Public Safety Recruiting: The Key To Agency Success

This is part two of our five-year podcast special. In this episode, we break down why massive overtime budgets are a warning sign that staffing systems are failing, not a long-term fix. We lay out the numbers behind cost per hire, explain why hiring bonuses often don’t change outcomes, and share the process changes that bring more qualified candidates with less work.
• Connecting overtime spend to fatigue, morale, and retention strain
• Using cost-per-hire math to forecast staffing budgets
• Explaining why hiring bonuses don’t consistently improve recruiting results
• Setting expectations with transparency, performance guarantees, and measurable outcomes
• Tracking conversion rates from candidate to applicant to hire
• Recruiting Gen Z with faster, clearer, phone-first communication
• Pairing recruiting with retention and wellness support through partners
• Auditing the full hiring process to find where candidates drop out
• Moving applications and messaging to mobile-first workflows
• Cutting website touch points to reduce abandonment
• Handling skepticism, change resistance, and the limits of DIY recruiting
• Looking ahead to AI-driven efficiency in public safety hiring

Get more information: safeguardrecruiting.com

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

Overtime Spending And Broken Staffing

Travis Yates 0:00

Doug Larson, we're back in our first episode of sort of this five-year anniversary journey you've been on. You talked a lot about the history of Safeguard and pretty encouraging with going from no clients to clients like Milwaukee and Cleveland and Philadelphia and a ton more. And you really have made inroads into making communities safer. But there's still some concerns out there. You know, I look at the overtime agencies are spending because the truth is they a department may be understaffed, but they're filling the beats with overtime and they're spending a tremendous amount of money, and there's obviously a problem when you have these officers working so much. It's going to cause a lot of fatigue, a lot of morale issues, a lot of retention issues. The Phoenix Police Department last year spent $98 million in overtime. Just blew up an overtime budget to fill the beats. They're down several hundred police officers. When does the overtime budget stop being a solution and really start being evidence that there's something inherently broken within some of these agencies that aren't correcting this? Yeah. Overtime's a tough fix. I mean, some of the officers really like having that those extra funds coming in, but others really don't like it, especially if it's mandatory. And we've heard some horror stories about people not being able to end their shift and go home. And you start really wearing on your department and you you wear on the services you can provide. Um 98 million. You know how many people we could get for 98 million million. Well, let's talk about that. That's uh, you know, uh you're pretty transparent in what things cost, right? And uh and your average is about $1,500 a hire. Meaning, if you're down, let's just say it's $2,000. Let's be conservative. Let's say so. If you're down a hundred people, you're $200,000 away from being fully staffed. And the reason you can say that so confidently is you've done hundreds of these campaigns, you know. So if you're down a hundred though, you're spending millions in overtime. Millions in overtime. And and you're right. Let's take that 2,000 number, and that's very conservative. And we can turn that into officers, and you can turn that into officers rapidly, and then continue a pipeline. So when you have, especially the larger departments always going to have attrition, you need to have a pipeline of candidates always coming in, always ready to go, always going through your process. But yeah, 98 million, that's just uh that's a burden the taxpayers don't need. That's pretty wild. It's you know, you say 2,000 is conservative, I would say you're super conservative because I'm I'm thinking of some pretty large agencies with some pretty big problems that did it for about a thousand. You know, down a couple hundred officers, and they're for about a thousand bucks, they got fully staffed. Now, uh that's the more they do that you suggest in our first episode. We talked about, hey, we're going to suggest all these things, and the more you do, the cheaper it gets, right? So you think between one and two thousand dollars a hire. So if an agency's out there and they're down five people, do the math, right? It's a lot cheaper than most hiring bonuses. If you're down, you know, you can just do the math. But if you're down 50 or 100, do the math on your overtime. How much are you spending every single year to fix this problem when you could just spend one time and have it fixed? You're exactly right. And so that hiring bonus money, you could turn that into a lot of officers. And the just the fact that you have those open slots, there's some budget there. If you use that, you could get enough candidates to get staffed and not have that overtime issue, spending on other things.

