The Metrics That Matter For First Responder Recruiting

We break down the two metrics that turn recruiting spend into real hires and show how to track every step from first click to final badge. Travis Yates and Doug Larsen explain why live dashboards, source tagging, and lean funnels beat billboards and overtime every time.

• defining interest-to-applicant and how to measure it
• building trackable funnels with landing pages or Safeguard Connect
• why generic websites hide results
• applicant-to-hire benchmarks and where drop-offs occur
• cost-per-hire modeling at $1,500–$2,000
• replacing overtime waste with predictable sourcing
• pricing options that fit small and large departments
• practical steps to geolocate and prioritize high-yield channels

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

Setting The Stakes: Metrics Matter

Travis Yates 0:00

Welcome back to the First Responder Recruiting Podcast. It's where we have Doug Larson on the show. He's COO of Safeguard Recruiting. They are making a huge difference in first responder agencies across the country with clients from fire to corrections to law enforcement. They're staffing up agencies nationwide. It's pretty exciting to see. But here's where we give you tips and information to help you staff up today. And today's topic is one of the most important topics. It's one of the topics we first talk to clients about. It's about the metrics that matter. When we talk about data and metrics, you have to know that to have a successful campaign. It's pretty amazing to see an agency and will say, Hey, what are you doing? They're saying, Oh, we're running a billboard or running commercials or running this or running that. And we will say, Well, how's it doing? And they don't really ever know. Maybe their applicants are a little up or maybe they're a little down, but they really can't tie it to their effort. And that's what you have to be able to do. That's something that Safeguard has built on, Doug, because you guys uh you started and you started just leveraging all this data from all these campaigns, and it's been pretty amazing. Let's talk about how you leverage this data to make these future campaigns get

Why Departments Struggle With Tracking

Travis Yates 1:12

better.

Doug Larsen 1:12

If you don't have data, you you can't make proper decisions. You you need the information off your campaigns. And we've seen this a number of times around the country where city councils have given departments money to spend on hiring, and then they they go back in, they can't tell them how successful they were off that money that was spent. And that it's just not going to be successful if you can't make proper decisions on where your money is being spent, how it's being cement, and what kind of interest that's getting in your department. So we believe in having all sorts of data coming to you. One thing is you get a live dashboard with us so you can track everything right up front, what platforms are working for you, what the spend rate is, and what kind of candidates are coming through off that. And you need all that information to be able to make decisions so you know where to geolocate

Live Dashboards And Source Attribution

Doug Larsen 2:00

your campaigns and how hard to push and where to push them. And that's just step one that's on sourcing candidates. Once we get those candidates in, we need to know how many candidates we got to have to fill these jobs.

Travis Yates 2:14

Yeah, and let me stop you right here because I've been in the meetings with you, Doug, when you first meet a potential client and you ask them an array of questions. And most folks don't know the answers. And I just want to encourage people listening, whether you're working with us or not, go find these answers because you need to know them, whether you're working with us or not. And the first question you ask them, typically, Doug, obviously you ask them, What are your efforts now, right? What efforts are you doing? And then you'll you'll lean them into well, how are these efforts working? And usually they just don't know. But here's how you need to know. And one of the important data metrics, what I'm gonna throw it to you, is this how much interest do you need to get one applicant? And what does this mean? How many people do you have to talk to to get them to take the first step? That may be job fairs, people you have conversations with. It may be a digital campaign on impressions or people that express interest, right? Uh, it can mean a lot of things. So, whatever effort you're doing, you have to be able to tie that in. If you're running a billboard ad, unless you run that ad to a page that tracks the person, you know, that's

Interest-To-Applicant: Defining The First Metric

Travis Yates 3:20

you're not gonna know the metrics. And what we see oftentimes is they'll run an ad or a billboard ad. This is this is marketing's rule typically, and they'll just run the traffic to your website. Well, you don't know if that traffic to your website is coming from just somebody generally finding your website or finding the ad. So the first thing you need to do is when someone goes to whatever you're advertised to, it could be a QR code, it could be a website, you need to be able to track, did it come from that source? And obviously, we know how to do that, we do that for our clients. And so you need to ask, how much interest do you need to get an applicant? And most people don't know, but you need to know that that's how you do it, is it not, Doug?

Doug Larsen 3:57

Yeah, that's exactly how you do it. You need to know where that's coming from, and it is hard off of something like a billboard, or if you're you're just pushing stuff straight into a website, so but you need to have that information. We like to hear that information from departments, and then we'll give steps on how to improve that conversion rate.

Travis Yates 4:17

Well, I'll just give a split for a billboard. We don't recommend billboards. I know there's been a couple of articles of our departments bragging about their billboard. First off, it's not working, they're bragging because city council paid a bunch of money for the billboard and they're trying to make sure that money doesn't go away, so they're going to the media and bragging about it. It's just not happening, right? It just doesn't

