Campus Safety Starts with a Better Hiring Process

Delayed hiring processes cause universities to lose elite security talent, overloading current staff and introducing hazardous liabilities to campus life.

• By Justin Biedinger
• June 02, 2026

When leaders of campus public safety departments discuss staffing, the conversation often begins with vacancies and ends with recruiting. Understandably so. Public safety departments on campuses across the country are being asked to do more than ever.

Respond to calls. Build trust with students and families. Collaborate with administrators. Support mental health interventions. Create a visible presence that helps people feel safe.

But there’s a critical step in the middle of that conversation that often goes overlooked: the hiring process.

For colleges, universities and K-12 institutions across the country, pre-employment vetting is still reliant on workflows built for a different time. Information trickles slowly. Files get bogged down bouncing between too many people. References take too long to gather. Documentation varies from investigator to investigator. Ultimately, the decisions you need to make can become harder to defend— not because your standards are low, but because the process your standards must pass through is disjointed.

That matters on a campus.

When a hiring process extends on for months, qualified candidates eventually move on. They take another offer, transition to another industry or drop out of the process entirely.

Your current employees shoulder the burden. Supervisors fill gaps. Overtime rises. Fatigue follows. Preventive work gets pushed aside by immediate needs. Community engagement suffers because the department is focused on coverage, not capacity.

In campus settings, that strain has consequences beyond scheduling. Public safety departments don't just respond to incidents; they are part of everyday life. They patrol residence halls, student organizations, sporting events and crisis scenes. They work with young adults, parents, faculty and staff. They work in environments where one negative interaction can erode trust, and one overlooked clue can have grave repercussions.

Why Campus Safety Hiring Cannot Be Treated As A Volume Exercise

The ideal candidate for a role on campus may not be the ideal candidate for another public safety environment. Colleges and universities require employees who can think critically and communicate clearly while working in an environment that is more relational, more visible and often more complex than many people realize.

During any given shift, a campus officer or security professional may need to shift from enforcement to de-escalation to student support. That level of acumen doesn’t just happen. Hiring managers need to vet candidates appropriately and quickly eliminate unnecessary delays that may cause strong candidates to look elsewhere.

When people talk about modernizing the hiring process, some leaders fear they are being asked to lower their standards. They should think of it as an opportunity to raise them.

Modernization should allow you to be more consistent with your standards, not less. More likely to catch missing information, not less. Reduce administrative drag while creating a clear and traceable record of what was actually reviewed, when it was reviewed and whether every candidate was held to the same standards.

Speed and rigor are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand.

When a bad decision is made and later challenged, campus leaders should be able to prove that the school did everything by the book. They should not have to defend improvised steps, fragmented documentation or criteria that change from file to file. Defensibility is important. So is the ability to show applicants exactly how the process works.

Consider Starting With A Process Audit

Campus leaders should ask a few basic questions:

• Are ineligible candidates being caught early, or only after hours of staff time have been invested in a file?
• Are investigators, HR teams and decision makers working from a single, defined workflow or a series of disconnected systems that lead to duplicate work and missed handoffs?
• How many manual follow-ups can be eliminated?
• How often are good candidates lost simply because communication stalls? If two investigators handle similar files, are they likely to produce similar documentation?

Those are not technological questions first. They are leadership questions.

Too often, institutions accept hiring friction as normal. It is not. Long timelines, manual workarounds, and inconsistent documentation are not signs of rigor. They are signs of a process that has not kept pace with the mission. When it comes to campus safety, trust, preparedness and accountability all play a role. They should matter to you and every campus institution.

Our mission is simple. Place the best candidate in the right position quicker and with a process your institution can feel good about.

Campus safety does not begin on an officer’s first day or at the start of a shift. It begins much earlier, in the quiet administrative work that determines who gets hired, how thoroughly they are evaluated, and whether the institution approaches that responsibility with the seriousness it deserves.

When campuses upgrade that component of their system, they don't just fill positions. They relieve pressure on current teams, enhance cohesion and establish a safer environment for all.