Why Hiring Bonuses Fall Flat

Travis Yates 3:38

Well, you're talking about some sacred cows in this episode. Let's talk about hiring bonuses. You've worked with agencies that have them and work with agencies that don't have them. Do you see a big difference in success? No. No. They meaning they're hiring the same whether they're offering a bonus or not. Why do you think that is? Correct. Yeah, it's I I don't think that changes somebody's reasoning to come to you. If they do, it might be a transient person that's maybe a lateral that's just gonna jump around a little bit, but that's not gonna be the main focus of why somebody wants to come and work for you. And we need to attract candidates, we need to push your culture and and what your agency's about and keep people interested. But I I just don't think see that as the right fix. Uh I think you need to fix your your processes and you'll get the candidates without the bonus.

Guarantees, Candidates, And Conversion Math

Travis Yates 4:33

Right there on your website, and what I love about it is you're just so transparent. You have the cost of connecting your software right there on the website, and you're very quickly to tell people exactly what they're gonna get when they spend money, which is unique. You know, marketing companies aren't gonna do that, but you will tell them if you spend this much money, this is how many candidates you can expect. I mean, you're so confident you have a performance guarantee right on the website that says if we don't perform, we don't guarantee this performance, you get your money back. You don't even pay. How are you so confident in saying that? Yeah, it it's because of experience. Uh the amount of campaigns we've ran, we we understand what it takes to source candidates and get them to departments. That's where our confidence comes from. And I want you to know up front when you're working with us what you're going to get, what you can expect. Unlike a marketing company that says, Oh, yeah, we'll get you 70,000 impressions. Oh, good. So now I got a 75-year-old guy looking at my website. Can't hire him, right? Um, because he he's not looking for a job in law enforcement. No, we are gonna dial in and say, hey, for this amount of money, you're gonna get this many candidates. And then from there, we're gonna look at your processes and say, okay, you convert this many to applicants, this many to hires. What can we do to improve those numbers? Because nationwide, that number's low. But when you plug into the safeguard process and we help you, we can get those conversion rates up. So now you have the number of candidates you need and you know up front for your spend what you're gonna get. And we're gonna help you on the back end convert those into actual hires. Well, that's so important you mentioned conversion rates because most agencies probably don't even know that. But it's not really how many hires you're making that's important. It's how many applicants it takes to get one hire, then it's how many candidates it takes to get an applicant. So once you know those numbers, you can tell them pretty much to the dollar what it's going to cost to get fully staffed. And that's why you're so confident in that hiring number, right? Yeah, you're exactly right. And we can help them with budgeting down the road because once they understand all that and what the cost is and what it's gonna take, how many candidates to get to the applicant to the to the hire. Now they can go and they can budget properly and they can plan properly. And we we just like to be up front so everybody knows what they're up against and what it's gonna take to solve it. And we can plug in time-wise what it's gonna take, manpower-wise. Yeah, this is one thing I want the audience to know is is this may be a business, but you you're doing things to actually hurt your business. You always say you want to put yourself out of business because you want to staff up American law enforcement. Uh, but right now the national average for hires is about 4%, meaning if you have a hundred applications, you're gonna hire about four of them. And so you're removing all those friction points to increase that number. Safeguard Connect reduces that number. So you increase that number upwards significantly. Then you've just partnered with Tactical Concepts, our good friend Brian Ellis, who gives a training course to the candidates to take that anxiety away. And you're you're working with him on that to provide to our clients. And so that that is going to push that 4% to six, seven, eight, ten percent. So this saves the agency money, but safeguard recruiting is gonna lose money because you're hiring him quicker. Why why have you made that decision? Yeah, yeah. So we we do some some people say we shouldn't run the business the way we do, but we're all for law enforcement, we're all for public safety. And we understand that our goal is to put ourselves out of business, and we we do a number of things to we we don't work on a term. We'll work month to month with the department. So once you're full, turn us off and then come back when you need us. But the whole goal here, Travis, is I understand that we put ourselves out of work, but over time, departments will grow, they'll have attrition, they'll they'll have a need for a pipeline, and they'll come back. So we're more interested in that partnership, in that we work together, and over time it'll work out fine for everybody. But you're exactly right. We put a lot of processes in place that long-term probably hurt our business, but in the end, I think it's better because we'll have a long-term partner. Yeah, I mean, trusted credibility is everything. Who cares about the dollar if nobody trusts you? And I think the industry has been kind of destroyed by false promises, you know, and marketing companies. Marketing company doesn't want you to solve the problem, they want you to keep coming back and getting those impressions. And so you're trying to solve the problem. It's pretty commendable.

