May 20, 2026

Law Enforcement Recruiting Solved with Doug Larsen

Law Enforcement Recruiting Solved with Doug Larsen
Law Enforcement Recruiting Solved with Doug Larsen
Courageous Leadership
Law Enforcement Recruiting Solved with Doug Larsen

Send us Fan Mail In this special episode, we talk with Doug Larsen about why police staffing shortages keep getting worse even when agencies spend big on recruitment marketing. Doug has spent the last 5 years solving law enforcement recruiting for countless agencies and his raw, authentic truth, is something that every leader must hear. Here are just some of the topics we discussed: • separating marketing metrics from police recruitment outcomes • why we call it a leadership decis...

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Send us Fan Mail

In this special episode, we talk with Doug Larsen about why police staffing shortages keep getting worse even when agencies spend big on recruitment marketing.

Doug has spent the last 5 years solving law enforcement recruiting for countless agencies and his raw, authentic truth, is something that every leader must hear. Here are just some of the topics we discussed:

• separating marketing metrics from police recruitment outcomes
• why we call it a leadership decision crisis, not a recruiting crisis
• Doug’s path from trucking recruiting to building a law enforcement recruiting system
• the mindset shift agencies need to make when applicants no longer “just show up”
• how small departments can compete with limited budget and limited manpower
• the most common internal roadblocks, including HR friction and recruiter skepticism
• why automation and applicant tracking systems protect recruiters from being overwhelmed
• cutting drop-off by removing account registration and early high-friction steps
• re-engaging warm leads over time to convert interest into applications
• real examples from departments like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Larimer County

