PHILADELPHIA, PA - The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) has replaced its cumbersome hiring process with a digital system that can get candidates into the police academy in less than two months.
Over the years, the hiring process for becoming a police officer has changed drastically. When Captain John Waler joined PPD decades ago, prospective officers rarely applied to more than one department, let alone four or five, which has now become the norm across the country.
Today, those looking to become police officers apply to as many as six police departments at once before choosing where to start their careers, and due to staffing shortages following the "defund the police" movement, there is fierce competition to hire them.
For PPD, after years of vying for recruits amid those staffing shortages and waves of officer departures, its ranks are finally rebounding. Walker, who oversees the police academy's recruiting efforts, credits that in part to a faster and more efficient method of getting potential officers through the door, as Governing.com reported.
The department got rid of its long-standing tradition of paper applications and is instead using software that speeds up what was once a months-long hiring process. Before, getting an applicant from an introduction with hiring managers to the first day of police training could take up to seven or eight months, going as long as a year, Walker said.
"The process to get hired here was cumbersome," he said. "It took almost 118 days after you applied for us to even make contact with you. That was a big problem."
After rolling out the software, called Guardian, the department says it is ushering recruits into the academy in as little as 54 business days. They hope to reduce that span even further in the future. While Guardian is not solely responsible for the increase in applicants, Walker said it has nudged the department closer to record recruitment numbers.
In 2025, the department enrolled 468 officers in training at the police academy, the second-highest number in the 21st century. Walker said there has been no drop in the quality of applicants, adding that the software it uses maintains high standards and is used by more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the country.
A year before 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, PPD was at 99% full staffing, according to Walker. Those numbers soon began to dwindle as diminished interest in policing combined with an uptick in officers leaving the force. In 2021 alone, 581 of the department's more than 5,000 officers hung up their uniforms.
While the department now stands at around 83% of full staffing, Walker said officials are beginning to see something of a reversal. Recruitment drives have increased in frequency to more than several times a year, yielding between 1,000 and 2,000 applications each round.
Justin Biedinger, who founded Guardian Alliance Technologies in 2016, said that the company contracts with around 1,300 of the nation's 18,000 police departments, and that Philadelphia is one of its largest cities.
Biedinger, a former Stockton, California, police officer, said the service not only has quickened hiring timelines, but also has increased scrutiny of officers who might not be cut out for a career in law enforcement.
The software allows recruiters to see whether an applicant has been reported for misconduct by another department, and the company uses AI to scan social media accounts for red flags such as inappropriate content, guns or drug use.
To Walker, the biggest benefit of the new system has been the ability to move quickly and hire people who otherwise might have accepted jobs in other departments while they awaited word on applications to work for PPD. "In today's world, people are not going to wait a year and a half to join this profession, as I did," he said.
Comments