There is a pattern that plays out in law enforcement agencies across the country. Staffing drops. Leadership sounds the alarm. Recruiting kicks into overdrive for a few months. The academy fills, everyone exhales, and the recruiting effort quietly winds down until the next crisis.
Then the cycle starts again.
This reactive approach to hiring is one of the most expensive mistakes a department can make. The price shows up in overtime budgets, burnout rates, and staffing deficits that never fully recover. According to a 2025 PPIC analysis, Los Angeles County’s sheriff’s department paid over $500 million in overtime in 2024 alone, a direct consequence of chronic understaffing. And LA is not an outlier. It is a preview of what happens when reactive recruiting becomes the norm.
Year-round hiring is the alternative.
The Hidden Cost of Turning Recruiting Off
When an agency stops active recruiting between academy cycles, it does not just pause momentum. It loses it entirely.
Brand awareness fades. Candidates who were loosely interested move on. Lead lists go cold. And when the next urgent push begins, the department is essentially starting from scratch, competing against every other agency that never stopped showing up.
The attrition data makes the urgency clear. A PERF workforce survey found a 42.7% increase in officer resignations from 2019 to 2021, with early career departures seeing the sharpest rise. Departments cycling in and out of active recruiting cannot backfill fast enough to keep pace with those losses.
What Year-Round Recruiting Actually Requires
Sustained recruiting does not mean running full-scale ad campaigns every month. It means keeping the three foundational elements active at all times: visibility, lead capture, and follow-up.
Visibility is your ongoing presence in front of potential candidates. This includes organic social content that showcases department life, a recruiting website that converts curious visitors into applicants, and targeted digital ads that keep your department in front of the right audience year-round.
Lead capture means giving interested candidates a way to connect with your department before an application window opens. Interest forms, email opt-ins, and text-based sign-ups build a warm audience you can activate when the time is right.
Follow-up is the piece most agencies skip entirely. Every lead who enters your system should receive consistent communication until they either apply, are disqualified, or formally opt out. That communication keeps candidates warm and your pipeline full.
Why the Timeline Demands It
Law enforcement hiring is not a two-week process. From initial interest through background investigation, psychological evaluation, medical clearance, and academy start, the process stretches across many months before a candidate ever sets foot in an academy.
That means the candidates you need for your next academy should be entering your pipeline right now, regardless of when that academy starts. If you wait until six months out to begin attracting candidates, you are already behind.
The Shift in Mindset
Year-round recruiting requires treating the recruiting function the way you treat patrol staffing, training, and equipment. It is not a special project. It is an ongoing operational responsibility that requires consistent resources and leadership support.
Epic Recruiting’s online recruiting and strategy services are built around this model, helping agencies maintain constant visibility and lead flow between academy cycles so they never have to start from zero.
The departments filling their academies consistently are not the ones with the most dramatic hiring pushes. They are the ones that never fully stopped.
Ready to break the crisis cycle? Connect with Epic Recruiting to build a year-round hiring strategy for your department.
