Tribune News Service — This past year, the city of Greenville’s human resources department worked through implementing a digital hiring process in an effort to reach more applicants and thereby increase the pool of talent available for vacant positions.
At a Greenville City Council work session on Tuesday, Director of Human Resources Euriah Brown said that the paper applications the city had been using had such a limited reach that some positions were remaining vacant for as long as six months.
Then in July 2022, when Chris Smith became chief of the Greenville Police Department, Smith was a proponent of switching to a digital recruiting platform.
In 2025, when the department found itself with 10 positions to fill, the city’s human resources department decided to pilot a 100 percent digital recruiting process for the police department.
“We believed that the police officer entrance exam was a prime opportunity for us to test the capabilities of this digital recruiting process, because it was only for entry level or lateral (transfer) police officers,” Brown said.
Over the two months that the police officer positions were posted online, the city received nearly 300 applications, 97 of whom eventually qualified to take the police officer entrance exam, of which about 65 passed.
“This has been a game changer for us,” Smith said. “From the time that I got here, digital recruiting was something that I really wanted to do, because in this day and age people can see your website, see your application and they get interested in it … so it made a tremendous difference.”
In December, Greenville PD hired six officers with prior experience in other departments and four entry-level officers.
“The lateral officers help us, because it takes about a third of the time … usually within three or four months (versus a year to a year-and-a-half for completely new officers), they’re on the street and on their own, so it helps us fill our ranks a lot quicker,” Smith said.
After successfully piloting the digital hiring system with the police department, the city’s human resources departments implemented it city-wide in October. Brown estimates that since then, the city has received more than 500 applications for positions outside of the police department and has already hired more than 20 people.
“The pilot process really showed us what the system is capable of doing,” Brown said.
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City of Greenville Pilots New Digital Hiring Process
What to Know:
- Greenville piloted a fully digital hiring process for its police department in 2025, receiving nearly 300 applications and filling 10 officer positions, including six with prior experience.
- The success of the pilot prompted a citywide rollout in October, with the human resources department receiving more than 500 applications and making 20 additional hires since.
- Officials say digital recruiting has significantly reduced hiring timelines and expanded applicant reach, helping the city fill roles that previously remained open for months.
