In this episode, Dr. Travis Yates discusses his recent trip to Las Vegas, where he teamed up with SAFEGUARD Recruiting for an eye-opening seminar. This episode peels back the curtain on the evolution of law enforcement recruitment, a journey that has taken Yates from commanding a unit to confronting the stark realities of today's recruitment crisis. Reflecting on the seismic shifts since the 1994 COPS Grant, we explore how the arrival of fresh faces into the workforce demands we rewrite the playbook on attracting top talent. Listen closely as we unpack the essential role leadership plays in this pivotal process and how Yates' own epiphanies have reshaped the way we reach potential candidates.
In this episode, Dr. Travis Yates discusses his recent trip to Las Vegas, where he teamed up with SAFEGUARD Recruiting for an eye-opening seminar. This episode peels back the curtain on the evolution of law enforcement recruitment, a journey that has taken Yates from commanding a unit to confronting the stark realities of today's recruitment crisis. Reflecting on the seismic shifts since the 1994 COPS Grant, we explore how the arrival of fresh faces into the workforce demands we rewrite the playbook on attracting top talent. Listen closely as we unpack the essential role leadership plays in this pivotal process and how Yates' own epiphanies have reshaped the way we reach potential candidates.
Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.
Travis Yates:
Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you're spending a few minutes with us here today and it's just been such a blessing to see so many people that are regular listeners here on the show and getting the comments and the feedback and the emails. I'm very appreciative of that. We try to work hard to bring you very timely information and resources that can help you in your leadership journey. Today's going to be a little bit different than most. We're not going to have a guest.
Travis Yates:
I spent a while since I've done just a general update of what's going on and I thought I would cover some of that where we've been, what we are doing and what we will continue to do in the months to come. I just arrived home from Las Vegas, nevada. I've been there a couple times in the last couple of months. This last trip was a little bit unique. I taught a recruiting seminar and I do that with Safeguard Recruiting and I want to kind of explain how I got ended up there, because it really is a fascinating story. You know people will ask me well, what are you doing this recruiting stuff for? I thought you talked about leadership and listen folks. Here's the reason I'm doing this and I will help out this company as much as I can. I've already filmed a bunch of training information for them. I will travel and do seminars for them and talk about recruiting to their audiences they have, because when it comes to leadership, there's not an important topic than staffing up your agency or organization. I mean, can you imagine that right? If we don't get recruiting right, nothing else we talk about is really going to matter, and I have sat back long enough and watched us play silly games with this recruiting issue, and it, on one hand, is extremely frustrating because there is an answer to this and not a lot of people want to listen. But on the other hand, it's also exciting that I found a company that is offering to help and solve this issue, and so I wanted to just kind of give you an update. I know I've done a few of these in the past. I've interviewed these gentlemen before. If you want to kind of go back on the podcast list and you can look for recruiting in the topic, you'll see a couple of those interviews. But it is a fascinating story and I kind of want to back up to where I sort of figured out.
Travis Yates:
Something wasn't quite right About 10 years ago I was placed in command of a recruiting unit. Now that was one of several units I was in charge of and, as most commanders you know, you may be over certain units that you don't always know a lot about. So you sort of trust the people in those units to try to inform you and educate you, and so you know I hadn't thought much about recruiting. My department had a recruiting unit, didn't really think about it. They would go to job fairs, travel the country, things like that, talk to people at different events. We had plenty of applications, everyone had plenty of applications until obviously we didn't, and we didn't do a really good job looking down the telescope, so to speak, when in 1994, the COPS grant, signed by Bill Clinton and endorsed by now President Joe Biden, put 100,000 cops on the street. Well, about 30 years later, guess what ends up happening to those 100,000 cops? Yes, it's retirement time At the same time, about I don't know, three or four years ago. We all know what happened. And so all this sort of converged and combined that with the new generation of employees. This isn't just a cop problem, folks. The kids today working age are different than the kids before. That's not a bad thing, but it is something you better pay attention to and you better revolve your recruiting efforts around it. And so everything has pretty much changed in the recruiting world.
Travis Yates:
But the problem is we haven't changed and about 10 years ago this was already kind of happening. We weren't getting the same number of recruits we used to get. We were still able to staff up because, you got to remember, when I came on, there were 200, 300 percent of applicants versus what we needed. You never had to really recruit. We said we recruited, but the fact is applicants were going to come no matter what. We saw that starting to decline and I vividly remember my recruiters coming to me and they said, hey, we're going to a university and it was one of my alma maters.
Travis Yates:
I said would you like to come to this recruiting fair? I said, sure, it's a couple hour drive. And we took three or four recruiters there, a couple cars. We paid the fees to get in. We obviously gas staff salary, you name it right. So we're probably in this thing for three $4,000. And I sat there all day and I think I saw three people, three people and it was kind of the same way. There was people from Texas and all over the country. There at this recruiting fair Same thing Wasn't hardly anybody there.
Travis Yates:
And so I get home that night and I'm kind of thinking about this. And so I get back to work the next day and I asked the recruiters. I said, hey, is that kind of what you should have expected? And they were like, yeah, yeah, that's it, it was just like the norm, right? I said, well, did you get their contact information or email? They said, oh no, we just sort of told them who we were, you know. And so I knew that something wasn't necessarily what it should be, though I didn't really know the answer.
