How Urgency, Data, And Automation Double Law Enforcement Applications

Hiring for law enforcement shouldn’t feel like a gamble. We open the curtain on a recruiting system that replaces vague “awareness” with measurable outcomes, shares the exact data points you need to forecast hires, and explains why urgency—done right—turns passive interest into sworn officers. Along the way, we share a real story of a major Southern agency that used our guidance to grow academy sizes without even signing on, because getting agencies staffed is the mission.

First, we draw a clear line between marketing and recruiting. Brand awareness has its place, but if your plan ends at impressions and website views, you’ll watch vacancies grow. We walk through the math that allows chiefs and recruiters to predict staffing: how many people you must contact to get one application, and how many applications convert to a hire. With those two numbers, budgets become roadmaps instead of wish lists, and timelines shift from hope to certainty.

Then we dig into urgency as a practical lever. Think time-sensitive language tied to real test dates, credible scarcity around academy seats, clear benefits that make the opportunity concrete, and visual cues that break through crowded inboxes. Our law-enforcement-specific software automates texts, emails, and voicemails so follow-up never stalls, while recruiters focus on human conversations. We also explain why serving passive candidates is essential to close the final 20 to 25 percent staffing gap, and how respectful urgency guides them from “maybe” to “I applied.”

We close with accountability: ROI you can see, guarantees you can trust, and campaigns that are constantly tested and refined by professional copywriters. If you’re tired of spending on noise and ready for numbers that end in hires, this conversation lays out a path you can act on today.

If you found value here, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a quick review. Want a no-pressure look at your pipeline? Visit safeguardrecruiting.com and reach out for a free consultation.

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

Quick Updates And New Website

Travis Yates 0:00

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us this week. There's a lot going on with Safeguard Recruiting. Of course, that's a good thing. If you're just now joining us, we've been doing this show for, I don't know, well over a year. We try to give you a weekly episode, and it could be anything from a few minutes to upwards of an hour. It just kind of depends on what we're bringing to you. Sometimes we have guests. I'm typically joined with the COO of Safeguard Recruiting Doug Larson. But we've been busy, and so it's been me solo here for a few weeks. But I had a topic this week that I want to get to that is very important and often misunderstood. But before I get to that, just a couple of updates. Our website has been updated. If you haven't been to the website, safeguardrecruiting.com, check it out. We're pretty proud of it. We wanted to just simplify things and get our audience straight to the point of what we're about and what we're able to do. We think we've accomplished that. But more importantly for you here with the podcast is at the bottom of that homepage is our most recent podcast. And we built out an entire page with all of the podcasts in video format. And so that's that's really easy to look at. It's updated once again as the episodes become more and more current. And uh, so so that's easy access for you. And that really, from an administrative standpoint, that's that was kind of a big project and a big lift. But we've got a lot of other things going on behind the scenes. I look forward to bringing to you in the coming weeks.

Mission And Free Help For Agencies

Travis Yates 1:32

We talk to potential clients a lot, and we're not just saying that. We don't just say that we give free consultations just to try to sell you something. As you know, uh, the owners of this company are all former law enforcement, over 100 years of experience. I mean, yes, it's a business. Yes, we're spending our time doing this, but at the end of the day, our goal is just to help agency staff up full. There's some agencies that the time's not right to have us come alongside of them and we'll just help them out for nothing. And I just want to tell you a quick story about that. Uh, we were speaking to a very large agency in the South. If I said the name, you would immediately recognize the agency. I'm not going to say that to respect their privacy. Uh, but we've been talking to them for about six months, and you know, and we had a couple of calls with them, detailed calls about their processes. They were very they were struggling a lot. We were having some detailed calls about their processes, what they can do to improve, and and so on and so on. And uh early on in the conversation, there was a budget issue. They were waiting for the new budget. Uh, we knew the budget was coming due here uh towards the end of this year. And uh, without us even asking, the the uh commander that was talking to us reached out just this week and said, Hey Travis, man, I'm sorry we've decided right now not to bring you on. Man, we love what you do, but the truth is the things you've told us has actually helped us out. We've really increased our academy sizes. So thank you for that. And you know, at first you'd think, oh darn, that's a customer, that's a paying customer. But I'll tell you where we stand with this. We're glad that they got more people in the academy. That's really our goal. In fact, when we bring clients on, our goal is to not be there forever. Like we want to not only staff you up full today, but give you the tools to where you can do this on your own. Now, some agencies aren't interested in that because it is a technical skill set,

