Our last recruitment campaign in 2015 identified there had been a lower than expected number of applications from the Catholic community and again a lower than expected number of Catholic applicants being successful in the actual recruitment process.
We commissioned Deloitte, our independent recruitment company, to undertake a piece of research to identify and understand barriers affecting recruitment. Whilst the research focussed on barriers to members of the Catholic community joining the Police Service it also looked at a range of other factors including gender, age, socio-economic background and nationality.
As a result of the findings, we are now making a number of changes to the recruitment process; these include redesigning the ‘Join PSNI’ website, reducing the timescales for anyone applying and introducing an online initial selection test.
This research has been shared with the NI Policing Board and Police Federation ensuring we can collectively make every effort to attract a diverse range of applicants from all sectors of our community.