PLECET Conference 2026: Lessons Learned

We come back from the PLECET conference with a reality check: no one we met is fully staffed, and the “recruiting is back” story does not match what agencies live every day. We share the simple framework we teach to stop panic spending, measure the recruiting funnel, and fix the friction that drives candidates away. 

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

Welcome And Why We’re Here

Travis Yates 0:17

Welcome back to Staffing The Mission. This is our weekly podcast that Doug Larsen and myself do that highlights the efforts of Safeguard Recruiting, the only law enforcement recruiting company that exists, uh, really on the planet. Uh, and also talks about Welcome back to Staffing the Mission. This is a podcast that is here to help you improve public safety recruiting. Of course, Doug Larsen is the COO of Safeguard Recruiting. He's usually with me on the show. But on today's episode, I just want to sort of bring you a quick message, something that really encouraged and motivated me from the PLECET 2026 conference that just occurred in Dallas, Texas. You're going to ask yourself, what is PLECIT? And I'm going to give you a brief overview because it was new to me. They asked us to come down there and be on a panel for recruiting. I was on a panel with uh one of the founders of the 30 by 30 program.

What The PLECET Conference Is

Travis Yates 1:25

another great, great researcher in recruiting. Welcome back to staffing the mission. This is a weekly podcast that is designed to help you improve your public safety recruiting. Doug Larsen, the COO of Safeguard Recruiting, is usually with me on the show. Of course, we're Safeguard Recruiting, and we're the only public safety-only recruiting firm in the country. Uh, we're not a general marketing firm. We don't need just add public safety to our host of clients. We literally work only for public safety companies. Predominantly it's in law enforcement. We've done corrections and fire and a bunch of others as well. But our entire team is former law enforcement, over 100 years of experience. What I wanted to come on and talk to you about today is the Plesset 2026 conference. Uh, we were asked to come down there and serve on a panel for recruiting. And you're going to first ask yourself, what is Plesset? And what Plessett is, is it's a conference, an annual conference that began about four years ago. And it's the only conference of its kind that is exists to train up community police officers or any officers involved in community policing. It sort of has dedicated training for that. And it's a huge conference. There was about 1,200 people there this year. And the way they set the conference up is they build 19 core classes. Recruiting is one of them. And they ask panelists, experts in the field to come serve on each one of those classes. And myself with Safeguard Recruiting was asked to serve as a panelist on the recruiting classroom. I did this with a couple of uh other experts in the field. One of them is the co-founder of the 30 by 30 program, and another one uh is a very well-renowned uh doctor out of Arizona State University that's done a lot of research on police recruiting. And it was very interesting, and each session was 75 minutes. It was set up as 60 minutes of lecture or discussion, and then 15 minutes of question and answer. And the reason I wanted to kind of talk to you about what occurred here is it really blew my mind. If you've been kind of paying attention to the media or the news or the latest police

The Staffing Crisis Is Still Real

Travis Yates 3:55

chief interview, you're made to believe that recruiting is kind of making a comeback and things are kind of coming back to normal. Now, all along we've told you we're not seeing that. Uh, we're speaking to departments every day that are having problems and having struggles. And oftentimes maybe they're able to get close to even, meaning retention versus recruiting, like meaning if 10 people retired last year, maybe they were able to hire eight or nine or 10, right, to kind of keep even. But where the problem is, is if they're currently down. Uh, we've spoken to clients down 50, 60, 70 officers. And if you're down that many officers, uh you've got to increase the front funnel, increase your pipeline exponentially to even catch up. And so we are years away from that if we don't sort of gather the details that's need to be done. Now, we've said this here time and time again. This is not hard to do. We do this all the time for people. Uh, but what I learned from Plessett was everyone's struggling. And so I'll tell you sort of how these classes were made up. We taught four sessions uh over the course of two days, and they they put that the basically when you sign up to go to the conference, it was an excellent conference, you're told you're put in a cohort. So not the entire 1100 people didn't come to our training. I think it's split up into thirds or fourths. So we saw a little over 300 people. That would be about force, right? We saw about 300 people cycle through. It's about 80 people a session. So they would bring in the 80 people, and those 80 people stuck together throughout the entire conference. So it's a very interesting concept, very popular, and people seem to enjoy it. And we asked every group that came in, first question, is anybody fully staffed? So out of those 300 plus people representing 250 plus police departments, no one was. No one was. Now, what we heard was, well, we're doing a little better, or if it's better than it was the year before, no one was fully staffed. And that really blew my mind because this is not hard to do. And if you've been following our content, we explain this each and every week. But I only had about 15 minutes. Each panelist went about 15, 16 minutes, and then we open up for questions and answers. And so that that makes it difficult because I mean, I can explain to you in 15 minutes what to do, but um, you know, you got to be kind of careful with what you say, make sure you're saying the right thing. So I sort of took in if I was to get 15 minutes in front of anybody,

