The Blueprint for Successful Law Enforcement Recruitment with Tom Sye

Transcript

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The gist of it is these companies, the marketing companies.

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They couldn't care less if you filled your vacancies.

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They don't care.

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In fact, it helps them if you don't.

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They can then re-sign up Absolutely.

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You come back and spend a big bucks again.

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So they really don't care.

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They tell you they're doing the sales pitch and this is going to work and all that, but they really don't care.

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That's not their product.

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Their product is not you, something that you're going to go holy cow.

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This video looks amazing.

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There's no way this isn't going to work.

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So you're overwhelmed by how great it looks.

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So when you put it out and it doesn't work, you're left with nothing to figure.

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But that must be something else.

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Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

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Well, welcome back to the show.

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I'm so honored you're here and we have an exciting barn burner of a show for you today.

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On today's episode we have Tom Sye, who is a 20-year law enforcement veteran.

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He's known as the police cop marketer and he is all over the place talking about how agencies can market and then recruit, and we're excited to have him here.

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Tom, how are you doing, sir?

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Doing well.

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Travis, Thanks so much for having me on.

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I'm excited to sit here and talk with you for a little bit.

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Man, I love your content.

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You're like the only guy, anybody, guy, girl, anybody doing this stuff, because law enforcement seems to be so behind the curve on this stuff.

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And people ask me well, travis, why do you always talk about recruiting and marketing and all these issues?

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Well, because I'm a leadership guy.

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But that is leadership.

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I mean, if we don't staff our agencies to the fullest, that is going to hurt communities and hurt agencies.

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And you are leading this revolution.

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I would call it.

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We're trying to educate our agencies and something we've never had to be educated for.

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And I guess I would just start out by asking you you know, what got you interested in this?

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What's your background and how are you sitting here today, kind of the so-called expert in this area?

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Yeah, so this is my 20th year in law enforcement.

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I hit 20 in August.

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Very excited for that to happen.

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Congratulations, that's a good feeling.

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Thank you, yeah, thank you.

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Everybody says things change once you hit 20.

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So I'm waiting for that mindset shift.

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Yeah, yeah, I don't know if it changes, it's just in the back of your mind you could just like leave if you want to, but you don't have to do that.

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So, yeah, I got that coming up.

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But I've worked in backgrounds and recruiting for the past 11 years at my agency and even prior to that I was in broadcast.

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Of course I wanted to be a cop.

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Just kind of go back a little bit here.

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I wanted to be a cop since I was knee high, my dad was a cop and I always looked up to him and wanted to be just like dad.

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But of course dad always said no, no, no, go do something else.

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You don't want to chase bad guys the rest of your life.

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So I did.

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I had a whole separate career.

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I went to a broadcasting school and had a whole separate career in broadcasting and media relations and communications for radio stations and some minor league hockey teams, and that's how I really got into the marketing side of things and learned how to do different marketing campaigns and advertisements, and then again, 11 years ago, started doing backgrounds and recruiting here and it was something we jumped on at our agency.

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I've always been into social media since you know the MySpace days and you know Facebook really became big and Instagram came on the scene.

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It was something that we led the way in the Valley and just kind of kept going from there and really learned by doing and figured out what works for recruiting police officers, what didn't work for recruiting police officers, and haven't looked back since.

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Well, kudos to your agency.

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I often talk about that.

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Our agencies have some of the craziest experts in the world.

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Here you are coming from a broadcasting background and a marketing background and it took them some time but they finally got you in a position in your agency where you're able to mold your expertise with law enforcement.

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I always talk about from a leadership standpoint.

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If you can figure out who you have and put them on the right bus man, they will love their job each and every day.

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And of course, you're smiling every time I see you.

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So I think you probably love your job.

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But you're so good at it because you love this and your agency has been able to sort of mesh that love with what you do and I bet you've had quite a bit of success.

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So you talked about you've sort of figured out what has worked and what hasn't worked.

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Talk about some of your earlier struggles, because obviously I would say seven or eight years ago there was a shift in law enforcement with recruiting, and here's what I talk about.

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I was over recruiting unit about a decade ago.

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So I started seeing this shift early on, where we didn't really have to recruit.

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I mean we would dress up in a uniform and go to a job fair and wave at people.

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The applications just came in, right, we had more applications than we had openings.

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Well, what happened was and everybody wants to talk about the defund police movement and this and that but in addition to that, in 1994, they passed the COPS bill, which was before your time, but they put 100,000 cops on the street through a federal grant.