Watch The Webinar mentioned in the episode

Contact Doug Larsen for a free consultation


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Chapters

00:00 - Why Staffing Is The Real Crisis

04:56 - Meet Doug Larsen And Safeguard

05:27 - From Trucking Recruiting To Policing

07:20 - Marketing Spend That Does Not Hire

09:11 - The Mindset Shift Agencies Resist

11:07 - Making Modern Recruiting Accessible

12:50 - Pushback From HR And Recruiters

14:30 - When Success Overwhelms The Team

17:47 - Automation That Keeps Candidates Engaged

20:28 - Partnering With Recruiters Like Milwaukee

23:08 - The Process Problems Driving Drop-Off

25:31 - Removing Friction With Mobile First Hiring

27:44 - Re-Engaging Leads And Better Messaging

30:02 - Five Years Of Results And What Matters

Transcript

Why Staffing Is The Real Crisis

Travis Yates

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today. And I wanted to give a quick introduction to what we're going to do today. If you've been following us for any amount of time, you understand that we're a little bit different in the leadership space, specifically the law enforcement leadership space. We don't just talk theory. We don't just bring guests on and provide you memes and slogans and things like that. We're not trying to sell courses. We do all this stuff, of course. We we do have courses and we do have seminars and we do a lot of things. But really at the heart of what we do here at Courageous Leadership, which is why we call it courageous, is we try to actually solve problems. We try to bring you practical problems. So we're not stuck in this box where we can only talk about certain things, or there's certain things that are off limits, or we don't want to offend anybody. That's not working if you can't tell. Just to take you back, you know, last summer uh we spent several months studying the issue with consent decree, specifically the Phoenix Police Department. We brought you a lot of content on that, a lot of articles on that. It was a huge issue in the leadership space. And then just recently, boy, I've been overwhelmed. We announced what we were doing with focus training, field observable cues for unknown situations. We discovered that leaders in law enforcement were sort of ignoring some training that can really help. They were grabbing on to other trainings that's actually doing the opposite. And we're still doing work on that. We brought that to you. We spent the last six months doing an exhaustive study on that, and we brought you those results. And we're actually kicking off in July all over the country doing that training. And I sort of gave you the history on that in one of the previous podcasts. And today's guest, we've had him on the show before, but I wanted to kind of give you some context to why I'm doing this today. And today we're going to be talking about recruiting. And we've had Doug Larson on, he's a CEO of Safeguard Recruiting a couple of times before. But I was recently down in Texas with Doug, and we ran into a podcast studio and filmed a few episodes for his platform. And I I just listened to it this morning and I thought, man, it's so raw and it's so authentic and it's so true. I had to bring it to you. It's not a sales pitch by any means, but it's one of the actually it's the biggest leadership issue we have. If you can't staff your agency, if you can't retain your personnel, what are we doing? And I just recently participated in a police one webinar. I'll put the link uh here in the podcast with Doug and uh Chief Lance Arnold of Broken Arrow, who he'll be on the podcast soon. What a great guy he is. Captain Walker with Philadelphia, all these sort of uh Tom Rizzo, all these just geniuses when it comes to leadership stuff and recruiting. Man, it was we did a survey and literally like 30% of the people on the webinar, and there were a lot of people on the webinar, said they were down more than 20%. And I'm thinking to myself, how is this still happening? And I think you'll hear the explanation from Doug on why it's still happening. Friends, we don't have a recruiting crisis, we're having a leadership decision crisis. We're making poor decisions when it comes to recruiting, and it's not solving itself. In fact, it's getting worse in a lot of places. And so uh just to be transparent, I mean, as I said, I try to solve leadership issues where I am, and so I started off helping Doug as a trainer, and I'm doing more and more with him because what he has done here is revolutionary. And when I listen to what he said, I just thought to myself that you had to hear this. It's so rare in law enforcement. I spent 30 years in the profession, I talk to vendors and companies all the time, and there's always an angle. Man, when you listen to this, you're gonna agree with me. There's no angle here. Doug has just solved this issue, he's doing his best to help agencies. And I need you to listen to this because you may be fine when it comes to recruiting, but you probably know an agency or you know a leader that where they're struggling, and I think it's they just don't know. Or maybe they're listening to some personnel that maybe is telling them the wrong thing. We this is about a 25-minute discussion with Doug. If you can barrel down and listen to this, you're gonna know crystal clear the issue and how to solve it. And man, it was an honor to talk to Doug about it. It's an honor to bring it to you. Thanks for being here. Without further ado, let's get going.

Announcement

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

From Trucking Recruiting To Policing

Travis Yates

Doug Larson, how are you doing? Doing excellent. Here we are on the verge of the five-year anniversary of Safeguard recruiting. Um pretty remarkable what you built here. Uh you retired from Utah DPS, career law enforcement officer, and you launched Safeguard. Um, tell us about it. Tell us how it's been going.

Doug Larsen

Yeah, it's been quite the journey since we we launched Safeguard and kind of an interesting beginning with that after retiring out of law enforcement. I still was doing a lot of training, traveling the country, doing some simulator work, but I got involved in recruiting on the trucking side, which taught me a lot because trucking is a lot different than law enforcement. We did they have a turnover rate that's 100% or even higher at times. So they have retention problems, and recruiting is a big issue for them, but there was a lot to learn from that. And in doing that truck driving recruiting, I learned a lot about processes that work, and but I was still involved in law enforcement because of my background and traveling the country, talking to people, including you. We we ran into each other. It was at a baseball game one night out of when I was out of state and talking about needs of departments. Um, the there's been this that they're having trouble recruiting. It's not the same as it used to be, where enough people would knock on the door and come in, you'd have a long list of candidates. But law enforcement was having the same trouble as trucking companies in recruiting enough people to work for them. So as traveling around the country, we started talking to a lot of departments that would ask, hey, will you take a look at what we're doing because we're not getting enough people and we need help? And when we started analyzing what these different departments were doing, um, Safeguard was really born out of that, out of a need or an ask by law enforcement that will you come in and will you start helping our industry because we're having the same recruiting issues and they were. And that's where Safeguard kind of started out of is a need and an ask from law enforcement and just having that background.