Nobody Is Fully Staffed

Travis Yates 6:30

what would I say to make them better? Now, the goal here wasn't to sell safeguard recruiting, it wasn't to try to get new clients. My goal was to give them a tidbit of information where they could go back to their agency and improve it. So I want to give you quickly what I did, and I want to give you some of the feedback on it. I really started out by telling everybody to slow down. Everyone's frustrated. I mean, you can see it in their eyes. Everybody needs to stop because what the profession has been doing is we're throwing, we're panicking, right? Because staffing is a problem. It's creating problems all over the place. It's creating problems with overtime, it's creating problems with the budgets. It's creating stress and wellness issues, and people are working a lot of hours to fill the beats. I mean, Phoenix Police spent 98 million in overtime last year to fill the beats of 600 people they don't have. So a lot of people are panicking. And what law enforcement typically does is we spend money to fix a problem. I mean, it's just what we do. It's government. You know, we, oh, you need we need new cars, so throw money at it. We need a new training program, throw money at it. We need digital policies, throw money at it. But this is not a money issue. Yeah, it's it takes resources and money, but it's a philosophy shift. And so what I sort of lined out in the first four or five minutes of my discussion was they're throwing all this stuff against the wall. We're spending all this money, this whole marketing versus recruiting thing. And we were really preyed upon by marketing companies, you know, uh, because what they provide is flashy and it's fancy. And they came in and they showed us fancy videos and fancy billboards and fancy graphics. They made promises they couldn't keep because marketing companies can't fill your pipeline. They can bring brand awareness to products you're selling, or maybe even awareness to your agency, but they they're not promising to recruit. That's why they're called marketing. So I told everybody to slow down. We've had so many clients come to us that spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on failed efforts. That hurts us because they put us in that category. That's one reason we guarantee candidates. If you go right to our website, safeguardrecruiting.com, you will see a guarantee. There's there's three different tiers we offer, and we do custom tiers as well. But based on those tiers, we guarantee a number

Slow Down And Change The Approach

Travis Yates 8:40

of candidates. Our low tier is 100 candidates a month, our high tier is 900 candidates a month. What does that mean? Well, if you buy that tier, it's what you're gonna get. It's not a list, it's not curated people we already have, it's people we go out and we source for your agency. We're a recruiting firm. Now we do that through using some marketing elements, but marketing alone is a failure. And so we knew this. And so we've told all the departments in the room stop, slow down. Don't think about spending any more money, don't think about stressing. First one is this this is not a crisis, this is not a problem you can't overcome, but you've got to stop. You got to get sort of above the problem. You got to have an umbrella and look down here and see what's going on. The first thing you need to do is you need to understand your data. And you've heard us talk about this here quite a bit. You need to know how many people that you need to talk to to get interested in to get an application. And then you need to know how many applications it takes to make a hire. Once you know that data, you know what you're looking at. So if you're down, say 50 officers, you can't just run out there and do everything you think you need to do. That's not, you're not really putting your effort. I mean, you could go spend millions and millions of dollars, you may get a little bit of help, but you're just it's such a waste of resources and waste of time. When you're down 50 officers, the first thing you need to know is, well, how many applications does it take to hire one person? Let's just say it takes 10. So now you know you need what? What is that? 500 applications to hire 50, right? Well, once you know that number, you need to know well, how many people do I need to curate to talk to to meet to get those applications? And let's say for every for let's just say it's 50%. If you talk to 100 people, you get 50 applications. That's a number we can easily do through our automated processes and our software. We see that time and time again. If you're using an old government system, it's going to take a lot more than that. We're seeing as high as a 90% drop-off if you're using a registered type HR system. But that's a whole nother talking point. You can go back on our blogs and our podcasts and hear us talk about software, the importance of being mobile friendly, mobile ready with a new generation. But let's say it's that two to one. That means you need to talk to a thousand people to get 500 applications to hire 50. Right? Now, it may be a little more complicated than that. Do you have the bandwidth to take all those applications? Do you have the bandwidth to do all the background checks? Are you moving them through the pipeline smoothly? Our software is really why that is built. And that's as cheap as $2,000 a year. It's really no excuse. But that's what you need to know. And then once you know that, you need to

