Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there has been a shortage of police officers across the nation including in New Orleans.
This week, President & Chief Career Strategist Julie Bauke of The Bauke Group shared the secret to keeping more officers on the force with WWL’s Newell Normand: onboarding.
If you’re wondering what onboarding is, don’t worry. That’s the first thing Normand asked.
“So, onboarding is what happens after the offer is accepted,” Bauke explained. “From that period until the person feels fully integrated into their new role, their new department, their new company.”
She said that it can take months for an employee to fully settle into their role.
According to The Marshall Project, an “analysis of two years of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data shows a steady decline in both law enforcement and local government jobs during the pandemic.”
That analysis found the number of local law enforcement employees decreased by 4% from March 2020 to last April. While WWL reported in January that the New Orleans Police Department had a surge in applications, crime analytics expert Jeff Asher said that the department was only hiring a small fraction of them.
“There were 25 new officers hired last year out of 2,590 applicants,” he said. “You’re looking at one to one-and-a-half percent of applicants being hired.”
Even when those applicants are hired, they decide to leave during the onboarding process Bauke described.
“The truth is onboarding companies have always done a pretty average or below job in in onboarding, it’s just a lot more obvious now because especially the younger generation, they’re not afraid to quit without something else lined up,” she said. “You know... back in the old days, as I say, we would suffer through poor onboarding and kind of, it was sort of a sink or swim sort of thing, eventually [we’d] would figure it out.”
How can the NOPD use this knowledge to its advantage? Listen to Normand’s full conversation with Bauke here to find out.
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