Be a hero, save lives, join LVAC!

Great job by the Lancaster Volunteer Ambulance Corps (LVAC)  in producing this professional video demonstrating their capabilities and dedication to the community, just in time to celebrate their 60th anniversary of service to the Town of Lancaster and Village of Depew NY.

With lots of images of their hard-working team, radio traffic voice overs and realistic looking mocked up emergency scenes, the video matches their clean and professional website in doing it right in motivating citizens to get involved and volunteer with this active emergency services agency.

Check out their video and visit: www.lancasterambulance.org.

The Hiring Pool is Open – Leland NC

Advertisement for Hiring Pool

Leland Volunteer Fire/Rescue Department, Inc. is accepting applications for our 2013 hiring pool. This pool of applicants will be used to fill any part-time or full-time hiring that the department may need for 2013. Once the pool is created it will be used for all vacancies in 2013, until all qualified applicants are exhausted. The applicants shall possess one of the following:

NC Fire/Rescue Commission Firefighter II, Emergency Vehicle Driver, and Hazardous Materials Level I (Operations) and NC Office of EMS Credentials as an EMT- Basic or EMT-Intermediate.

Loudon County VA Hiring

Loudoun County VA has posted a paid Firefighter/EMT recruitment  to their website at: www.loudoun.gov.

FIREFIGHTER/EMT

Recruitment #13-F136-322

Date Opened:

12/18/2012 8:00:00 AM

Closing Date:

1/2/2013 5:00:00 PM

Hiring Range:

$40,925

Department:

FIRE & RESCUE SERVICE

Job Type: Open and Competitive

Full/Part-Time: Full-Time

Eligible For: Full Benefits

Schedule: Varies

Reg/Temp: Regular

Draft Choices

Volunteer fire departments, whether they realize it or not, compete for recruits. Sometimes with other volunteer fire departments but most often with a busy home life, other community organizations, volunteering opportunities and a wide array of social activities.

What if our recruits, like in college recruiting, were in competition with other recruits wanting to be selected by our fire departments? Would we see more or less candidates? More or less qualified? Or are they already in competition with each other?

More importantly, what can we learn from college athletic recruiters like the NCSA who set up this registry for potential recruits? Do you use language like: “SEIZE the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – and change your life” to describe the benefits of joining your volunteer fire department?

NVFC Launches new Junior Firefighter Recruitment Video

The National Volunteer Fire Council has launched a new recruitment video aimed at attracting young people to the volunteer fire service. Funded by a grant from Tyco, the video shares testimonials from several existing junior firefighters, leveraging the power of referral from these young adults.

The NVFC page that introduces the new resource also includes insight for marketing your local junior firefighter program: http://juniors.nvfc.org//itemDetails.php?itemid=24

Are You Ready to RecruitNY?

SHARED COURTESY OF FASNY and Nell Killoran, Senior Editor, The Volunteer Firefighter [www.FASNY.com and www.abcideabased.com] Images created or modified by FireRECRUITER.com

Erie County is supporting their 94 volunteer fire departments in their VolunteerNY efforts by offering free design and marketing assistance

Recruiting and retaining manpower is one of the greatest challenges, if not the greatest challenge, we face in the volunteer fire service.

To help address this issue, FASNY created and launched the Recruit NY campaign last April in 2011. Hopefully this rings a bell for you and your department was able to draw in some great new recruits from the event. If your department did not participate last year, this is your year to get involved.

As you may or may not remember, the campaign’s objective was primarily to implement a statewide recruitment initiative during National Volunteer Week in April 2011. This new approach saw FASNY, the New York State Association of Fire Chiefs, Association of Fire Districts of New York State, Volunteer Fire Police Association of the State of New York and County Fire Coordinators Association of the State of New York all join forces to assist fire departments in expanding their recruitment efforts. This was a first-of-its-kind type of effort and a very successful one, at that.

Video Killed the Recruitment Star

OK, maybe that’s not how the song goes, but I have to thank my good friend Bill Schumm over at FireGeezer.com for doing my FireRECRUITER work for me.

In his February 17th Morning Lineup features (and updated on February 20th), he discusses and demonstrates the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of using video as a recruitment tool. While his perspective on why we face the recruitment and retention challenges we do are certainly part of puzzle, the value of his commentary lies in the subliminal call to action that we need to be more creative in creating the solutions.

Certainly, a recruitment video with appropriate visuals and a good, solid message can be effective, but FireGeezer proposes that we need to do something about our culture, our society, to inspire and perpetuate volunteerism. I couldn’t agree more.

However, I feel that before we can tackle the 300 pound elephant of societal viewpoints, we should first look inward at our own culture. No longer can we afford to act as a “secret society” — shunning those who don’t necessarily fit our traditonal demographic or the model of what a firefighter “used to be.” While we must certainly strive towards those who can embrace or already share our value system, reality is that those people come in different shapes and sizes, colors and backgrounds too.

FEMA Provides Youth-Based Workshops

Leading educators and scholars in the field of preparedness education consider our nation’s youth to be the best envoy for taking preparedness messages home to their families. In order to better prepare our nation’s youth to bring preparedness home, FEMA is providing technical assistance workshops to state and local practitioners who support youth-based programs and who are interested in integrating preparedness education into their offerings.

Can you rise to the challenge?

An article posted to FirefighterNation.com today outlines the challenges faced by volunteer fire departments in Pennsylvania in recruiting and retaining their members. Although these types of articles are becoming all too frequent, this one in particular is better than most in that it focuses on the positives of being a volunteer firefighter — not all the negatives. I’ve cited many examples of what not to say if you’re actually looking to solve your R&R challenges in a previous post titled “Is this our best approach?” Too often, we hand a prospective candidate all of the reasons and excuses why they wouldn’t join on a silver platter.

Digital Recruitment and Retention

Burlington Township (NJ) Firefighter Matt Stahlnecker checks his mobile device while returning from a run on Rescue 30. Photo by: Tiger Schmittendorf

The world is changing rapidly and the fire service is getting caught up in the tornado effect of technology on our society.

More and more fire departments are smartly using web sites, e-mail and social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to recruit new firefighters, share life safety information and to stay connected to their community. There isn’t much you can’t do with a mobile device today that took a super-computer to do less than 30 years ago.

And while we’re making strides in keeping our folks safer on the incident scene, there’s probably few bigger challenges today than to keep your folks out of trouble on social networks and the Internet. Sometimes ‘retention’ in the fire service devolves to preventing our people from doing stupid stuff.

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a conversation titled: “From the Xbox to the Box Alarm” with a large group of fire instructors  for the University of Kansas Fire and Rescue Institute wherein we discussed today’s and tomorrow’s generation of firefighters. The conversation focused not only on the challenges in understanding, motivating, training and leading this unique cadre of individuals, but also enlightened the participants as to the tremendous potential they possess for moving our fire service forward.

And, naturally, you can’t have a conversation about today’s generation of firefighters without discussing the importance of technology and the impact of social networking.

I had the daunting task of following a presentation by Curt Varone, an accomplished