Gen Z Expectations And Retention Reality

Travis Yates 9:18

But one of the main issues you've often talked about is Gen Z. You know, you can't recruit like we were recruited. You know, I took a test and waited by my mailbox for six months, and they finally sent me a letter, and basically they were like, come if you can, but we don't really care. You know, no communication. But Gen Z is not like that. And you work with a lot of departments on how to deal with Gen Z. Tell us about that. Yeah, big change. We got into law enforcement, we may have been up against 800, 1,000 people for one or two jobs, and that's not the case anymore. There, you don't have that many people knocking on your door. That doesn't mean there's not that many people wanting to be in law enforcement. That means you're not communicating with them properly. And sure, Gen Z is different, right? If they like communication, they like to stay on their phone, they like that information. And if you don't do it and you don't communicate with them properly, they're just gonna move on. And they're gonna move on to a different opportunity. And and we're seeing different even commitment levels, right? It's not we came in and we knew, okay, pension's this long, I gotta be in this career for this long. I'm gonna, and then I then I can go do something else. No, it's a lot of a lot more people wash out in the academy now. A lot more people wash out year one, year five. They're they're like, I want to try it, but I'm not gonna do this for a long time. But the bottom line is this communication is key. The more you communicate, the more successful you're gonna be. And you got to communicate in the proper ways. Yeah, one of the disturbing trends that we're seeing, and what the data is telling us is when someone starts law enforcement today, in five years, 62% will not be in law enforcement because of the generation, they almost it's almost a job tryout. It's not like a career was for you and I. And you you're never shy about partnering with organizations that can help this this issue. And you you you've partnered with responder safety, which helps with wellness and retention issues. So you're not really just addressing recruiting because you know that on the back end of that department, retention impacts recruiting. Tell us about that. Yeah. Responder Strong's a great partner. I love what they do, they do a lot of training and they they go across the country and help with the challenges that are with public safety. It's a different type of a career. And it's not only different for the person that is in the career, but for the family. And so Responder Strong steps in right up front and prepares people for what this career is going to be. There's a lot of shift work, there's a lot of holidays missed, there's a lot of I can't be here for something because the job demands it. And everything from that to how do I handle things on the financial side. So Responder Strong is such a great partner for us because they pick up the piece of retention and that the whole retention wellness part. When we started in law enforcement, you didn't admit to anything. You didn't, you weren't allowed, right? You couldn't show weakness. That's different now. Brother, there were still cigarette trays in the in the squad room when I started. Yeah, it's a whole different than a different world. And and so it's different. We're helping people better. And and and it helps with retention because somebody that maybe needed a change in their career, they needed to get rotated out for a little bit, we can salvage them. But if if people know up front and then they have the resources when something happens, okay, I'm noticing a change in my spouse, I'm noticing a change in this, then there's resources there to help them and help them spot that. So Responder Strong's a very great partner. Yeah, your partnerships are just cutting edge stuff. You were talking, we talked about tactical concepts and Brian Ellis, Responder Strong on retention. You partner with the National Testing Network for that helps agencies with testing and psychological tests and backgrounds, because that's not what you do. You're doing all the recruiting on the front end, but you have some place that can help them on that end as well. So once again, it's it just tells me more that you're not just a business, you're just trying to bring every solution to these agencies that are struggling. That's that's it. We want to be a one-stop answer. So it and recruiting and hiring, it's there's a lot of steps in there. We don't do them all, but we're gonna bring on experts to help in that. Just just it's kind of the same thing we advocate with departments bringing us on, right? We have an expertise you need, bring us on. We're doing the same with our partners. They're picking up those pieces we don't have, and we vetted them, and we're very satisfied with the quality of work they and that's why