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Well, this is the time period about a decade ago, maybe seven, eight years ago.

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Those folks are starting to retire and then on top of that we have these high profile events and of course, from a leadership standpoint, we don't respond very well to it.

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That also hurts things to it.

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That also hurts things.

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And then you have the retention issue, where people are leaving their profession earlier than they were going to leave.

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So that's putting a big strain on the front end, which is recruiting.

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So we started seeing that shift and I can remember going to job fairs and nobody even coming up to us and the applications were just kind of slowly going down, down, down and they didn't really catch on for some time.

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That we needed to make a shift.

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I think everybody knows now we need to make a shift in how we do it.

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Now that lends to the problem, tom, where you sort of knew what worked and what didn't work through trial and error.

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A lot of agencies are just they really don't know where to start.

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So what would you tell an agency as far as the biggest mistakes they can make when they try to make this shift?

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And when I say shift, once again it's the job fairs aren't going to help you, the billboards aren't going to help you.

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People don't just apply.

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You have to have a different mindset, a different philosophy when it comes to recruiting.

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So you've made all the mistakes and now you've sort of figured this thing out what would be the things you would tell them to stay away from?

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I guess I can sum it up and I'll get into some details about specifics here in just a second.

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Yeah, we'll get into that.

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Yeah, to go to the first part of this thing is the biggest thing that I see agencies struggling with in making mistakes in is kind of what you just alluded to is they're still trying to recruit like it's 2015.

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It's 2024.

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You have to start recruiting like it's 2024.

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I say it all the time and I'm going to say it a million more times Agencies are just stuck in the past.

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I'm going to go to a job fair and that's going to be enough.

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It's not.

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I'm going to put out a recruiting video That'll get all kinds of eyeballs on my product.

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It's not.

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There's so much more to it.

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Let's put out a fancy website, right, I mean, you could name it.

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I've talked to agencies that put out billboards at bus stations and they've wrapped cars and fancy websites.

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None of it's going to work.

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And what's crazy to me, tom, is you know it, I know it.

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I've seen the research that says it doesn't work, but these agencies continue to do it.

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What do you think's going on there?

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Yeah, I think it's just a lack of knowledge.

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You know we're cops, we're not marketers.

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We're not.

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We don't know what our advertising options are or what they do.

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And for me, I'm a firm believer is that you should never invest in something that you have no idea what it is.

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You should always be educated before you invest in anything, whether it's a marketing product, a vehicle, a new home, whatever it is.

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You should always know what you're getting yourself into.

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And what happens is and I get them all the time at my agency we get emails and mailers and phone calls and people pitching the next, latest and greatest best thing this is going to change your recruiting.

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You're not even going to believe it type stuff and it looks great on paper.

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And then you go to a website and you know you see this fancy HD recruiting video with the slow motion drone footage and here's the SWAT team moving through the smoke and oh, look, now we're petting dogs and horses and now we're playing basketball with the kids.

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It's the same video over and over again we're petting dogs and horses and now we're playing basketball with the kids.

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It's the same video over and over again, but you see that as somebody in command or in charge of things, and you've never seen that before.

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So it looks amazing.

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And you're like there's no way this isn't going to work.

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And then you know the person selling that to you says, oh, this is the latest and greatest.

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And you put it out there and all your friends tell you how great the video looks.

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And hey, chief, this is surely going to work.

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And the next day there's no applications.

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And the day after that there's no applications.

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And the day after that there's no applications.

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That's one solution.

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That's one day.

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Recruiting in 2024 is every day.

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You have to constantly be out there.

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That's where things have changed since 2016 to now, is where you're correct, where we used to just open up and get thousands of applications.

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Those days are gone and they're not coming back, and I don't think agencies quite realize that they're still living in the past.

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Again, the biggest thing that you can do is a very simple three-step formula.

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I talk about this all the time as well.

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To recruit like it's 2024, travis.

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You have to meet your applicants where they're at.

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You have to build a relationship with them and show them why people like them work for you.

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Recruiting 101, that's no different than 25 years ago at a job fair.

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That's where your applicants were at and you'd build that relationship at the table and you talk about all the different things.

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That's changed now and it's all online.

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Now is where this Gen Z and the younger generations are just flooded on social media.

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Yeah, yeah, and marketing and recruiting are distinctly different.

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Obviously, you're aware of that.

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I mean marketing typically is to sell a product.