Marketing Spend That Does Not Hire

Travis Yates

So Yeah, I know when I can I remember the night you told me about this recruiting thing and trucking, and and I was frustrated because I was still on the job. I was a high-ranking commander at my agency, and I was watching my agency spend thousands of dollars in marketing, and they weren't getting anybody. And I remember asking the question to the staff at our recruiters, and I said, Well, how many people are we hiring based on this marketing campaign? And when they came back and they go, Well, we don't know, but we're our website's getting a lot of hits. And so when you told me this, I immediately thought, well, Doug, we have a marketing problem in law enforcement. We don't have a recruiting problem, but we're making the wrong decision. And so you launched this, but you launched this in the middle of a recruiting crisis post-2020 that everyone was talking about. Did you have any issues because so many agencies were using marketing and they and they weren't working? Did you run into any sort of roadblocks talking to those agencies?

The Mindset Shift Agencies Resist

Doug Larsen

Well, the marketing companies have created some issues because they've taken a lot of money from different departments and not produced. And from your agency that you worked for and a number of other large departments, they spent a lot of money. I mean, Philadelphia is one of our clients, and they spent over $3 million and they didn't get better using a marketing company. Now they had some great collateral that they could use, but it wasn't making their recruiting improve. In fact, I think they were getting worse. And so when you look at that and you look at marketing departments are bringing impressions, they're bringing maybe traffic to your website, but is it the right traffic? And how are you capturing that traffic? There's a big difference in there. So marketing companies have been a roadblock because they say they're helping with recruiting, but they're not helping with recruiting. Matter of fact, they're just uh taking a lot of funds and misusing it.

Travis Yates

And so when you started out, you spent probably the first years just educating. Uh, you know, you you traveled the country, you taught at seminars, you taught at conferences, you put your entire seminar online for free. It's still there for people to watch. And from a critical standpoint, I would say, man, you're giving a lot away. Uh, but is that why you did it? Because you needed to educate first because of what had happened in the marketing industry?

Doug Larsen

Yeah, there needs to be a mindset shift in in the way we're looking at recruiting and we're we're looking at bringing people in. And that's what it was. It's it's taking it to a next level, bringing in tools that they're not using now, processes they're not using now. So education was huge. And and our both our backgrounds are training. We've always been educators, we've been trainers, and we've given back to the industry. So it's just a natural set for me. Now, sure, people say we're giving away too much, but I don't believe that. I think it's the whole law enforcement community, the whole public safety community needs to change. They need to change their mindset and they need to come to a next level of how they're going to recruit or they're gonna fall behind and they're gonna have these deficits.

Travis Yates

Yeah, so this isn't just a business for you. You see an entire shift that needs to occur for law enforcement recruiting. We're no longer in the 90s to where applicants just came. Applicants do still come, but it's not enough to fully staff agencies. You need you're looking at trying to shift an entire industry that there's a different way of doing it, whether they use safeguard or not. Correct.

Doug Larsen

Yeah. The mindset's got to change. We we can't sit back and wait for people to come to us. We can't put them in these long processes that we expect them to sit around and wait six to nine months for an answer from us, and that they're gonna be there willing to work for us. There are a lot of people that want to be in law enforcement. It's uh there's just the way we're approaching them has to change uh and the processes once we do approach them and get them interested.

Travis Yates

Now, the media focuses in on the larger agencies and the recruiting issues of larger agencies. Uh but this this this has happened in agencies of all sizes. And one thing that I've been so impressed with from the very beginning is you made sure, and you this is always your mantra, that you want everyone to have access to the tools that Safeguard provides, access for everybody. And so you run campaigns and you run recruiting campaigns with very small budgets to very large budgets to the needs of the agency. Why was that so important that you gave access to every agency in America?

Doug Larsen

Yeah, I I don't want anybody to get left behind. When I first started out in law enforcement, it was with a small department. And if you look at the amount of departments in the United States, the majority of them are small departments and they don't have the resources, one, manpower-wise to recruit properly, two, budget-wise. They can't, they don't have the same budget. So we don't want anybody getting left behind. And I want it to be available to all. That's why we have different tiers in our software. So you can access our software and you have the same tools available to you as the large departments. And the same with soliciting officers. I want that to be available to everybody. And we we make it happen. We help a lot of departments out. And we've helped some small ones out where we did a complimentary just to get them back on their feet and going.

