This month's featured police recruiter: lieutenant ryan cantrell
Lieutenant Cantrell is an officer at Hayward PD in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been in law enforcement for over 23 years and in that time he’s worked with many of the divisions within the Department. As an experienced officer, Cantrell has led multiple large scale investigations and is now tasked with building personnel at Hayward.
The police officer recruitment process is no easy feat. Whether you’re new to the recruiting game or an expert, hear from Lt. Cantrell and how he personally was able to overcome his recruiting challenges.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in recruiting?
The largest was engaging the current workforce generation. We were reactive, in that we were just waiting for people to come to us to apply and we realized that isn’t working. The old way of doing things was placing an ad in the newspaper or a magazine, or perhaps a job fair but these just weren’t meeting our goals of getting people to apply. Our challenge was reworking our strategy to actually go out and market to people.
Given these challenges, what was your next move?
We learned in our research that we needed to use digital marketing. 90% of the workforce is on the web and this is where they handle everything, including job searching. We also realized we needed to brand ourselves and focus on showing people what we’re all about, then engaging with people. We decided going digital would be most successful for us.
What strategies did you try before working with Epic?
We did a little bit of job advertisement on Facebook organically. This worked a little bit for us but it was never effective in targeting the right people or enough people. We needed to do something with more reach.
What was it like finding funding for recruitment efforts?
You know, we saw that we had an issue and this is something we realized we needed to spend some money on to do the right way. What we did was go to City Council with salary savings. This meant the budget allotted for new police hires, the unfilled positions, then went into recruiting strategies. This way, we didn’t have to ask for extra money or go find grants.
What were you looking for in a police recruiting agency and why did you choose Epic Recruiting?
Well, one of the biggest issues we had was finding an agency that did everything under one roof. We don’t have a dedicated team to spend time on this, I took the lead and we needed a group that could be there for every step of the way. Since we don’t have a full recruiting team, we needed a company that could do it all, get the wheels turning and assist until we eventually have the capacity to do it on our own.
Epic has that ability to do digital marketing and video production, as well as establish us on social media. Another thing was that in our police marketing, we wanted to show who we were are as a Department. We’re focused on community and family first, so we needed a company that could portray that in the marketing material made, which is exactly what Epic did. We could have gone to multiple companies, you know… one for photography, one for video, one for the website etc. but that would have been a nightmare to project manage. With Epic, it’s a one stop shop and our branding is consistent across all platforms.
What stood out most to you in the epic recruiting process?
So I think a lot of people have the perception that police officers are hard to deal with, that we’re demanding. What was really nice is that from the get-go, it was very customer service based. It was all centered around what we needed, what we envisioned and how to get there. The Epic Team never pushed anything on us, our end product was built on what we wanted and you guys accommodated that. It was also great how the team gave suggestions based on experience with other agencies and bringing insight on police marketing specifically.
Working with Hayward PD and Lt. Cantrell was a great experience for Epic Recruiting and we were happy to see such great results from their online recruiting campaign. We’d like to thank him for his time and sharing his experience with us. Follow Hayward PD on social media and check out their recruiting website to see for yourself what a great Department they are.
As Lt. Cantrell said, we’re an agency that’s an all-in-one package. The services we provide work together to create one cohesive recruiting package. Check out examples of the work we did for them in Hayward Police Department’s case study. See up close and personal how we developed recruiting videos, trade show material, a recruiting website and more.
Every recruiting campaign that we create is made specifically for each Department. No two campaigns are alike, just as no two Departments are alike. The Epic Recruiting Process for recruiting police officers today involves extensive research and personalization to get the results you want.
No Endorsement. Epic Recruiting acknowledges that Hayward PD makes no claims on behalf of Epic Recruiting as to the quality of the products or services Epic Recruiting offers. Epic Recruiting shall make no claims that Hayward PD endorses Epic’s products or services.