Travis Yates:
And then, when the so-called recruiting crisis hit, I can remember I wasn't recruiting anymore, but I can remember being at a staff meeting and the recruiters were kind of bragging about our thousand we were spending several thousand dollars a month on a digital recruiting campaign and they were bragging about all the website traffic we were getting. But I remember thinking, well, what does that have to do with recruiting? You know you could drive website traffic, but are you driving the right traffic? And I made a statement one time after I heard this. I said, well, okay, that's great, but how many recruits did we get and they couldn't answer the question. And so I really sort of knew something wasn't right. And three years ago Doug Larson had formed Safeguard Recruiting Doug's a retired Utah DPS officer, and Jake Peters who is the technology brain behind that operation and what happened is they were involved in truck driver recruiting. It was after Doug had retired and they learned this recruiting business.
Travis Yates:
And that's what I think law enforcement doesn't understand. This is not some game you can play. I saw just this week, you know, miami Beach rolls out of Royals Royce to help with recruiting. You know, I see another department that's coloring crayon books at a McDonald's. I see another department putting billboards up and other departments getting fancy websites in Washington DC. Has they won the recruiting video of the year at the same time with the lowest staffing in history? Well, you don't see that in the private industry they actually hire recruiters because there's a skill to it. It's a high level skill. They actually hire recruiters because there's a skill to it. It's a high-level skill, right?
Travis Yates:
I don't have time to really go into it a lot in depth, but the idea that we could just put a website up or put a video up or put a billboard out there and just expect people to apply. That's kind of insanity. And now here we are, years after this. We should know that the ICP just came out with some data. It said that 75% of the law enforcement agencies were seeking outside help with recruiting and, at the same time, 65% had low staffing Folks. That's called a clue. If two-thirds of the departments are getting outside help but they're not getting fixed, what kind of help are you getting?
Travis Yates:
And so what I loved about what Doug brought to the table is is he brought actual recruiting. And with that said, it's been hard to get the attention of agencies. Because, think about it, man, I like that website, I want that cool video, we want that Rolls Royce or whatever it is. And then your recruiting is not solved and your mindset is well, it can't be the video, because I like the video. Well, this we're talking about the new generation here, folks, what we like isn't what maybe other people like, plus, it's almost like you're throwing spaghetti on the wall. Right, are you? Are you really going to get enough people that drive by a billboard going to apply or going to go to a website and apply and it just doesn't. Didn't, never made any sense to me. And so what I love about what safeguard does, and they're the only ones doing this for law enforcement. Now the private industry does this.
Travis Yates:
The odd thing is in law enforcement, when we hire for executives and you see this all the time police chiefs and captains and things like that, we don't put a website up, we don't put videos up, we don't put billboards out there. What do we do? We hire recruiting firms. I see these posts all the time. I've been contacted by some of these folks and you hire a recruiting firm to go out and find good, qualified candidates and they bring them back to the department. But for the line officer, the new hires, we don't do that. No one exists. But Safeguard to do that and I don't anticipate anybody else will because these marketing companies which is who's doing these websites and videos are making crazy money. Crazy money, I mean, it's unbelievable the money being thrown around and they're not really in the business of solving the problem. They don't necessarily want to solve the problem right, because they keep getting paid if the problem's not solved.
Travis Yates:
And we're now starting to see some of these agencies that spent. I talked to somebody just a few weeks ago. They spent a quarter of a million dollars on a website, a video and some what they call SEO. You know, we drive traffic to your website which, by the way, it's not recruiting still and their recruiting got worse right and they had to kind of look in the mirror and say, man, is this really what's working? And we're starting to see more and more departments understand that. We've also seen more and more departments that you know did the website and video and then they go well, we need a new website and video and they pay another couple hundred thousand dollars.
Travis Yates:
But I think, at the end of the day, us as a profession, we as leaders, are going to have to understand there is a skill set in recruiting. It's a specific skill set. It's one we don't typically have. You better find the right people to do it, and that's not as easy as just throwing a website out there and so so what I love about what Doug and Jake have done over at Safeguard and it's why I'm helping them, because it is a solution is you call them and you tell them how many you need to hire and they quote that. That's really amazing. I mean, it's not that it's not as expensive as you'd think. I think I saw one of their clients were getting $27 per qualified applicant. You know, meanwhile you can, you can imagine if you spent $200,000 with marketing how many applicants you could get right. But they, they and I'm not going to go into their processes they're they've got, uh, they're going to roll some uh, extended training out, uh, a certification class for recruiters. We found this out, actually in Vegas. Like, we had recruiters in the room and they said you know, they put me in recruiting, but there's no place to get training for this. And so these guys are. They were already in the middle of doing it, but they're putting out together an extensive full day online course on how to do this. So, not, it's not necessarily about hiring them. You can actually get the course and learn what recruiters have to know. So I'm excited about this.