Auditing The Hiring Process End To End

Travis Yates 13:42

we back them. Let's talk nuts and bolts here. I'm a leader listening to this podcast, and I decide I'm gonna contact Doug Larson over there at Safeguard Recruiting. What's the first thing you're gonna do for him? Yeah, first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna learn more about your department. So we we need to know what the problems are. Like how many officers are we down? What are we doing to solve this problem, and and what's your processes? Because I need from start to finish. If I want to come and work for you, what's that look like from beginning to end so we can understand that and we can understand how many candidates you get in, what happens when I do apply, what happens when I do show interest. I need to know all of that so we can understand and we can make recommendations on how to improve or where we might be losing candidates. Once again, I think it's impressive because you're not just calling and sending them an invoice when they call you. Uh, I was on a call with you just a few weeks ago where this department was spending a considerable amount of money with you, and you said, Hold on, there's some things internally you need to fix first because we want to maximize what we do for you. You could have easily turned on a campaign immediately for them, but you actually advised the chief there's some things internally that if you corrected first, it's going to blow this thing up for you. And he said, Okay, I appreciate that. Give me a few weeks to fix this internally and I'll call you back. Once again, from a business perspective, you just let that fish go. But that's important to you, is it not? Well, it's very important because we we want overall success and happiness in the end. And when we see some holes that need to be plugged or need to be changed, some policies maybe updated. Um, it's very important that we take a step back. I mean, they'll come on board. We it's just delayed a little bit and they need to get some things in order. And I I think they appreciate that honesty and up front too that hey, this is what needs to be fixed before we get going. Yeah, because you're not just a recruiting company, but you're consulting. I mean, you're just you you want to and they may not be able to fix everything, but the things they can control, if they can fix that, it's gonna make things better. So once you do this audit, Doug, and once you talk to them about this and they come back and you do the audit, you see where the sort of the root causes are because you want to find out where they're dropping out, why are they dropping out. I remember one client, uh, they had a big dropout at one particular part in the process, and you said, Well, send me the message you're sending the candidate. And when you saw the message, you went, Oh, that's why they're dropping out. The message literally told them, You better drop out, or we're gonna do this to you, right? And so you're you're getting into all those fine details, which I don't and no one's doing. It's so valuable. But once you do that, then what do you do for these clients? Yeah, one once we got the process down and we've got it dialed in on what they have and how we're gonna move forward, then we start plugging them into our safeguard system. And we start, if we're if we're loose listening officers for them, we'll start developing ads and we'll share that content, get their approval. We'll get them all signed in with Connect and we we get them trained, we we get the messaging optimized for the department. We we need to learn a lot about the department to be able to successfully dial in a campaign for them. Some people have geographical areas that they want to push that makes people want to work for them and move. Some people have different disciplines within the department they want to push. Um, so the more we can learn, the better it is. So you plug them into this ecosystem, the safeguard recruiting ecosystem where the software is there, the messaging is there, the the ads are there, and it's bringing people into the system, it's communicating with them.