Pushback From HR And Recruiters

Travis Yates

So when you were talking to these agencies early on, I'm obviously a brand new company. You have a philosophy that very few have. Um, you know, when you were running across a lot of the their background with marketing and dealing with marketing companies that wasn't working for them, did you encounter roadblocks when you first started talking to agencies about what you were trying to do?

Doug Larsen

Oh, oh yeah. It's uh anytime you come in and try and change a mindset, change a tradition, it's hard, right? It's a challenge because the easy road is the path that you're already on. But that doesn't mean it's going to work and it's not working. So yeah, we got a lot of pushback early on. Um, people that have tried marketing companies, but even the resistance from hey, you have a proven process you're bringing in. And so we we get pushback from, let's say, HR. HR does not want us to come in and change their role or step on their feet at all. And we're not. We what we're doing is we're helping the departments get enough people to talk to, enough quality candidates that they could choose the right people. And so we we get pushback from those areas where it's just a change, right? It's something they have to adapt to and they have to get used to. Once they understand what Safeguard's doing and how we're helping, they come on board and they embrace it. Um, recruiters have also had to change too, because we're gonna ask them to approach candidates differently, communicate with them differently, and track that communication. So there's some changes there, but our process is proven. And if you do it properly, it will eliminate leaks of candidates and it it will help you be more successful.

When Success Overwhelms The Team

Travis Yates

Well, proven is correct. Uh you run hundreds of campaigns and and you know that if they do what we ask and suggest, it just works from the largest agency you can think of to the smallest agencies, it works across the board. Uh but at one time it was just proven in your head. You just knew from the trucking industry, I think this can work in law enforcement. I think I see the problem here. At what point early on in safeguard recruiting did you go, I know we have it. I know we have a solution, which is huge. You have a solution to a huge problem.

Doug Larsen

Yeah, when we we started going out with with some some of our clients and and seeing some big successes with them. And you can look at a department, let's take Larimer County out in Colorado. They do a phenomenal job. They they have a system, they listen to all our consulting and and they've tuned their system to where they communicate really well, and they they hire. They hire really well. We've we've seen them get as many as 20 hires in a week, and they they have accepted the process and the change, and they're they're a model department. We source candidates from them, we hand them off, and those guys take it from there, and they do really well.

Travis Yates

Yeah, Seth Graham's been on this show, and I I don't think I'm gonna give up any secrets here, but their agency is spending less than $10,000 a year, and he's quadrupled, quadrupled his hires. And it's because he's just said yes to what we suggested. And we have other clients that they can't say yes, but he just said, whatever you think is best, I'll do. So he was open to that. How important is that for people in a recruiting role to be open-minded that if they're having a problem, they're not getting enough applicants that it's not that it's their fault, but maybe it's just doing things that the way we've always done them, it needs to be a little bit of a change.

Doug Larsen

Yeah, having an open mind like Seth, and he embraces technology, embraces tech uh communication, um, that's very it's huge. It it goes a long way and it's proven in his results. Um, I wish we could clone him and send him out to a bunch of different departments. But then you'll get other departments that can only do parts of the process. They may be held up by HR, different things will will make it so they can't use it all. But as long as they embrace what they can, they're still going to be successful. And we will help them minimize those problem areas that might be costing them some candidates. Or so it's um we'll do what we can to work within the system. We we understand government, we've been on both sides of it. So we we understand there, there's rules, there's different hierarchies and different ladders, and you can't, you know, push some in different areas because maybe you don't control it. So we we just give best practices and work around that.

