on YouTube and we need a banner and we need a billboard ad. And we so so, but that's really the wrong approach. If listen, no offense, if you knew how to recruit RFP writer, you wouldn't need to write RFP on recruiting. So, what you need to do is is put the onus on the companies, being safeguard one of them, and say, We need help, we need to hire this many people. How do you do it and prove it?

Doug Larsen 8:57

You're exactly right, and get those best practices in there, what you think is gonna work for you, and and then write up your RFP um properly. So you because some of these places are not going to get the results that they need, and so now they've got less budget once this is over with and a bad taste in their mouth. And on the flip side of that, too, if I mean, we we have cooperative agreements too, so you can get around the RFP, and we've we've already been vetted on those. But if you have to go the RFP route, you're definitely right, you definitely want to get as much information as you can and write them properly, or you're going to end up with not the kind of um names and applicants that you're

Guarantees, Packages, And CTA

Doug Larsen 9:40

looking for.

Travis Yates 9:40

Yeah, and the problem that we see with that is it's almost like Philadelphia. Uh, they spent their money. I mean, they they spent their money, and so by the time they got calling you, they had just a little bit of money that they tried to scrap up. But imagine if they said instead of spending three million with a marketing company, I mean, I don't know, let's just break it down and say, let's give two million to a marketing company and one million to a recruiting company. Man, for a million dollars, they're they're staff full, right? Because it's all a numbers game. Because you guys, Doug, when they you tell them how many people they're gonna get based on a spend, you can tell them exactly. So if anybody's talking to a company's out there, you got to ask them that question. If I give you this much money, how many people will I be able to hire? If they can't answer that, you are speaking to a marketing company, are you not?

Doug Larsen 10:25

Yeah, at that point, be very leery or run because you don't know what you're gonna get in the end game. And people clicking on your website doesn't mean applications or people interested in working for you, and so you need to be very careful with that. You we tell people up front, go to our website, we have different packages on there, you're gonna know exactly what you're gonna get on on what you sign up for, and we guarantee that you're gonna get this many people coming through the door every single month, and then you can prepare for that volume and you can deal with that volume.

Travis Yates 10:55

So, right on your website, front page, safeguardrecruiting.com, you have three different tiers, and at the top of the tier, it says how many people you're gonna get. You guys guarantee it.

Doug Larsen 11:04

Yep, guarantee it that that will happen when you sign up for us.

Travis Yates 11:07

We're gonna deliver guaranteed our money back, which is kind of insane. Now, listen, we're not just talking the talk here. In the show notes of this podcast, we have a download for you on best practices on RFP. So everything we've talked about and more is in that document. Just go down to the the body of this video and click on the link. It's just gonna bring up a PDF for you. You can dump it, download it, do whatever you want. Uh, because you've got to ask for the right things to actually get something that's gonna solve your problem. Doug, any closing thoughts here?

Doug Larsen 11:37

Yeah, I I I would encourage everybody to read that and ask questions because you don't want to put an RFP for a lot of money and then it doesn't deliver for you. Um, so you're exactly right. I I I like to educate as much as we can.

Travis Yates 11:53

I don't know how you made RFP show sexy, Doug, but it was pretty sexy to talk about. So congratulations. All right. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.