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We know what the data says seven to 21 touch points to get a decision on buying a product or not buying a product.

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And these marketing companies?

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I wouldn't get into this this early, but, man, I tell you what we are spending so much money with marketing companies and it couldn't be more different than what we actually need, because a lot of these marketing companies are pretty slick, because they're marketing companies, I mean the things they do look great and then what they did is many of them, some of the big players, they sort of branched off with a DBA, have a different section.

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They call themselves police recruiters right, but there's the same old marketing tactics and say, well, how come they don't recruit?

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Well, recruiting is harder, recruiting takes more time.

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There's not as much money in that for these companies.

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There's lots of money in these websites and videos and we're just buying right off into it.

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But give us the big difference in marketing and recruiting venture where marketing is more of a non-personal interaction.

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So you're putting out an ad, you're running a bus billboard or a bench ad or something like that.

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That's marketing.

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It's here's my message, and I'm putting it out there.

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And whoever drives by this bus or this billboard or just happens to hop on my website and sees this video great, they may be interested in a job.

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They may not be interested in a job.

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You're just pretty much throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

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It's a big wide net and you're just hoping right.

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And which that?

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ends up making an expensive net because you're not targeted.

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It is.

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And part of the cost thing, and I don't know.

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I don't have any research on this.

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This is just my thoughts on it, just seeing how things work.

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I would bet a lot of money that I was dead on and defund the police and no one wants to be a cop anymore and these companies came in and they saw an opportunity to make some money.

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Let's not throw any punches.

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That's what it's all about.

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I did a video this morning.

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I don't know if you saw it or not, but the gist of it is these companies, the marketing companies.

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They couldn't care less if you filled your vacancies.

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They don't care.

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In fact, it helps them if you don't.

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They can then re-sign up Absolutely.

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You come back and spend a big bucks again.

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So they really don't care.

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They tell you they're doing the sales pitch and this is going to work and all that, but they really don't care.

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That's not their product.

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Their product is not filling your vacancies.

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Their product is showing you something that you're going to go holy cow.

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This video looks amazing.

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There's no way this isn't going to work.

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So you're overwhelmed by how great it looks.

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So when you put it out and it doesn't work, you're left with nothing to figure.

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But that must be something else.

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It can't be the video that looks great.

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And again, it's because you don't understand what that video is doing.

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You're going to put out a recruiting video.

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Let's just say you throw it up in your website, right?

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How many website visitors are you going to have in a day?

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I don't know.

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If you're lucky, 50.

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If you're lucky, you're going to throw it up on social media.

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Yeah, your friends like it, Everybody who works for your agency.

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They like it, they share it.

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You know, maybe you get, you know, a couple thousand views on it.

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Then what about tomorrow?

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What about the next day?

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What about the day after that?

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So this is where the recruiting part comes in, and what I like to call police marketing is kind of the combination of the two things is where you're just constantly hitting your audience and trying to build those relationships with content and showing why your agency is a special place to work.

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That's what recruiting is now.

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Yeah, and I love you know people will say, oh, travis doesn't believe in marketing.

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No, I think marketing has a role in this, tom, just like you say.

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But without the targeted audience, without the people, without the recruits, using marketing for recruiting is just pointless.

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So the way I talk about it is you build this funnel.

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You need your recruits first, maybe your candidates and maybe then your applicants.

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Then use the marketing to get them excited, walk them through the process, get them to the test, get them to the physical fitness.

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So use the marketing for that, but marketing alone is.

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I mean, if a department spends $300,000 on a marketing campaign, are they going to get a few applications?

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Oh, probably, but it could be done for so much cheaper and so much more efficient with a true recruiting campaign.

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And so I love that mixture.

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You know you call it police marketing, I call it a recruiting marketing interface to where recruiting comes first and marketing, and then you blend this together.

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You could actually recruit without marketing, but you can never recruit with just marketing, right?

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But the best of both worlds is to use the recruiting and then the marketing.

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So, yeah, you've nailed it, man, and you've seen the success at your agency.

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You're not just talking this stuff.

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You've actually seen this successful, have you not?

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Yeah?

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So we've hired.

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So here's I always let people in on a little secret here.

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It's almost embarrassing with the way everybody else is spending money and doing different things and going to job fairs and they have all these things.

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So here's what I can tell you about us is that we've hired in the past couple of years, between both civilian and sworn.

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We've hired almost 200 people.