A Southern Agency Success Story

Travis Yates 3:24

right? And the way the recruiters work oftentimes in law enforcement, it's like a lot of special units, is men or women will come in and do that job for a couple of years and they get transferred out, and new people are coming in. And so there's sort of an experience gap there. And so uh a lot of agencies aren't interested in sort of making their officer a recruiting expert because of that. Uh, by the way, we've got a certification course that we provide for people for that very reason. So if you want to dive really deep into this issue, you can reach out. We can give you the link to that course, it's completely done online. We also do that on location, so we're not just about grabbing business for recruiting, which would be you know, websites and video work and obviously targeted digital uh advertising and the software that goes with that. We really our heart is just to help out agencies. So if an agency runs across this podcast and it helps you, great. Agency uh, you know, talks to us on the phone, they can't really do business with us, but it helps them, great. Uh, there's a lot of police departments out there, and and our main goal is to help people. That's where, as I said in the previous episode, I think that's where we sort of set ourselves apart. Uh, there is less than five players in this game. What do I mean by that? Uh you got there's a marketing company on every corner. That's not what I'm talking about. Because, as we've said in the past, marketing is not recruiting, marketing is brand awareness. It's mainly built for the private industry when you're selling a product. Recruiting is getting people into your organization or agency, and that's a completely different aspect of it. Does marketing can marketing assist with that? Yes, but if you do marketing alone, good luck with that. I can't tell you how many clients we now have that spent a ton of money on only marketing and it actually got worse for them. And so we've talked about this on their show in the past. So, yeah, we we will include marketing aspects. I mean, photographs are marketing aspect, videos and marketing aspect, your website is a marketing aspect. But if you don't have the targeted direction towards getting applications and hires, you're not doing any recruiting whatsoever. And a lot of departments, you know, when they started struggling, uh, they ran to the marketing world, and the marketing world is more than happy to take your money, I can guarantee it. Uh, and but when I talk about just being five players, I would say less than five uh actually are focusing on recruiting for law enforcement.

Marketing Is Not Recruiting

Travis Yates 5:48

We're the only ones that actually have law enforcement experience, and I'm telling you, you may not think there's a difference there, but there is because when we talk to these recruiters, we talk to these chiefs or sheriffs, man, we get it immediately and they get it immediately. We speak that language. And I would put up our ROI or our return on investment against anybody. I don't think anybody is able to touch what we've been able to do. But once again, we welcome the competition, we really do, and uh because we're very confident what we're able to do. In fact, we're the only recruiting company to first responders that will guarantee you success. Our website lines that out. Uh, we guarantee you a certain number of candidates, we guarantee it. Okay, so and in fact, it's guaranteed or your money back. No one else in their right mind would ever do that. But we know we can do it because we're on the up and up. We're not playing any games here. We know exactly what we're doing, we know what your spin will produce, and that's what you need to know. Okay, if you want to go buy a Ford police car, you know that your money is going to buy a Ford police car. For some reason, in the marketing recruiting type world, they're the only ones that really can't tell an agency what they're gonna get. Yeah, a marketing company may go, you'll get so many impressions, right? But there's never gonna tell you how many website hits you're gonna get. Or a recruiting company may say, You'll get so much impressions on social media, or you may get so many website views, but they're never gonna tell you how many people you're gonna get. We will tell you exactly what to expect. And so when an agency calls us up and says, Hey, we're down a hundred officers, we do the math real quick and we tell them here's what it will cost for you to staff up full. And I think half the time they don't believe us because they've been struggling and they don't understand that. But we've done so many of these campaigns, hundreds of them. We know exactly what it would take to get 100 hires. Now, I'll give you a little background because we talked about this before, but in case you just joined us, you how you come up with that number, and data is key, data is important, is you have to know how many people you have to talk to to get one application. Then you have to know how many applications it takes to get one hire. A lot of agencies don't know that number, which tells you they've been talking to these marketing companies, right? Because they want to just keep keep taking your marketing dollars. But once you know that figure, we can tell you to

