The changing demographics of job candidates and the need for managers to tailor their management styles accordingly is an important concern in today’s workforce. But how we recruit in a multicultural society has to change as well.

In policing, the traditional means of recruiting that have suited us well for more than 150 years are no longer appropriate. Newspaper advertisements, “shopping mall” recruitment booths and the twice-a-year university or college job fairs just don’t meet our needs.

Applicant pools are changing — not only in terms of education, experience and age. Potential recruits now come from communities that simply don’t view policing as a career option or as an honourable profession. This is one of the major reasons why outreach projects will fail if we don’t let go of the old ways of recruiting. They will also fail if we do not address retention issues.

I would not suggest that we have to convince people to become police officers; candidates must already possess the desire to wear the badge, otherwise the spirit isn’t there to enable them to do a good job.

What I would suggest is that the policing spirit is indeed in many of our new community members — we simply need to learn how to nurture it and at the same time bring about organizational change that will support it.

Police services have a crisis to address: a lack of potential candidates to fill increasing vacant positions. To recruit new applicants in Canada’s fast-changing communities, police organizations need to anticipate candidates’ lack of knowledge in three important areas: their knowledge of the job, their understanding of the competitive process into which they enter, and their awareness of what happens after they are hired.
 
Police services that recognize the complexity of recruiting in today’s Canada and in their communities in particular will put the resources and expertise required where it is needed. Traditional means of recruiting, which for the most part required not as much effort in recruiting as in processing files, are no longer effective. It’s now absolutely essential for recruiters to have an awareness of, and an ability to work with, the changing demographics of Canadian communities, in terms of education, age, religion, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation and culture.

The leadership required to support the ever-changing approaches to recruiting is also crucial to the future successes of police services, and that includes moving beyond the usual rhetoric about wanting to reflect the diversity of the community. It’s time to bring such statements into reality.