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Right, we're a four person staff.

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That's a lot of people for a midsize agency.

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The reason that we have so much is because we have a great city council who keeps adding positions to us, so we keep trying to fill those things.

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I have not been to a job.

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I've been to take it back.

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I've been to two job fairs in the past two years.

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Two I have a basic garden variety website, whatever the city signed up for.

00:15:43.596 --> 00:15:44.999
I updated some pictures.

00:15:44.999 --> 00:15:46.380
It is nothing fancy.

00:15:46.380 --> 00:15:47.503
It doesn't have video.

00:15:47.503 --> 00:15:49.446
It doesn't have any of that type of stuff.

00:15:49.446 --> 00:15:54.149
We don't have a recruiting video and haven't had one in the entire 11 years that I've been there.

00:15:54.169 --> 00:15:55.701
I bet you had a few chiefs that wanted one, though right.

00:15:56.451 --> 00:15:57.634
We get asked all the time.

00:15:57.634 --> 00:16:00.181
So whenever we get a new chief, hey, what do you think about this?

00:16:00.181 --> 00:16:03.078
Or they'll get an email from somebody, hey, what do you think about this?

00:16:03.078 --> 00:16:07.640
And I'll just tell them yeah, I mean, if you want to spend the money, we can, but it's a gigantic waste of money.

00:16:07.640 --> 00:16:12.962
And fortunately, they've seen our success and they know that I know what I'm talking about.

00:16:12.962 --> 00:16:17.424
So they tend to go with that idea but yeah, you don't need that stuff.

00:16:17.424 --> 00:16:19.385
It's just is it great to have?

00:16:19.385 --> 00:16:34.701
Yes, but very much like what you were talking about is you got to have, before you get into those types of things, recruiting videos and fancy websites and going to job fairs like crazy, and billboards and whatever else that you want to spend money on?

00:16:35.043 --> 00:16:41.780
Before you can do any of that, for it to be effective, you have to have everything else in place first.

00:16:41.780 --> 00:16:48.245
You have to have a good base for your recruiting, which means you have to have the proper staff.

00:16:48.245 --> 00:16:50.251
So we talked about this earlier.

00:16:50.251 --> 00:16:53.283
Right, you have to have the right resources in the right places.

00:16:53.283 --> 00:16:57.940
So many people don't even have a recruiting staff and they're trying to have a recruiting video.

00:16:57.940 --> 00:17:00.738
Okay, well, great, well, somebody calls up now who's going to talk to them?

00:17:00.738 --> 00:17:04.097
Whoever you know, whoever's in the office and answers the phone.

00:17:04.097 --> 00:17:09.111
You have to have the right resources in place, you have to have a team, you have to have a plan.

00:17:09.111 --> 00:17:15.219
That's the most important is you got to have a recruiting plan on how you're going to fill your vacancies.

00:17:15.219 --> 00:17:19.223
If you don't have that to start with, all the marketing in the world doesn't matter.

00:17:19.223 --> 00:17:19.964
It's not going to help you.

00:17:25.609 --> 00:17:29.701
Yeah, we're kind of stuck in this sort of OODA loop thing where I had a recruiter come up to me in Nevada and I gave this kind of spill in this class.

00:17:29.701 --> 00:17:35.922
She says you're right, we spent $150,000 on a recruiting video and a website and our recruiting got worse.

00:17:35.922 --> 00:17:38.037
The problem is they spent all their money.

00:17:38.037 --> 00:17:40.377
The problem is she's the one that pitched it.

00:17:40.377 --> 00:17:44.480
She doesn't want to go to the chief now and say, oh, I was wrong.

00:17:44.480 --> 00:17:46.377
And we're just kind of stuck in this thing.

00:17:46.377 --> 00:17:52.983
And my concern and the reason I've harped on this so much is because this is a solvable problem.

00:17:52.983 --> 00:17:54.594
We can solve this problem.

00:17:54.594 --> 00:18:01.296
But if we keep spending millions of dollars in the wrong fashion, I'm afraid a lot of agencies are going to be like well, there's nothing we can do.

00:18:01.296 --> 00:18:04.819
We have this recruiting crisis.

00:18:04.819 --> 00:18:05.994
There's nothing we can do.

00:18:06.529 --> 00:18:08.478
And what they're buying, Tom, is a philosophy.

00:18:08.478 --> 00:18:10.597
Unlike if you buy a car, you know what it's going to do.