Mobile-First Applications And Automation

Travis Yates 17:15

And more importantly, is mobile access. 85% of every application in America today is filled out on a phone. It's important, it's important that that part of that ecosystem is mobile access. Tell us about that. You're exactly right. And if we look at law enforcement or public safety, are 85% of the applicants on the phone? Probably 85% aren't. And and that's a huge problem. But if we can keep people on the phone where access is right there, everything's in their hand, and that's what they're used to, that's what their comfort level is, and and we can gather enough information to keep them in the process. If if you need your full 600-page application, maybe don't do that right up front. But the the most successful departments we have right now are the ones that have gone full mobile and put everything in connect. Yeah, I'm thinking of Haggertstown, Maryland. Uh when they called us, very good department, great people over there. And the lieutenant was just going crazy because she's like, everybody comes in off the website, and I've got to forward all these emails because they have several recruiters that work part-time, so you know, and so I'm forwarding them, I'm making all these assignments. And she said, Do whatever it takes to make this easier. And so you fully automated their entire process. So they're coming on the website, where they're coming in through ads, they go inside Connect. Connect is sending it automatically to the recruiter. Connect is messaging it automatically to the candidate. Connect has a landing page because they're they have kind of a complicated process. So they have one page, because before they were sending attachments and everything. So then they have one page where the candidates see everything, and they just blew up, and it's less work for everybody. More candidates, more hires, less work. That's what we love, that's what we like to do. And if you see on the back end all how that looks, it's pretty impressive where everything's moving and pointing, and and okay, I'm gonna move them over to this lane, and now there's a new series of uh messages are coming to them. They they had a good vision and they were very receptive. That department does an excellent job, and they are they're getting a lot of cancer. Yeah, I'll shout out to L Lieutenant Rebecca Fetchie over there. She had the mind and the vision for this because it wasn't for her, you know. I mean, a lot of chiefs they're relying on their commanders or their recruiters to give them sound advice, and and she had a vision and and she she gave us permission to pull it off, and it's been fun to watch. Uh it certainly has. They've been a model, and the the beautiful thing about it is there's a lot of departments that are looking at what they're doing right now and the success, and they want to follow it. Yeah, and that's what it takes sometimes in law enforcement is that big leap, right? We're so used to our comfort zone. Uh okay, I'm in recruiting now, I'm just gonna do what was done before me. No, take a step outside of your comfort level, especially if it's not working, and let technology work for you and let some experts go. And Haggish Towns, they're a model that I'm I'm impressed that others are wanting to reach out and look at what they're doing and they want to start adopting it. And they're gonna go take the fight to the HR and the different parts of the the community that may fight back against this. Um, but it's a great model. Yeah, I mean, Pineville PD came on board a few months ago, and I think they followed in Hackerstown's footsteps. They they were encouraged, I think, what Hackerstown was doing, and they're just they're just going. It's just it's just it's cool to watch for where they come from to where they are, but it does take that leadership in the department to say, yes, I want to do something different. Let's try this. Well, it definitely takes strong leadership, it takes a visionary, it takes somebody that's gonna get a little outside their comfort zone and say, okay, this makes sense. Um, we're gonna we're gonna take this step. And that's uh I'm hoping this is the way we're starting to mold the whole public safety community because they're gonna be happy in the long run. They're going to get more hires, they're gonna get and it's gonna be easier, right? It's it's less labor intensive to do it this way. You talked about the importance of communication, you talked about the importance of mobile.

