Andrew Avelino got lucky.
As a deputy with a shorthanded sheriff’s agency in Southern California, he was working lots of overtime. As it does to so many in law enforcement, that encroached on his sleep. He was functional but fatigued. And on not one but two occasions, that contributed to minor accidents when he got behind the wheel.
On neither occasion was anyone seriously hurt, but the incidents left Avelino highly attuned to the dangers of fatigued driving and the secondary impacts law enforcement’s current hiring challenges can have on overworked officers.
“That’s why I’m passionate about the hiring piece,” said Avelino, now vice president of sales for Leadline, whose modernized recruiting platform helps law enforcement and other major industries fill their vacancies. “And that’s why I love our software: because it helps these departments get butts in seats faster so they can avoid things like that. Once you hire the people you need, then you can address the overtime and burnout and all the other stuff. It all connects to hiring and retention.”
Create a lead bench of talent
Leadline is a technology platform designed to help law enforcement agencies recruit smarter, faster and more cost-effectively. Its arrival is timely in the post-COVID-19 and post-George Floyd era, when law enforcement agencies are recruiting in a competitive landscape and personnel shortages are at crisis levels.
A 2023 Police Executive Research Forum report found officer turnover is outpacing recruitment. Since 2019, resignations have surged by nearly 50%, while retirements rose by about 20% through 2022.
In April 2023, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) hosted a meeting in Washington, D.C. to assess the condition of law enforcement recruitment and retention and consider how to update processes to align with modern requirements, communities and workforces. Their findings were stark: Many agencies still rely on spreadsheets or even pen and paper to power their recruiting processes. Additionally, the Society for Human Resources Management reports 92% of applicants abandon processes that are lengthy – and traditional police hiring processes can certainly be that – and not mobile-friendly.
Leadline, launched out of a high-volume staffing firm, uses automation, data science and strategic tools to streamline hiring and keep applicants engaged and advancing in their journeys. Its technology reduces hiring costs by up to 40% and simplifies processes through a user-friendly, mobile-optimized platform that has four main components.
The first is a unique combined approach to applicant tracking and candidate relationship management. A customizable five-minute prescreening application initiates the Leadline process, feeding the top of the funnel and simplifying prescreening and shortlisting top prospects. Tags, links and files can be added as departments sort their needs and possibilities, and candidates who move ahead can then be exported to more than a dozen top applicant tracking systems used by police HR departments.
Importantly, once candidates are in this system, they stay there – for future reference, circling back and perhaps hiring at a later point, when they’re a better fit.
“You may get 50 individuals who could have gotten the job, but maybe they don’t graduate until next year or smoked pot once in the last year,” said Leadline COO Chandler Waldis. “What often happens is they sit on ice in an e-mail inbox for a year, and when they’re eligible, no one goes back to say, ‘What about those people that could have qualified last year?’ We use this tool to basically create a lead bench of talent so that over time you don’t have to always start sourcing leads from square one. Applicant tracking will track where they are in the process – you don’t want somebody sitting there for four months not knowing, because they may take another job, and now your pool is smaller.”
‘A good experience along the way’
The second aspect to Leadline is its job marketing capabilities, which can supplement job postings with photos, video and other complementary content designed to be more engaging to job-seekers.
“We basically take a black-and-white job description and inject colors, content, pictures, photos and videos,” said Waldis. “Those are things that are going to complement the job description and make someone go, ‘Wow, that looks like a great place to work,’ not, ‘I saw a job description and it looks like every other police officer opening across the country.’”
Leadline also allows nurturing of these relationships through integrated texting and emails. The communication suite behind it provides multiple options to help keep prospects engaged and less likely to drift away as the process advances. Common messages can be programmed and sent automatically.
“If you don’t keep people informed, they’re going to go somewhere else,” Waldis said. “Government is government, and you can’t move mountains overnight, but you can remember to let people know where they are in their process and give them a good experience along the way.”
The final component is the provision of advanced analytics around the hiring process, including not just raw numbers but aspects like cost per hire, drop-off rates and other metrics that can help guide an efficient process.
That reflects a growing recognition among police agencies that hiring is a business and today requires an approach that’s more formal and quantifiable than in the past.
“Departments might not know how much money they’ll need for it. We can actually tell them because we know based on historical data,” said Waldis. “If it costs x to fill five roles, and now they’re growing by 10 roles, it’s probably going to cost x times two. So they can determine how to manage that and secure that budget.”
Similary, a high drop-off rate – candidates who begin the process but don’t finish it – may suggest the need for a shorter or faster hiring process. Studies show engaging applicants within the first 24 hours significantly reduces those rates.
“Speed to engagement is the biggest thing,” said Avelino. “Let’s get these individuals in the door ASAP, communicate with them, make them feel valued and get them through the process.”
Another recruiter, without the cost
That’s a dramatic improvement to a process that historically can take months. At Avelino’s department, it routinely took 6–9 months to get a new prospect from first application to the streets; in his case it took 10.
Leadline’s potential to improve that was what induced him to join the company after an injury prematurely ended his law enforcement career.
“For departments, it allows them to modernize and optimize their entire recruiting process,” he said. “We give them the ability to source, attract, engage, communicate and streamline their recruiting, while allowing them to track and measure their costs. They have the visibility to easily see where everyone is in the process and start forecasting what their next academy class might look like. Right now those kinds of insights require manual processes.
“That’s also true of the communication piece. There’s a ton of email, a ton of ‘All right, you can call someone.’ There are departments I’ve been trying to get a hold of for months, and they have dedicated recruiters with dedicated mobile phones, and I can’t reach them. What if I was actually trying to apply? Well, our software allows you to still capture that stuff and engage with those people. It essentially plays the role of another recruiter without the additional cost of actually hiring another person.”
For more information, visit Leadline.