Travis Yates

One of the best stories I've heard you told was uh you had a client early early on that was getting about 20 applicants a month, and after they hired you, they he got over 200. And he got so upset, he literally fired you. He got he was too successful because you didn't have the time to do it. And is that why you're so big on the technology behind Safeguard Connect? Because they can easily manage what's coming in. And it and that way, more applicants and more candidates doesn't make your job harder. It doesn't get any harder, it gets more efficient.

Automation That Keeps Candidates Engaged

Doug Larsen

Yeah, you're exactly right. So we we've learned a lot over the years, and we cannot overwhelm a department and what they can handle. One, we don't want to spend their money unnecessarily on candidates they can't process. Two, is we need to automate this whole system, and we've done that really well. So we have an automated nurturing program. Um, we we automate a lot of the process for the recruiters because their job is to kind of step in and be a mentor and keep people going in the process, but we want to keep candidates engaged and and rolling through the process and keep them informed. So we have automated much of what we do. And the reason behind that is efficiency. When you get like Philadelphia is getting over a thousand candidates a month, and they only have a couple recruiters, they cannot contact everybody on their own. So they need us to automate the system, and we do, and those messages flow to the candidates, keep them engaged, keep them moving along to each step. And it it's very helpful because it without automation, without the technology involved, it would be very easy to overwhelm these departments. And a lot of departments don't have a high number of recruiters.

Travis Yates

I think it's important to note because I I know that you've talked to some recruiters that think that you're somehow trying to replace what they do. And it's not the truth at all. The truth is you want recruiters to do what they do best, which is to make personal contacts with people. Keep doing, keep going to job fairs, keep going out in their community, keep doing exactly what recruiters traditionally have done, but you put a layer on top of that that gives them more people to talk to and a much more efficient way to do it.

Partnering With Recruiters Like Milwaukee

Doug Larsen

Yeah, we we want recruiters to see us as their best friend, their partner, their ally. We come in and we pick those pieces up that a department doesn't have maybe the specialties in, the recruiters don't, because they they rotate out a lot. So we we want to come in and we want to be that piece that you don't have in the department and work with this will get you promoted. You you know, you'll be so successful in your recruiting department that it does well for your career. But yeah, recruiters, they don't need to be scared of us because we're gonna help them with the processes, we're gonna help them get enough quality candidates to talk to. And we're the we're their ally. And we're gonna make it real easy. If they do want to continue to go out to career fairs, we'll get them the QR codes, we'll give them the way to capture information through technology. Don't have to do it on paper, you don't have to do the clumsy follow-ups. We'll we'll get it all into our system and and automate it for them. But that has been a little bit of a pushback. Sometimes recruiters think, uh, I don't want an extra set of hands in here because you know that changes the way I work. But we're we're just here to help.

Travis Yates

You know, I think Milwaukee Police Department is is is a great example of that. Uh we obviously have been working with them for close to a year now, very, very successful campaign. They're very, very pleased. And we fulfilled a lot of the elements. You know, we did videos for them, we did websites for them, we're getting them candidates and applicants each month. But they're their recruiters are always coming back and going, hey, can you can you make this video 15 seconds or 30 seconds? We're running a commercial, can you do this brochure for me? Can you do this flyer? That's not actually in what the contract says, but you have just said, yeah, we'll do it. I mean, it the customer service, I think, is what really sets you apart is when you are a partner with those recruiters, you'll do pretty much whatever they ask. And I've seen that, and really not making any money on it, you know, at all.

Doug Larsen

Yeah, it might be outside of our scope, but that's okay because the final mission is to get the officers hired and get them fully staffed. And Milwaukee's a great example of that because their whole team is so tuned and tied into what the recruiting process is, from the leadership down through the recruiters. And we love getting that feedback from them because the recruiters are talking to people, and the feedback helps us tune the process, tune their campaign, and make it more successful. So, yeah, if we've got to make some extra ads, we've got to make some different videos or make some tweaks, that's great because they're listening, they're looking, and they're and they're really buying into what they're doing. And Milwaukee has been successful in its top-down leadership all the way through the recruiters. They're phenomenal.