Fewer Clicks, More Applicants

Travis Yates 21:28

Let's talk about touch points. And I I know you've talked before, I saw you in a seminar one time, and you talked about how much more money Amazon made when they went to the one touch buy, right? Because it's all about touch points. And so you just go to a lot of these department websites, and it takes six, seven clicks to even get to an application, and they got to register for the application, and they're losing them, they're losing a ton of people. How important is it for you to get those touch points to just one or two to get them straight to the application? Uh it's very important. Optim is a optimum. Optimizing a website is severely important. That's the front door for your department. That's the first impression. And if you make it hard on people, they leave. And we audit a lot of websites, even when we're not asked, because we we see these news reports of departments that are hiring. And we'll go in and we'll say, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna see what the process looks like. I'm gonna try and apply for this department. Sometimes we can't even apply. We can't find their application. Or you got to click through, you got to register, and and then it takes me to another page. And I might be, I got to find the job in the whole list of city or county job openings, and I got to go find it, and then I got to click again, and then I got to figure out how to get my application in. And and then if I want to email a recruiter and uh the email bounces, or I email a recruiter and nobody ever calls, gets back with me. And so that's part of what we do is auditing, but optimizing a website is very important. And if you start looking at, yeah, I want to give you a couple examples here. Asheville, they had a great website, looked looked phenomenal. And they had it up for a couple of years, produced maybe two people for them. Is there it's a recruiting join Asheville PD website, and you go to it and it looks great. It does. And you're like, this is a this is a good website. Can't imagine what they would have spent on that. Yeah, probably probably spent some good money, right? And and you look at it and then, but you're like, why is this not producing? And then we take it to our team, and these guys are good. They they specialize in this, the the optimization of websites and making them produce. And they looked at the website and they immediately figured out what needed to be changed, and they made some changes to the Asheville's website. Now, Asheville's website, and these are free candidates that come to your front door and come looking for you. You don't you aren't spending money on it, and they're getting 20 to 30 a month. Yeah, that is incredible. And now they by the way, that will last long after for the for 20 or 30 a month forever because you've we've turned that recruiting website into a recruiting engine. Uh, Milwaukee PD, the same thing. We we actually built that website. It's always great when we can build it because we build it for we make it as cheap as possible for agencies. And uh we built that for them and it was converting 30 or so a month, and they were getting a 70% conversion rate, meaning 70% of people that went to the website said, I want to work there. Now that's unheard of in in recruiting, right? So, yeah, man, that's that's so important. Uh so just for a little bit of money, you could optimize. In fact, for a while, you were you you'll do it. If someone calls you, you'll probably do it for them because you know how important it is. It's very important. And even right now, we we'll look at it and give you recommendations. Call us up, we'll do it for free. We'll we'll look at what needs to be done on your website. And because it is very important. My favorite one, and I don't know if you remember this, but we were on the phone, it was late at night, and it was when Philadelphia we were optimizing their website, yeah, and it was really not doing much. And then it's we're on the phone and it got flipped, turned on, and immediate candidates. Five seconds after we flipped it to optimization, they started flowing in. And literally, that was changing a little bit of verbiage, putting some buttons in different places. In the marketing world, they call this a lead magnet, right? Uh, we're not marketers, but we know how to optimize websites. And uh, so we have a lot of clients that want this because that's forever. Like you're not paying for that. You just do the website right and you're getting those people to come in. And uh, pretty powerful