00:18:10.597 --> 00:18:13.653
If you buy a technology product, you know what it's going to do.

00:18:13.653 --> 00:18:15.134
This is different.

00:18:15.134 --> 00:18:16.957
You can't just buy this and get results.

00:18:16.957 --> 00:18:18.719
You're actually buying a philosophy.

00:18:18.719 --> 00:18:22.643
You better buy the right philosophy or it is off or not.

00:18:22.643 --> 00:18:23.123
And you know.

00:18:23.123 --> 00:18:25.946
Talk about the agency just finished, just had $300,000.

00:18:25.946 --> 00:18:34.076
I can guarantee you there's no way that that chief's going to tell that city council he was wrong.

00:18:34.076 --> 00:18:36.059
Even if it doesn't work, he's just going to say we did all we could do right.

00:18:36.079 --> 00:18:45.801
And so my concern is, if we don't get this right, it's going to really hurt national law enforcement, because the fact is, majority of law enforcement can't spend $300,000.

00:18:45.801 --> 00:18:47.234
And so I don't want them looking at this going.

00:18:47.234 --> 00:18:52.401
Well, we don't have the money to recruit, when what you're saying is that your agency, you have the right philosophy.

00:18:52.401 --> 00:18:54.999
Now, your agency is a little special, tom.

00:18:54.999 --> 00:18:57.393
They have people in place that know the philosophy.

00:18:57.393 --> 00:18:58.776
I think most agencies don't.

00:18:58.776 --> 00:19:03.576
So they need to reach out and understand that philosophy.

00:19:03.636 --> 00:19:05.404
Now, I know I put out a lot of resources.

00:19:05.404 --> 00:19:07.090
Safeguard Recruiting's put out a lot of resources.

00:19:07.090 --> 00:19:09.375
You have excellent resources.

00:19:09.375 --> 00:19:19.443
So tell us, I know you're helping out a lot of agencies, and what is really insane to me is I was involved in EVOC training for many years and we had some success.

00:19:19.443 --> 00:19:20.712
Well, I had agencies contact me.

00:19:20.712 --> 00:19:21.575
Hey, what are you doing?

00:19:21.575 --> 00:19:22.416
What's the secret?

00:19:22.416 --> 00:19:23.519
Send us your curriculum.

00:19:23.519 --> 00:19:24.481
And we were helping them.

00:19:24.481 --> 00:19:36.585
But when it comes to recruiting, a lot of these agencies think well, we'll just hire a company and that's it, instead of finding the departments that are successful and reaching out to folks like you, tom, and going help us out here.

00:19:36.585 --> 00:19:37.445
What's the secret?

00:19:37.445 --> 00:19:41.759
Have you had people do that, or are they just hiring million-dollar companies to help them out?

00:19:42.422 --> 00:19:50.263
Yes, I've had quite a few agencies contact me since I got this thing off the ground and started doing this back in June, last June.

00:19:50.263 --> 00:20:06.151
And it's great, you talk to them and they're so excited to learn and they just they know that that there's a there's something out there, there's something better, there's a better way to do things, and that's what really fires me up and drives me to want to keep doing this.

00:20:06.151 --> 00:20:08.178
Is is just that passion.

00:20:08.178 --> 00:20:09.602
You know, for me.

00:20:09.602 --> 00:20:12.230
I have a passion for teaching and for helping people.

00:20:12.230 --> 00:20:13.855
That's that's, you know, number one.

00:20:13.855 --> 00:20:14.698
I've always been that way.

00:20:14.698 --> 00:20:18.796
I've always liked helping people out and trying to learn something so I could teach somebody else.

00:20:18.796 --> 00:20:22.960
And then, second for me is I'm a cop.

00:20:22.960 --> 00:20:38.398
I want to see our profession be strong for years and years and decades and decades to come, whereas when you enlist the help of somebody who's just a marketing guy, again, they're not bad people.

00:20:38.398 --> 00:20:39.857
I don't want people to mistake me.

00:20:39.877 --> 00:20:40.884
Well, they're doing their job.

00:20:41.045 --> 00:20:43.108
Their job is marketing they're doing their job, but they don't care.

00:20:43.108 --> 00:20:46.319
They don't care if there's cops 20 years from now, they don't, they just don't.

00:20:46.319 --> 00:20:48.576
They couldn't care less.

00:20:48.576 --> 00:20:58.614
So yeah, so when agencies call up and they're just lost, they don't know what to do and you just start breaking down the basics to them and it's like well, do you have?