Travis Yates:
But it's just a paradigm shift in law enforcement, where we never really had to recruit, even though we called ourselves recruiters. Right, trust me, we would have filled the departments whether we had recruiters or not. That's just the way it was for so many years. Well, now, because the things have changed, we better change how we do it. And don't get me wrong, I mean, these guys still will produce websites and video, but they use it for the marketing arm of recruiting and not recruiting.
Travis Yates:
And so what happens is is you need candidates first, then you hit them with the marketing and that nurtures them to applications and on down the road, and it's amazing, man, they've been doing this long enough. Now to where you should see their success. I'm talking agencies that haven't had 50 applications in a year are getting 100 in a month for not a lot of money. It's really insane when you actually put the processes together with this company, what can happen? So I'm helping them because they're doing it for the right reasons, and that's what I was doing out in Vegas. And if you want to see more about them and I actually filmed a free training series with Safeguard you can just go to their website, safeguardrecruitingcom. I'll put that in the show notes and spread this around, because most agencies are still struggling and I keep going.
Travis Yates:
Man, there's an answer right there. Like you don't have to struggle, but it's just taken a long time to sort of shift the profession that way. I have confidence it's going to happen because, quite frankly, it has to happen. We don't want to keep policing in this manner. Frankly, it has to happen. We don't want to keep policing in this manner, being short-staffed and those there having to work so many hours. There's a downhill repercussions for that.
Travis Yates:
But I was also in Vegas to go on the Blue to Gold training podcast and I've sort of been someone that has sort of been pulled in two different directions in recent years. So I do almost everything I do is in leadership. But for about the last 10 years I sort of had this class I sort of considered my hobby class called Seconds for Survival, and this is a class on pre-intern indicators. It's human behavior, human analysis. It essentially is what it is, without going into too much detail. It's a way to highly predict what someone's going to do before they do it. And I have noticed in recent years when I do this, because this class is popular on the conference circuit, I do a lot of narcotics conferences. It's just sort of a separate thing I do. My main focus has always been leadership, but this class has become so popular and I enjoy doing it. It's very video intensive, it's fun, it's participation by the audience. It's a fun class to do.
Travis Yates:
But I sort of thought a few years ago I need to sort of back out of this and focus all my time on leadership. But the problem is I've been going into classrooms in the last couple of years. I'm running into officers that have never even heard of this type of training and this is not new folks. I've tried to put a new spin on it. We try to make sure it's enjoyable and it changes your life, and we actually have had people said it saved their life. I mean we've gotten some great testimonies off of it, but apparently in many areas we're not teaching these things, and this was something 20, 30 years ago we were taught in the basic academy, and so that really put a burden on my heart that I needed to do something about that. At the same time, whenever your attention's directed in two different ways, you can't focus completely on one thing. I think everybody understands that, and so blue to gold found out about the class we had some discussions about six weeks ago, and so I was in Vegas to essentially sign on the dotted line. We're going to start providing seconds for survival through Blue to Gold training. That's important for a couple of reasons Administrative work on the class Essentially, I get to show up and teach the class.
Travis Yates:
They're going to handle all of that. They're going to handle marketing, they're going to handle the selling, the class, percy. It's going to actually put the class in more places than I would have normally done. I would normally not. It would. It would take a lot for me to actually go and do that class if it was going to get in the way of the leadership class. But with them involved, that class is going to be seen by more people, by more law enforcement professionals, and that's what needs to happen and I don't have to worry about all the business side of that particular training. So I'll get to focus full time on leadership.
Travis Yates:
We have a couple of book projects in the mix. I'll fill you in at a later podcast about those. I'm hoping to spend the summer finalizing some of those. But that was sort of the big announcement in Las Vegas. Blue to Go announced it on the podcast. I'll link that up here in the show notes but they haven't officially announced on the website yet. You got to hear about that first. As soon as they do that. If you'll follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram, instagram is Travis J Yates. Linkedin is Travis Yates, 1744. Just type in there Travis Yates, leadership. It would probably come up. I'll probably post that information there. But it was a good trip, quick trip two days, taught a recruiting seminar and then went over to the podcast, did a little bit of filming with my videographer. We'll get some of that information out there too.
Travis Yates:
If you're following us on the other pages, you can find all the things we do off travisyatesorg and in particular, of course, the podcast is linked there. But in particular, we do weekly articles. I keep telling people about the articles. Now that has picked up a lot of steam.
Travis Yates:
But, man, if you subscribe to those articles every week, you're going to get something that I think is really going to help you, right, and, uh, it's really easy to do. In fact, you don't have to go to travisyatesorg, but that's sort of the hub of everything. You can actually go to www. courageouspoliceleader. com and you'll see that, and you can actually put your email in and it will just weekly. Every time article comes out it just sends you a quick email. But, once again, probably the easiest way to find all this stuff is at www. travisyates. org. You can find everything from training to podcast, to articles, to anything else that we're going to be doing, but we wouldn't be able to do any of it without you. So I'm grateful you're listening. I'm grateful for the encouragement, grateful, the support. I'm having the time of my life. All thanks to you. Thank you for listening. Just remember, lead on and stay courageous.
Intro/Outro:
Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at www. travisyates. org.