Travis Yates

You often said the recruiting crisis is a myth, and it is, because you once you run the Campaigns and just to be clear, when because people will ask this question, when you're bringing candidates to an agency, that's not from a list. Those are people that have seen the ad that you've out but done outreach to in those areas that say, Yes, I want to work for them. And so they're very warm leads, they're very warm applicants. It's not just some general person. Uh, but you've had some people that have sort of accused you of that, I think, right?

Doug Larsen

Yeah, and and that's one thing you got to be careful with is you don't we run custom campaigns. Everybody that wants to work for you, they they they know they're putting in for your department, and but there's companies out there that'll just send send you a list of names. That's really easy to do. We have we have names too. We can send you names. Those people aren't worth looking for a job, they're looking for a job from you. So it's uh yeah, it you gotta be careful with that type of what's available to you. We run custom campaigns and we capture information so you can follow up, and we even help with that follow-up by sending some texts and some emails, and it's uh highly successful.

The Process Problems Driving Drop-Off

Travis Yates

So it's not really a recruiting myth, it's more of a making the right decisions towards what your recruiting is. But are you still seeing a pattern of some things agencies are doing that if they would just stop doing what they're doing, things would improve?

Removing Friction With Mobile First Hiring

Doug Larsen

Yeah, so it's not really a I I don't even think it's a recruiting crisis. There's not a lack of people that want to get into law enforcement right now. We're finding plenty of people that want to get into law enforcement. The problem is departments not willing to shift and change and change their approach. So how do they go out and find candidates? Do they just want to put an ad on a job board? You might have a little bit of success there for a month or so, but then as your ad gets further back, it gets on page 11 or something. What we're doing with that ad on the job board is we're making the person come and find us. That's kind of the old school way of doing it, right? I'm gonna do all my actions are going to make you find me. And that's not the way Safeguard operates. We take your ad and we 24 hours a day, seven days a week, go out and find the right candidates for you, and we filter those candidates. So if they don't meet your qualifications, you never see that name and you don't waste your time with them. So it's not a recruiting crisis. It's one, it's a process prior crisis, and that starts up front with how departments are trying to source candidates. And then once they source candidates, how are they communicating with those candidates? And that's that's where the big drop-off starts coming in. If if you look at some of these departments' processes and they they demand you give us a 60 plus page application right up front before we'll even talk to you, they they they want a bunch of information, but they're not clear to the candidate on what the process is and what the outcome is. It's frustrating for a candidate. So every time that candidate has to register and they have to get on a computer, they have to get a bunch of information, they have to wait around, they don't hear from you. If they don't hear from you, they feel like that you're not interested and they move on. Um so we got to remember in public safety and law enforcement, we're not just competing with other departments, we're competing with other industries. And we need to change our processes.

Travis Yates

Yeah, and I think that's why Safeguard Connect, your applicant tracking software, which really is a talent acquisition platform. I mean, it's it's really good, but just the software alone is averaging doubling the folks that agencies can talk to because I think it because it removes that friction. Because every friction point, you're losing people. And it's just, I mean, you we've seen as high as 90% drop-off because agencies will make people register for an account before they take a job. And you know, it's just this new generation. They're just a lot of them are not going to do that. If everybody listening or watching, you don't like to register for things, right? You've got to have some real trust to be able to register and provide all the information. So what the software, what your platform is doing is it's just it's just removing that friction, does it not?

Doug Larsen

Oh, it's definitely removing that friction. And our software can do really anything you need it to in the process. It can take full applications, it can take partial applications, can communicate with the candidates, and it's smooth, it's easy. We can keep them on their phone where they're comfortable and it's right in their hand, and they don't have to go find another device. They don't need to register for it, and they get their information in there, and it allows the recruiters too to communicate back and forth with them. It's all tracked. So if you and I were working with Canada and I'm off one day, you can see what my communications are. You can pick up where I left off and you can keep the Canada involved and answer questions. We we got to remember that getting into law enforcement and getting into the law enforcement hiring process is scary for somebody on the outside. They don't understand it. And these dead periods of no information or asking for a lot of information from us, it can scare people off. The other thing that happens too is you get candidates if if you're not communicating with them and answering their questions, will self-eliminate. They think they've got something in their background that they can't go on in the process when it's not really true. Or they might have a life event that says, hey, I can't move forward in the process now. But if we use Safeguard Connect to keep in contact with them, they might come back three months, six months, nine months down the road, and then they're back in the process once their life events change.