Know Your Numbers And Targets

Travis Yates 11:25

know where the friction is. So first step was know the data. If actually, first step was calm down, quit stressing, quit throwing everything on the wall, hoping something will stick. Number two, it's know the data. Number three, understand the friction points. What does this mean? This means your drop-off rate. So if a thousand people are coming into the front door, but you're losing half of them before they take the test, or you're losing two-thirds of them before the interview, you got to find out why. What's going on here? What are we doing on REM that's causing this? We talked about a lot of those issues, right? I mean, I just talked to you about registration, old school software, not communicating with people, not automating things. All these things affect friction. And that's the more you have to work to get what you need to get. And so you have to understand this. And then once you know all that, it really is just about building the front-end funnel, building a large net to throw out there and target the people you want and bring them in. If you need more qualified candidates, you need more diversity in candidates, you need more candidates. It's that simple. This is a numbers game. That's of course what Safeguard, that's what we do. And we are successful every time we do that. I mean, we've got clients we're sending thousands to every month. And so this is not a big deal, but what we're seeing by and large is we're not sure what to do. We're kind of panicking, we're throwing a ton of money at it, we're not seeing it work, and we just go, oh, it's a crisis. So that's kind of what I broke down for them. And the response was pretty amazing. I mean, I've been teaching various stuff around the country for you know 15, 20 years, and they were standing in line to talk to us about the problem. They're very passionate. And so, what I didn't really know is we speak to a lot of recruiters every day here, but I didn't know that in a lot of smaller departments, the community police officers kind of have the recruiting function as well. Come to think of it, it's kind of a brilliant idea, right? Because I mean, what's more than community policing than trying to recruit from the community and fill your department? So a lot of these officers were part-time recruiters, and they, of course, had no expertise in it, they had no knowledge in it, they're frustrated because they don't see anything working. So we ended up having several meetings with them, uh, setting up several meetings right there at the conference to help out a lot of agencies. But one of the growing patterns that I saw, and this is very disturbing, is most of these agencies were using other companies. And they're very frustrated. And the reason they're frustrated is they're spending a lot of money, but they're not getting many people at all, and they just don't understand why. And when I walked them back to the decision to pick this company and why they picked the company, by and large, it was, man, they kind of wooed us, right? It was kind of they showed us some fancy pictures and fancy websites and

Fix Drop-Off And Pipeline Friction

Travis Yates 14:20

kind of showed us all this glitz and glam, and and it just kind of impressed us. But the problem is, is you can have all that and not improve your recruiting. And so what I've told them is what I'll tell you if you're talking to any company, just stop with all that and just ask them this. If I spend X amount of money, how many candidates am I gonna get? Right now, not applications, because a lot of times applications are a are a direct product of your process. If you've got a really bad process and you're not communicating and you don't have the appropriate software to take mobile-friendly applications, your applications are gonna suffer. But about the the candidates, the people that are maybe interested in your job, how many do you promise? Well, I'm not saying they're not out there, but other than us, no one's gonna promise you that. No one. Because to a marketing company, by the way, a lot of people are calling themselves recruiting for law enforcement. They're just marketing companies. To a marketing company, their goal is to keep taking monthly money. And that's just, and what they're gonna do is they're gonna send people to your website through advertising. Whatever money you spend on advertising, they're gonna pocket 80 to 90 percent of it. And so, meaning if you spend $1,000 on advertising, they're gonna throw about a hundred bucks at it, enough for you to see more traffic to the website and that kind of okay, well, it's working. But if you're not getting more people, it's not working. It's all a facade. It's like uh the illusion from a magician, right? How does a magician work? Look at my right hand while my left hand's doing all the work. And so they're showing you all this stuff they can do, but the left hand's putting money in their back pocket. And the reason I talk about this, and it's a little kind of a little dirty secret of marketing world, is it hurts us. We don't do that. Uh, we guarantee what you're gonna get. We hit that mark every

