Identifying and selecting law enforcement recruiters - Interview Now

This is Recruiting is Sales

A blog exploring law enforcement recruitment as a sales function. This is the second in a three-post series on building and equipping your recruiting team to produce the results you need. In our first post, Building the Right Team, we explored the foundational necessities of effective recruitment, ranging from proper placement in your org chart to unit structure and allowing your team members to play to their strengths. Today we will take a closer look at what makes an effective salesperson and how to select the best individuals for each position on your recruiting team.

Key Characteristics of Effective Recruiters

There are many salespeople in the world and most, by definition, are average. Countless combinations of personality traits and experiences can create effective salespeople and recruiters, but the data shows top performers tend to have certain things in common. Building a top performing team requires a more in-depth selection process with key characteristics you should be looking for.

“As American law enforcement agencies grapple with issues surrounding recruitment and retention, an increasing number see mentoring as part of the solution.”
–The Community Policing Dispatch, April 2023, Volume 16, Issue 4

As a rule, people involved with recruitment should be experienced both within law enforcement and your agency. When candidates speak with a recruiter, they are looking for accurate information on the profession, the agency, and the law enforcement lifestyle in general. They need a mentor to counsel them as they work through their own decision-making processes.

Without time on the job, a recruiter will not have the knowledge and experience necessary to meet these needs. This does not, however, mean new officers have no place in recruiting. Rookie officers will not have the same depth of knowledge, but their ability to relate with candidates closer to them in age, as well as the recency of their own recruiting and hiring journey, will make them extremely effective relationship builders.

“…[L]aw enforcement leaders must determine how millennials and post-millennials differ from past generations and adapt their recruiting and hiring efforts, leadership styles, policies, and systems accordingly.”
– Dr. Nicole Cain, Recruiting and Hiring the Next Generation of Police Officers

Skills Required for Effective Recruitment

Sales is about volume and requires drive, initiative, and organization to succeed. An effective sales professional knows how to structure their time, their workload, and their processes to maximize results and recruiters must do the same. All recruiters need to have a strong work ethic with a history of innovation and high self-initiated activity. Passive recruiting no longer works. Select hunters who are goal-oriented and who will put in the time and effort necessary to drive results.

Your recruiters need to be skilled communicators with the emotional intelligence and cultural competency necessary to recruit candidates from diverse backgrounds. Emotional intelligence is critical in both law enforcement and sales.

“Without emotional intelligence, salespeople will struggle to build rapport with prospects and stay motivated… In fact, decades of research identify emotional intelligence as the critical trait that differentiates top performers from the rest of the sales force.”
– Michael Ferguson – Sales Hacker, Tapping Into Your Soft Side with Emotional Intelligence in Sales

Law enforcement recruiters cast a wide net, recruiting within communities of all types and cultures to locate the best candidates for their agencies. Cultural competency, or the ability to effectively and respectfully work and build relationships with people of different cultural backgrounds, is needed if recruiters are expected to identify and pursue the most qualified candidates.

Prioritizing Key Characteristics

Regardless of their role, no recruiter will be effective without a strong work ethic, confidence, initiative, well-developed communication skills, emotional intelligence, and cultural competence. Make these your “deal-breakers” and prioritize them ahead of any other characteristics discussed here. Secondary characteristics to look for will depend more on the role you are looking to fill on the team.

In our previous post, we looked at different unit structures and how they can define roles and enable the team to leverage individual strengths. Recruiting roles can be broken into two categories: developers and closers.

Developers vs. Closers

Your developers will be responsible for crafting your messages and getting them in front of the right people at the right time in addition to qualifying potential candidates to ensure they meet minimum standards. They will be focused on your web presence, social media platforms, live events, and collateral and their interactions with candidates will typically be short-lived and transactional.

“As technology changes, law enforcement must change with it. Old recruitment methods… are not the best ways to reach younger generations.”
– DOJ, Law Enforcement Recruitment and Retention Working Group (2021)

Closers will be your relationship builders and mentors and, as such, experience is particularly important in this role. They will use frequent personal engagement to get to know candidates and help candidates get to know your agency. Closing is a relational process and will be more time-consuming, so full-time recruiters should fill these positions whenever possible.

When selecting a recruiter for a closer role, organization is key. Closers need to manage candidate engagement like a detective managing a heavy caseload. If the recruiting supervisor has a lot of other responsibilities on their plate, program management skills become critical as your closer will end up coordinating recruitment efforts across the unit as well.

Screening and Interview Processes

In sales hiring, establishing an effective screening and interview process is especially important since sales performance largely depends on “soft skills” that are difficult to quantify. It typically takes multiple interviews to properly assess an applicant’s skills, aptitude, and experience.

When selecting your recruiters, you should plan a structured interview and assessment process to keep things moving efficiently and ensure it is both repeatable and equitable for all candidates.

When selecting your recruiters, start with an initial conversation between candidates and the recruiting supervisor. Use this conversation to give the candidate an overview of the unit and your vision for recruiting moving forward.

After the initial call, plan on having two in-person interviews in front of the recruiting supervisor(s), a tenured member of the recruiting team, and at least one representative from command staff. It is important that the same panel conduct all interviews so members can make informed recommendations for each candidate.

The first interview is to assess the candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, experience, and understanding of modern law enforcement recruitment.

In the second interview, candidates will provide a 3-minute sales pitch and respond to questions and objections. Panel members will assess their ability to provide substantive and tactful responses to questions surrounding current events, criticisms of law enforcement, high profile uses of force, and more.

Conclusion

Building a top performing recruiting team is a complicated task that requires planning to do properly. As you define your recruiting processes and roles, you will be able to start building a selection process that will ensure you have the right people in the right seats.