Re-Engaging Leads And Better Messaging

Travis Yates

Yeah, that's a great story out of Philadelphia. You've been with them in a couple of years, uh, you know, major department that was really struggling. In fact, that marketing campaign that they had spent millions of dollars on their Captain Walker said they actually got worse. And so they hired you and you started implementing these processes. And kind of a cool story is the throughout the time, they had about 5,000 people that hadn't applied yet. You had acquired those candidate names for them through the ads, but not everybody applies. And so you went back late last year, right before Christmas, and you hit all those 5,000 people with Connect, which is one click, one touch, send the email, and their application spiked. Because I think making an application is a big decision for people, especially for law enforcement. And so they're not always ready at the time that the name comes in. And so what your software is able to able these agencies to do is they can go back and hit them. There's another great example from Seth out of Larimer County where he just sent everybody uh on July 4th, he just hit the entire list and said, Hey, happy July 4th. And he got applicants from that. So that's what the software is able to do. There's no human being that can keep up with that in an Excel spreadsheet or an email. And so literally, this software for some agencies, depending on the size, is as little as a couple thousand dollars a year. And they're and they they they're just exponentially increasing their applicants.

Doug Larsen

You're exactly right. If you do nothing else, you should get into Safeguard Connect because it's going to streamline your process, make it efficient, but keep you in contact with these candidates. And there's a number of those types of examples. Uh Crestwood, he did the same thing, a happy holidays. He got three applications out of it and just over the Christmas break. And it worked well for him. Cleveland was able to generate a lot of interest off their old list by using the automated messaging. And so Safeguard Connect is something that I think every department should have. It's a tool they cannot shy away from because they need it, the efficiency that goes with it. We we have too many departments out there that are still tracking on whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets and individually trying to communicate through the recruiter's email. And you cannot keep up, you can't keep track, and you can't get consistent messaging. That's another thing we help with too is the copyright on the messaging. Those messages have to be dialed in and write to get activity and get people to move forward.

Travis Yates

Yeah, you go into such fine details on that. You know, you look at the messages you get from from things you buy, stores you buy from, and the way those messages are written are written for a reason. And you go into those such fine details because you're trying to pick up every applicant you can at every stage. You know, I just think it's important that to for you to reflect. I mean, we started this podcast with sort of the verge of the five years doing this, started with nothing, uh, started the company, uh, no awareness whatsoever. Most of the profession, almost all the profession, was going the wrong direction, like my agency using marketing. And you've mentioned a ton of your clients now, Milwaukee and Philadelphia and Cleveland and all these departments you've made inroads in and helped them staff up. I mean, this is I just want to just reflect and let you know that this is more than just a recruiting company. You're making community safer.

Doug Larsen

Yeah. And that's part of the goal, right? We we came from a law enforcement background, so we understand both sides of the equation. We understand the purchasing, we understand the troubles in government, and we also understand what it's like to get hired from the outside. And it's been quite the journey. It's been it's been interesting to watch how Safeguard from the original idea continuously to evolve because it's got to constantly get better and keep up with the latest technology. And the we have to do that for the departments to keep growing, but uh it's been a fun journey, and uh I love to see what Safeguard's turned into.

Travis Yates

Doug, this has been great. Congratulations on the five-year anniversary. And we're gonna come back and we're gonna do this again next week, and we'll be hearing about you about more on what you have in the future.

Doug Larsen

Thank you, Travis. It's always good to talk to you.

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