Landing Pages, QR Codes, And Connect

Travis Yates 4:35

work. Uh, and it may work a little bit, but there's so much other things you can do. But let's just say billboard. If you're going to do a billboard or you're going to do a bus ad or you're going to do anything, that's why you have to build a separate landing page for that campaign. You don't just send them to your general website. First off, your general website probably isn't geared towards recruiting, it needs to be a central landing page that points them all to give us your information now, right? We call that a lead magnet. You people, everybody listening to this, have seen lead magnets. You've shopped for products or you've been on Facebook and you've clicked an ad and it's gone to a lead magnet, right? Or a lead funnel. And so that's so build a lead magnet so you know when people are coming through that lead magnet where they're starting from. That's how you do that. Uh, even easier is if they're using Safeguard Connect. I know we mentioned that on most shows, Doug, because quite frankly, it's the best thing after for law enforcement. Whether you hire us or not, if you have Safeguard Connect, you're gonna know a lot. You can lead them directly into Safeguard Connect, and Safeguard Connect will tag the source of where it's coming from. So you can go in there in one dashboard, you can go, this many came from our billboard, this many came from our Facebook ads, this many came from our

Applicant-To-Hire Rates And Drop-Offs

Travis Yates 5:40

Instagram ads, this many came from wherever, right? And so you don't even need a lead page if you're using Connect. You can lead them right into Connect and get their and get them immediately. So you need to know the first metric is how much interest to an applicant. The second metric is how many applicants do I need to make one hire? We see uh averages anywhere from about 3% to 10%. The more a department does what we say, they get up to a 10% uh conversion rate. Now that's pretty impressive when you consider it's not just applicant to hire, Doug, it's applicant to test, to physical fitness test, to background check, to interview, and there may be a couple of weird things in between. So every every step of the way, you're losing people. You need to know where you're losing them. So, two most important metrics we can talk to you about is you need to gauge how much interest it takes for an applicant and how many applicants it takes for a hire, because that's that's when you know what kind of resources it's going to take to fully staff up. What's your thoughts on that, Doug?

Doug Larsen 6:42

Yeah, and so that's so important for departments to know and up front, and we rarely can get an answer to that from a department on how many applicants it is through the process, but in order to make good decisions, we need to have all this information, and then we can tune the program to make it even

True Cost Per Hire And Budget Math

Doug Larsen 7:02

better. And so this is data is king in this scenario. You need to know.

Travis Yates 7:10

We can back it up too, and that's how we can tell. I mean, people kind of think we're kind of being cocky about it because we'll we'll have a client go, hey, we're down 50 people, and we'll do the quick math with this data, and we'll go, it's going to take this amount of money to staff up. I think right now we're averaging about $1,500 to $2,000 per hire. And that means that's the money it takes to source the candidates, to source the applicants, and to get them to the hiring process. And so a department of calls and say, Hey, you know, this is a general, this is general terms because every department's a little bit different, but we know based on average over 400 campaigns what it is. They'll say, hey, we're down 50 people, we're barely keeping up with attrition, we're never catching up, and we'll just go, hey, for $100,000, you'll be staffed up. And they kind of look at us like we're crazy because quite frankly, they're spending that every month in overtime, typically, right? Just to fill the beats. But we were not crazy. We know from all of this data, that's what it takes. And as long as they stay in our recruiting system and do what we say, it's actually going to work. Now, the minute they say, Oh, we can't do this, we can't do that, it the price creeps up. But we know ideally, man, you give us $2,000, you're getting higher because we know exactly what it costs to source the interest, to source the applicants, and then them getting through your process. But if they don't know the data, it's hard to know that. Now, we usually know that once you run a campaign. That's why we're confidently saying $1,500, $2,000. We run enough campaigns where we know exactly what this costs. But that kind of departments don't believe that because they don't believe it because they've never seen the data before. But you need to know that, right? Everything you buy in law enforcement is a price, right? What's Microsoft Office cost? What's Power DMS cost? What's this cost? What's a simulator cost? But nobody seems to be able to tell departments what recruiting costs, but you've been able to do that because of the data, have you not?

Doug Larsen 8:51

Yeah, you're exactly right. We can dial that in pretty close, and and we do for departments. And it's it's amazing how this thing works. It's they're spending a lot on hiring bonuses, spending a lot on overtime, even these crazy like bus ads and things we were talking about earlier, where that money can be better spent to actually source candidates, viable, good candidates for them, and turn them not

Cut Waste, Use Connect, Get Staffed

Doug Larsen 9:15

from a in only into a candidate, but into an applicant and then a hire. And it doesn't cost that much. It I think departments would be surprised when they call us.

Travis Yates 9:24

And really, Safeguard Connect, if that's all you want to use at Safeguard Connect, you don't want to run a digital campaign or you don't want sourcing from Safeguard Recruiting. I mean, to have Connect, you would have the data, you would hire more people based on that alone. We're seeing roughly two at two to three X more applicants based on Safeguard Connect only, meaning recruiters do what they do, but they're using Connect and their applications are going up two and three X. And that's because it shows you this data and shows you where to focus your efforts. And Doug, you've priced that for every agency in America. I mean, depending on your needs, uh, you go, you can, you can you come in, you can you have a couple different pricing models for that. But if people are interested in Connect, how do they reach out to you? How do they find out about that?

Doug Larsen 10:04

Yeah, just go right to our website, safeguardrecruiting.com. We got all the information on there. And you're exactly right. We got a price plan for departments of all sizes. We never wanted to leave the little guys behind because they need as much help as the bigger departments. And being down one officer at the smaller departments hurts even more than the big ones. So we've got a plan for everybody, and we can help everybody.

Travis Yates 10:26

Good stuff, Doug Larson, COO of Safeguard. If you've been watching or you've been listening, thanks for doing that. You can staff up tomorrow by doing a few simple things today. Thanks for watching.