Civil investigators on the rise A case study of recruitment processes and their consequences in the Swedish Police Authority

Abstract

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of how recruitment processes can appear and how these processes may affect the labour pool within a chosen setting - the Swedish Police. The study will firstly focus on a descriptive narration of the recruitment processes of civil investigators by following their entrance into the Police, and secondly to explore what consequences such recruitment processes could have for the current police labour. The foundation for the study is of a qualitative character, investigating the recruitment process from four different angles: an HR perspective, a recruiting manager perspective, a recruited employee perspective and a perspective from the police union. Data has been collected by conducting 18 interviews in total and additional written material has been collected in the form of relevant documents, contributing to secure a justifiable mirroring of the occurring recruitment processes. By using a theoretical framework consisting of boundary work, results are explicating how these processes are being structured and the consequences affecting the police profession. The theoretical tools that boundary work provide, help to detect recruitment boundaries and making them visible and exposed. The study identifies a recruitment process that is in many ways destructive to the police profession but also showing a process that highlights internal irregularities, exposing consequences and stressing the future enforcement of the current recruitment system. This paper provides new insights on how recruitment process can be performed in a manner that deviates from most of the fashionable recruitment methods of today. The paper may inspire to a broader discussion concerning how recruitment process can be interpreted and the detection of consequences that deviate from the initial plan.