00:20:58.634 --> 00:20:59.498
an Instagram account.

00:20:59.549 --> 00:21:09.519
That's the one thing that always blows me away when I see these articles and they're on LinkedIn all the time where you see you know this place can't hire and we throw up our hands.

00:21:09.519 --> 00:21:10.875
No one wants to be a cop anymore.

00:21:10.875 --> 00:21:22.335
We've spent all this money and I'm trying to do this the first thing I do.

00:21:22.335 --> 00:21:22.654
It's a fun game.

00:21:22.654 --> 00:21:23.136
You should try it out.

00:21:23.136 --> 00:21:27.648
The first thing I do whenever I see somebody saying they can't hire people is I go to Instagram only the most popular app for 18 to 25 year olds, I don't know.

00:21:27.648 --> 00:21:31.036
Maybe you know people that are trying to get jobs in police work.

00:21:31.036 --> 00:21:33.320
So if you get, there's a first place.

00:21:33.320 --> 00:21:33.741
I go.

00:21:33.741 --> 00:21:36.568
Let's see if they have a police page.

00:21:36.568 --> 00:21:38.473
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

00:21:38.473 --> 00:21:40.097
Let's see if they have a recruiting page.

00:21:40.097 --> 00:21:43.154
99% of the times they don't have a recruiting account.

00:21:43.154 --> 00:21:44.538
So it's like are you even trying?

00:21:44.538 --> 00:21:45.441
You're not even trying.

00:21:45.441 --> 00:21:48.472
That's where your applicants are they go to?

00:21:48.613 --> 00:21:50.155
but they're on all the job boards.

00:21:50.155 --> 00:21:55.403
I mean, come on, you have to go to page 24 on the job board to find it, but they're on the job boards, right.

00:21:55.984 --> 00:21:58.457
Right, and job boards are great.

00:21:58.457 --> 00:22:01.299
I found my job 20 years ago, in 2004.

00:22:01.299 --> 00:22:07.260
I found my job on a job board, tom, I got to tell you man, you really crack me up online.

00:22:07.309 --> 00:22:10.493
I want to tell everyone to follow you on LinkedIn and we'll give all your socials in a minute.

00:22:10.493 --> 00:22:19.444
But I love what you do because I see these, because obviously we're connected on there and some department will have a nice little flyer right.

00:22:19.444 --> 00:22:23.036
We're hiring and you unlike me, who just goes?

00:22:23.036 --> 00:22:24.019
You're an idiot.

00:22:24.019 --> 00:22:24.942
What are you doing?

00:22:24.942 --> 00:22:29.559
You just go and you say good luck with the recruiting campaign on every one of them.

00:22:29.559 --> 00:22:31.022
What are you doing there?

00:22:31.022 --> 00:22:32.011
Are you just are you?

00:22:32.011 --> 00:22:33.915
Are you needing them a little bit, or are you?

00:22:33.915 --> 00:22:37.163
Are you truly that positive of a person to do that?

00:22:37.730 --> 00:22:39.718
Yeah, it's, it's, it's positivity.

00:22:39.718 --> 00:22:44.400
Positivity won't hire anybody, will it it's not going to hire anybody.

00:22:44.400 --> 00:22:49.558
And I know full well when I see those flyers with a million words nobody's reading that.

00:22:49.579 --> 00:22:50.401
You're scrolling right up.

00:22:50.401 --> 00:22:51.022
I mean you read them.

00:22:51.022 --> 00:22:52.875
We read them because we're cops.

00:22:56.049 --> 00:22:58.114
We want to know what's getting paid or the benefits, but no one else is reading them.

00:22:58.114 --> 00:22:58.815
No one else is reading those.

00:22:58.815 --> 00:23:01.641
But it is one of my pillars of this company when I started was positivity.

00:23:01.641 --> 00:23:20.692
There's so much negativity in law enforcement and you know, as you know, there's two things that cops like and it's changed in the way things are, so that just breeds negativity.

00:23:20.692 --> 00:23:21.718
So I just want to be positive and it's it's.

00:23:21.718 --> 00:23:21.919
I feel.

00:23:21.919 --> 00:23:22.663
I feel bad that that they're trying.

00:23:22.663 --> 00:23:23.125
So that's the thing is.

00:23:23.125 --> 00:23:25.353
I see agencies trying and that's why I comment Cause you're trying.