ROI, Guarantees, And Predictable Results

Travis Yates 8:12

a dollar what it will cost to staff up. And uh, and so that's a pretty powerful number, pretty powerful metric. And we know what the average is. So if an agency says, Hey, I don't know, we sort of already know because we've done so many of these campaigns, so just keep that in mind. But listen, extremely, extremely happy to help agencies. Uh, yeah, we we love to have your account, we love to have your business, we'd love to build a partnership with you. In fact, when people join us, they don't leave. We've been with our clients multiple, multiple years. Because granted, some of them may have some questions how is this really happening? Are you really telling us the truth here? Because they're we're sort of used to not being told the truth, right? But they find out pretty quick that we're very legitimate. And our new website, I'm very proud of it because it lines out a bunch of testimonials. We have case studies on there. I mean, check that out if you get a chance, safeguard recruiting.com. Now, today's topic is an interesting one uh because we actually have had clients that don't like this, and we've had clients that have made us move away from this. But I wanted to talk about it here with you briefly. The issue is urgency. Okay, urgency uh in the recruiting world, and I would say really the marketing world as well. You've seen this, is there's a psychological trigger for people to make decisions if you build urgency into the messaging. You probably see us all the time if you're signed up for any emails from businesses, right? Or you're always getting, you know, limited edition or last chance to get this item, and it's all done for a reason. And today I want to give you four specific items about urgency and what we try to build into our campaigns. As you know, uh, we have a software package that we built just for law enforcement. That the software alone, we're seeing it doubling the applications. That's that's just the software alone. Uh, that price ranges from 6,000 to 12,000 a year. Straight up, that's what it costs you. And it's amazing. I'm not just

Data Needed To Forecast Hires

Travis Yates 10:10

saying that. Trust me, it's amazing. If you want to check that out, get on our website and reach out to us uh because that alone will help you if you don't do anything else. And it's just it's just unbelievable. Uh, we didn't see a product like that out there for our profession. And there's some people that are using you know generic products or products built for the marketing world or the or the sales world or for CRMs that are just in general, but this is specifically for law enforcement and it's just very, very powerful. But in that software, when our clients want us to, and it's part of the package that they prov that they buy, we build out automatic messaging. So that means the recruiters don't have to worry about messaging all these people all the time, it's just automated. As soon as somebody applies, or as soon as soon as somebody expressed interest, boom, the messaging starts text, email, and voicemails. And then when they move them, say, okay, they've they've applied now, they've taken the test. We've changed, we can change all of that messaging up. But it's been tremendous because what it helps the recruiters do is instead of the recruiters being on the phone all day, you know, talking to people or sending emails all day, man, they get to just reach out to people in a personal way and do and spend their time otherwise because you know, depending on your needs, you could get hundreds and hundreds of people in every month, even thousands of people. We have clients getting thousands of people in every month. The last thing you want to do is turn all of your uh law enforcement recruiters into you know virtual assistants and they're just on the phone all the time. So the system takes care of that for them. But inside these messages, we build these psychological trigger links. So the first thing we do is we use sensitive language, language like this apply now, all right, last chance, limited academy seats, things like that. Okay, that's the first thing that we do. The second thing we do is we create a sense of scarcity. Uh, this makes them maybe want the job more than

Introducing Urgency As A Strategy

Travis Yates 12:05

they originally thought. Uh, a lot of the gap in law enforcement recruiting today is that is we don't understand what a passive candidate is before versus a motivated candidate. There's always going to be motivated candidates that want to be police officers. It's the people that want to be a police officer since they were 12 years old, right? I mean, that's the nothing's going to sway them. And departments are still getting them. You could actually have zero recruiters in your department and just have the application page on your website. You would fill 50 to 80 percent of your department with that alone. I say 50 to 80 because there's some departments that you know we could all think of those names where you go, oh, I don't know about that department. But this 50, I'm telling you, 50 to 80 percent, you're filled. But it's that 20 or 25 percent gap where we can come in with these messaging and with our targeted approach to fill the gap. That's how we're able to do it. And you have to use this type of messaging for those passive candidates. So, a passive candidate is somebody that goes, Yeah, I think I'm interested. They send their information in. But then when it comes time to fill out the application or fill out the background information, they're like, I don't really have time for that. I don't know if I want to do that, right? And so the urgency messaging gets more of those passive candidates, you know, into the activation mode. Now you're gonna say, because we've heard our we've heard agents say that, well, if they're if they don't really want the job, then we don't want them, and you know, and if they're not excited, we don't want them. Well, you could have that attitude, right? And you're probably gonna be down 20, 30 percent in your department, or you could acknowledge that, man, passive candidates exist. Every industry has them, they don't have to be passive forever. They may be passive in the beginning. You can make them excited about the job as they apply, go through the process, and get on the department, right? And so I talk to officers all the time around the country that you know they they sort of went into this job as kind of a job, they weren't sure how they were going to do it very long, and they got in it and loved it, and now they're fully committed. So you have to acknowledge that, and that's especially true with today's generation. You know, anybody under the age of 30, for the most part, they're going into