Recruiter Pushback And Doing It Yourself

Travis Yates 25:39

stuff. Now, I just see now, Doug, you talk to a lot of recruiters, and sometimes they're a little skeptical. Talk talk to us about that. Yeah, definitely there's always some pushback, right? People don't believe that we can get as many candidates as we're guaranteeing. We hear that, right? And there's no way you can do that. Well, sure is. And and you'd be surprised how quickly those candidates come in as soon as we turn the campaign on. It's it's immediate. Um recruiters are yeah, it they are always, I I think it goes back to change, right? People are always resistant to change, and that's where we get pushback from recruiters. Um, they don't necessarily some of them want somebody coming in and changing the way they do things, and and they feel like, oh, if I get all these candidates, that's a lot of work. And so there's been some pushback from recruiters. Um, leadership always loves the results for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we you've gotten this question before, and I will just address it here. Somebody will say, Well, why can't I just do this myself? Why can't a department do this themselves? Uh, and because recruiting is a very technical skill, high-level skill. What would you say to that? There's a lot of this you can do yourself. You can. And it boils down to do you have the tools to do it, do you have the time to do it? Do you do you understand how long to leave an ad out, how to create the ad, what's going to resonate with people, what's going to get them to take that next step. And uh you can do that. And our our software actually makes some of this easy for you if you want to do it yourself. Um, what departments have found is a lot of times they it's easier to push that expertise off because internally in departments, it's harder to find people that have that expertise and that want to stick in that position. But no, a lot of this you could do yourself, but it's it's it's just a matter of expertise, right? Because if you you it it took us years to get to where we are. We're from law enforcement. So imagine you would need to bring in, you would need to treat a recruiter position like a homicide detective, knowing it's going to take them two or three years to really understand what to do and send them to a bunch of training. Now, so ob obviously agencies can do that, but the recruiting position oftentimes is transient. People are coming and going, they're getting promoted out, they spend a couple years and they bring somebody else in. And so I appreciate the candor that, yeah, you could do it, but you just have to understand you have to recruit a certain way that brings a high level of skill to it. Yeah, any piece you leave out of like the process is going to cost you results. And it's hard to keep somebody in recruiting that in a department on the cutting edge and they they keep up with everything. And that's where we just try and come in and step in with that expertise. But sure, they can do that. And a lot of people don't want that role within the department, right? They want the traditional, okay, you're interested in working here, I'll help you once you've shown the interest and you're going. And that's the the part that most people in law enforcement understand because we got to break it down, is there's probably maybe we can find one or two, but nobody gets into law enforcement because their goal is to be the recruiter, right? Right. So it's not, it's not that that's what they're coming to. Maybe property room. Maybe they want to be the property room. Maybe something, but that's not the passion, right? You don't you don't call your your mom and dad and say, hey, I'm getting in law enforcement because they need a recruiter. There's other things you want to do in law enforcement, and then you end up evolving into this role for whatever reason. It might be a promotion, it might be good hours, it might be whatever, but it's hard to get. We have multiple people that touch a campaign. It's not one person doing all these things. We have multiple people with this different disciplines. Graphic designers, copywriters, website developers, uh, Facebook specialists, social media specialists, can't, you know, oh, you're right, multiple, multiple people. So internally, we don't even just have like, okay, our we have a team, and that's kind of what you need too. And and another point here is a lot of departments, especially the bigger ones, have like their social media groups. That's great. And that that's not the same thing as we're doing. We're we're friends with each other because they get a lot of great content. We can help them with how to schedule it, what the timetables are, when that stuff should go out, but that's not recruiting. But we'll use a lot of their elements in our recruiting. So departments need to not confuse. Hey, I have my little social media team. That's not the same thing as what we're doing in recruiting. We're we're different and it's very specialized. So, yes, you can do it on your own, but I individually don't do everything, it's a team of people. Yeah, it's important to know because we love when they have social media teams, but that is completely different. We'll have a client say, we don't understand why recruiting is hurting. We've boosted our social, our our Facebook audience by 100,000 this year. We don't understand. That's because we're not going after the Facebook audience for hires. If if you're if you if you're on the audience of social media of an agency, you probably aren't working there because you don't want to work there. You would have already applied, right? We're going outside that because of your law enforcement background throughout the years, you have all these connections with some of the largest social media law enforcement companies, and you're you're you're reaching out to all those folks with interest in law enforcement. So they're outside of the of their actual personal, of their business Facebook page. So there's a lot of misunderstanding. Well, agencies say, well, we don't understand, we're boosting some of our posts. Well, that's your internal audience, those aren't employment ads. Yeah, that's that's completely different. And so what we what what we would say is keep doing what you're doing on your social media page, but we need to do this through our algorithm and through our target audience, and it's gonna work. You're exactly right. We will work with that group. We're not competitors, we're not the same thing, um, but we're allies. Yep, and we will enhance each other. And it's a great point. I I do like the ones that have these these big teams because they have a lot of good good photos, videos we can use, and it's it's a great partnership, but some departments confuse it as I don't need you because I have this, and it's not the same thing.

AI, The Next Five Years, And Contact

Travis Yates 32:00

We're here on the five-year anniversary of Safeguard Recruiting, Doug, but where do you see public safety recruited in five years from now? I I hope we make bigger changes than we made in the first five years. And when when you look back at where we started and what we've grown to in the amount of products we've we've put on and what we offer, it's amazing. We didn't have that vision when we first started to go where we are now. Where I see us going from here on out is more efficiency, more effectiveness, driven by AI, driven by technology. And everybody that gets on board and embraces it properly is going to win and they're gonna be very satisfied with the results. And it's it's gonna dictate how the whole candidate process, the whole how how we look at candidates, how we assess them, how we communicate with them. It's all gonna be driven by technology, and I love where we're going. We're working on some big special things right now that are gonna roll out soon. Doug Larson, congratulations on five years. Thanks for the interview. It's always great talking. Yes, sir. If they want to reach out to you, what's the best way to do it? Yeah, go to our website, safeguardrecruiting.com. There's a number of different ways to fill out a form. You can you can reach out to me directly, Doug at Safeguard Recruiting. I'll get you in touch with the right person. Um whatever it takes. Yeah, thanks a lot. Right on time, man.