Can Digital Marketing Help Police Departments Recruit New Officers?

Will a simple change in thinking fill your shifts with new recruits?

Law enforcement as a whole is working to enhance its use of the digital space to actively pursue much-needed candidates for their departments. However, many agencies still rely on antiquated methods to reach younger officers, such as job fairs, standard radio ads, and billboards. While these methods may have worked in the past, they simply are not producing the results needed to properly staff police departments in 2021.

At Find A Force, we have studied the landscape and have found some departments shifting their recruiting efforts towards the digital world, using social media, search engines, and job boards.  This approach allows departments not to just post their open opportunities, but actively market them as well. In addition, they are hitting a target audience they typically don’t get in front of at a job fair at local universities. 

Will these law enforcement agencies outperform their counterparts who are relying on outdated methods, simply based on the numbers? If the playing field was equal across every other plane, the departments and agencies using the internet and digital technologies will get their open positions in front of many more potential recruits. Corporate America has seen the benefits of these techniques for more than a decade now, and it’s clear the policing profession needs to drastically change its game plan when it comes to recruiting new and lateral police officers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the recruiting challenge for police departments, sheriff’s offices, and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. Vaccine mandates in several locations across the country has police officers looking for new opportunities at departments with less rigorous pandemic protocols.  These officers are not going to job fairs, nor are they likely visiting police department websites one by one. They are using the search engines and social media to locate new police departments. The departments that have well-optimized websites and well-positioned job postings are going to fare much better than those not leveraging these technologies.  Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was the first to jump on this opportunity, offering police officers from New York City, Chicago, and other locations with looming vaccine mandates a $5000 signing bonus to relocate to the Sunshine State. This has already attracted officers to sign on with Florida departments, and we’ll see more in the coming weeks. 

Picture an NYPD officer going to Google and searching “Police Jobs Florida.” Departments who are actively using the digital space, optimizing, and paying for the coveted page #1 of Google are going to drive much more traffic to their open job opportunities, and the other departments will be wondering why they were unable to attract the same number of officers looking to relocate to Florida.

Now picture that same officer clicking on the top links in Google and ending up on a department website that is easy to use, has a simple application process, clearly lists benefits and compensation, and provides a gallery of popular destinations within that jurisdiction. Instead, often the process is difficult to navigate, content is hard to find and information is even buried, not on the police department’s website itself, but within the City or County website. This makes it very prohibitively challenging to attract new and lateral police officers. 

Police agencies marketing their opportunities effectively in the digital space are simply doing what the rest of corporate America has been doing to fill positions. It’s past time for your department to take advantage of this opportunity.

Find A Force can help your police department begin to attract, recruit and even retain police officers. Contact info@findaforce.com today!