Software And Automated Messaging

Travis Yates 14:05

most jobs as passive candidates, whether it's law enforcement or any other job. The other thing that we do is we provide a clear and compelling reason to have the job. And so our messagings will talk about the benefits, it will talk about uh the opportunities that you have, things like that. Now, not every message will hit everything. Some messages will hit the scarcity part, some messages will have the time-sensitive language, like they're not getting message one on day one going, hurry up, do it now, right? That tends to be closer to the end or closer to when we need people to show up to test or closer to that academy date. But in the course of these messages, we may send two to four a week between text, email, and voicemail. We're mixing that up, right? Uh, and so uh keep that in mind. So sensitive language, scarcity, and clear and compelling reason. And then the fourth one is we use visual cues to attract attention. It may be a video, it may be a photograph, it could be a little pointy finger, right? Or a little fire thing you see on social media, but we just do that because we know people are in your data with messages, right? They're in your data with text messages, they're inundated with everything, and we're just trying to draw attention to what we were previously, we're trying to draw attention to that urgency, so to speak. So those are the four things. Uh, we use time-sensitive language, we provide clear and compelling reason, we create a sense of scarcity, and we use visual cues to attract attention to that urgency. But all that would be for not if we didn't do this one thing, we test it. Okay, we test it, and so we test these messages, we test the engagement, we mix messages up, we use different language points. Now we've done so many campaigns, we sort of know right off the bat the messages, the messages that work, uh, but you have to constantly test these messages. And and we we have a professional copywriter who studies this all the time, and we've been very, very successful. And it's much more complicated than just

Four Elements Of Urgency

Travis Yates 16:05

an email or a text that our uh clients are sending out on you know through our software. Now, the downside to that is a lot of people don't understand this. I frankly didn't understand it. I mean, I I got the messaging, right? I mean, why do I buy this t-shirt and I've got 100 t-shirts? Well, it was a limited edition t-shirt and I really wanted it, right? Or whatever it is. So I think we're all in this little urgency game, but I don't think we've really thought about uh why it's being done and if it's effective or not. And we've had clients that didn't like this messaging. We had a client, I don't know, several months ago that said, Hey, that one message is that says you need to hurry up or seat your limited. Uh, we don't want we don't want the message to say that. And uh what we do in that case is we try to explain why we're doing it. We try to explain the successes we're seeing. And then if they want the message out, we take the message out. At the end of the day, the client's the client. Uh, but we have had people do that, and messages aren't rude, uh, the messages aren't abrupt or or anything like that. It's just it has verbiage in there to make people, when they get the message, if instead of going, hey, you know what, I'll fill that out next week, it makes them think I better get that filled out pretty quick. And so that's really what it's time to do. And we've seen a lot of success with it. It's one of the things you get with us. We don't just sell you a software package, we don't just bring you candidates. We work and we we provide all of this messaging and we help with the communication day in and day out of uh the candidates and applicants that are coming in. Of course, we've talked about communication a lot here on this show. I think you're probably well aware of that, but uh that's why we do it. And for me, it's sort of interesting. It was interesting to see this happen and I see it in real time how it works. And uh, I just thought I'd bring it to you today. So, man, thanks for being here. Uh, I'm excited about the future of Safeguard. I'm excited about the future of law enforcement. We're hearing more and more about the successes that are out there. Go to our website and check out some of those successes. And if you need any help or just want to talk and you just want to want us to tell you about how you're doing or maybe how you can improve, no sales pitch from us. We'll be glad to do that. Reach out to us on our website. Thank you very much.