More Than Public Service: A Field Experiment on Job Advertisements and Diversity in the Police

Advertisements focusing on the personal benefits of applying to government jobs are more effective in eliciting candidates to apply than advertisements focusing on public service motivation.

• The most effective treatment messages were the “Challenge” message, that asked if they are up for the challenge of becoming police officers, and the “Career” message, which emphasized the long-term career options associated with the job. These messages each increased the likelihood of applying to the police by approximately 0.4 percentage points, more than doubling the likelihood of applying to the police.
• Advertisements focused a serving or impacting the community did not have a statistically significant effect on increasing recruitment compared to candidates who did not receive any advertisement at all (p>0.05). 
• The advertisements focusing on the personal benefits of applying to government jobs were 3 times more effective in eliciting increased applications to the police academy, with the greatest effect on women (p<0.01) and people of color (p<0.01).

These findings shed light on recruitment strategies that could be used to address government worker shortage as well as the lack of gender and racial diversity within public sector jobs.

This study conducted a randomized controlled experiment on 21,807 households by assessing whether various postcard mailing strategies would be effective in recruiting people to become police officers. These households and addresses were selected from a database of registered voters. This guaranteed that these individuals would have been at least 18 years old and without a criminal record, thereby meeting the minimum eligibility requirement for becoming a police officer. If a household had two eligible individuals, then the postcard would be addressed to the person in the household who was the youngest eligible person, so that each household only received one postcard. Using random assignment, 9,907 of these households received a postcard using one of four advertising strategies (emphasizing: the challenge of the job, the ability to serve the community through the job, the impact on one’s own community through the job, or the job security that comes with a long-term career). This random assignment was stratified by race, meaning that the proportion of people of color were kept the same throughout all the conditions because it was an important metric within the study. These postcards all featured the photo and signature of a black male police officer from the local police department, making it more likely that the household receiving the postcard would interpret the message as coming from the black police officer. In the remaining 11,900 households, they received no postcard advertisement, allowing the researcher to gauge what would be the “normal” rates of police academy applications from those households.