Marketing Facades Versus Candidate Guarantees

Travis Yates 16:05

single time. But people, we have to overcome this every time because of the way they've been treated. The profession has been fleeced by these marketers that do what they do. Marketers are great at websites and videos and development billboards and bus ads. None of that is going to increase your recruiting. If it did, I wouldn't have every hand in that conference saying we're low staffing, because many of them have spent a lot of money on those efforts. So uh I walked them through, and some of them actually showed me what they were spending and what they were getting. And that's where I come up with that 90% number because I know what it costs. We guarantee candidates, we know what it costs. So when they're telling me they're spending $100,000 a year and they're getting 150 people a month, I know for a fact that the company's taking 90 to 95% of that money and putting in their back pocket. And that's a shame because these agencies that are spending that kind of money would have already been solved if they would have used us, because we don't do that. And so once again, this isn't just a this isn't a pitch for us. This is more of be very careful who you're doing business with. Uh I don't blame the companies for doing this. They're businesses, they recognize a need, they're offering a solution, but the solution is not working. And that's what I need everybody to analyze is if you are doing this, is it working? And the other thing we've seen is it becomes very hard for an agency that once they make a decision to kind of come off that decision because you got to think about this. Someone has championed that company, they've championed that idea. And it's very difficult to say, ah, maybe we went in the wrong direction. But it really takes courage to do that. And the departments that I spoke to flat out said, we have to make a change. We are desperate to fix this because they understand that it doesn't get better through time. So it was really an incredible conference. It was an incredible time. Met some great, great people, very impressed. I think we're going back next year. That's the word on the street, so to speak. I don't have a city to tell you yet, but we're going to talk about this once we find out. And we look forward to doing even more at Plessett 2026. But that's really what I wanted to talk to you about today. I will say this: if you did not watch our last episode, it's called How Safeguard Recruiting Built Success. Man, that is one of the most important podcasts I think we've ever done. Myself and Doug were down in Texas and we ran into a podcast studio and kind of filmed this on the fly. It was our five-year anniversary and wanted to kind of give everybody sort of a history of Safeguard and where we've come from. And I, you know, I had to, I watched it back before we posted it. And I was like, man, that if you were at all interested in what we've done, where we've been, what we've done, and what we're going to do, you've got to listen to that. It's about

Last Episode Plug And How To Reach Us

Travis Yates 18:55

30 minutes. Um, if you didn't know this, we're on all the podcast platforms. So you could just type in staffing to mission or safeguard recruiting on any of your podcast platforms, Spotify or Apple, you'll get these, right? And you'll get notified. But that's just audio. If we don't watch the video of that last podcast, uh, or if you watch the video this one, it's the same place. We have a YouTube channel, but we post it on our website. Typically, it's the podcast link or it's down at the bottom of our front page. You'll see these podcasts. Uh, but that one from last week, I it's kind of worth watching. It was pretty interesting, pretty dynamic, and I highly encourage it. But that's it. Listen, if you're if you're watching or listen to this, you're in a tiny, tiny club. There's not a lot of people that are interested in this. So if you're interested, you certainly care about where your agency is going. And when it comes to issues such as leadership, there's nothing more important. And so I'm thankful you're listening. I'm thankful you're watching. If we could ever do anything to help you, please reach out to us. Safeguardrecruiting.com. We'll see you next week.