00:23:25.353 --> 00:23:30.576
You're putting a post out on Facebook or on LinkedIn or on, you know, instagram or wherever that you're at.

00:23:30.576 --> 00:23:31.491
You're trying.

00:23:31.491 --> 00:23:32.375
You're putting this post.

00:23:32.375 --> 00:23:35.374
It's not working, but you're, but you're, you're giving it a go.

00:23:35.374 --> 00:23:39.138
So I just want to try to encourage you and say, hey, I saw your ad.

00:23:39.138 --> 00:23:41.728
Just keep going, keep doing it.

00:23:41.728 --> 00:23:45.609
The problem is with those is they put it out one time and then you never hear from them again.

00:23:45.609 --> 00:23:45.990
Yeah, I mean.

00:23:46.010 --> 00:23:48.778
I'm envious because I love that attitude that you have.

00:23:48.778 --> 00:23:51.893
I think we could all use more of that, and it always lifts me up when I see it, even though I'm thinking Tom.

00:23:51.893 --> 00:23:56.660
And it always lifts me up when I see it, even though I'm thinking Tom knows full well this isn't going to work.

00:23:56.660 --> 00:23:58.122
He's just being super positive.

00:23:58.122 --> 00:24:00.526
So let's get back to the scam artists.

00:24:00.526 --> 00:24:01.991
I will be nice about it.

00:24:02.011 --> 00:24:04.700
I'll just call them scam artists at these marketing companies that are just doing their job.

00:24:04.849 --> 00:24:06.336
I mean, listen, good for them.

00:24:06.336 --> 00:24:12.163
You can be a multimillion dollar company taking people's money and not solving a problem, solving a solution.

00:24:12.163 --> 00:24:19.667
But so there's no doubt that these agencies are getting nonstop calls and contacts from these companies saying we can fix your problem.

00:24:19.667 --> 00:24:24.220
Yeah, what could you tell an agency how they could vet them?

00:24:24.220 --> 00:24:26.095
What could they look at?

00:24:26.095 --> 00:24:32.339
If they get these random emails or phone calls where they can vet them to make sure that they could actually work, what would you have them do?

00:24:32.339 --> 00:24:34.536
Ask one simple question.

00:24:35.951 --> 00:24:38.598
That question is I don't have a budget for recruiting.

00:24:38.598 --> 00:24:39.500
What can you do for me?

00:24:39.500 --> 00:24:40.592
That's good.

00:24:40.932 --> 00:24:42.931
That's nice, yeah, and I would.

00:24:42.931 --> 00:24:47.762
I will parlay that in because I'm involved with Safeguard Recruiting that has actually done a lot of recruiting campaigns.

00:24:47.762 --> 00:24:53.111
They can put a dollar figure to applicants because they've done so many campaigns, so ask them.

00:24:53.111 --> 00:24:55.133
You can also ask them if it gets down to it.

00:24:55.133 --> 00:24:56.153
Because they've done so many campaigns, so ask them.

00:24:56.153 --> 00:24:57.075
You can also ask them if it gets down to it.

00:24:57.075 --> 00:25:04.061
Okay, give us your latest, give us your case studies on the last five or ten departments, on what it costs for a lead and what it costs for a recruit.

00:25:04.622 --> 00:25:09.227
Marketing companies won't do that because, as you know, tom, it's about clicks to a website, right?

00:25:09.227 --> 00:25:17.781
Yeah, it's not about people, it's about clicks, and so they're either not going to answer or the number they're going to come up with.

00:25:17.781 --> 00:25:19.953
It's going to be extreme, like, for instance, a three hundred thousand dollar campaign.

00:25:19.953 --> 00:25:24.613
Yeah, they may be able to give them some applicants for forty five thousand dollars an applicant, right?

00:25:24.613 --> 00:25:26.376
I mean, it's going to be great.

00:25:26.376 --> 00:25:29.473
So, so that's the difference, really, in marketing and recruiting.

00:25:29.473 --> 00:25:31.561
Marketing will promise web clicks.

00:25:31.561 --> 00:25:39.178
Recruiters are going to promise people and, what is amazing to me, in law enforcement, we understand this when we're hiring executives.

00:25:39.178 --> 00:25:41.530
I see the recruiting firms, the headhunters.

00:25:41.530 --> 00:25:47.894
I've been contacted by some that are out looking for chiefs or assistant chiefs or captains recruiting firms.

00:25:47.894 --> 00:25:51.633