Fire recruitment limitations

The next full-time firefighter recruitment campaign should only allow applicants from Shropshire and surrounding areas to keep applicant numbers “manageable” and help ensure candidates stay with the brigade after training, a report says.

Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service’s last push, in 2018, used “postcode restrictions”, but a preceding campaign in 2016 did not and saw half of those appointed “leave following completion of their development programmes and apply for their ‘home’ brigades”.

HR officer Wendy Edwards and Chief Fire Officer Rod Hammerton recommend that the fire authority allows the brigade to keep the geographical qualification.

They also write that the previous wholetime campaign used an online system provided by the Fire Service’s College, but says this is no longer available, and recommends it uses an alternative system as handling more than a thousand expected applications “in-house” would be too much for “the already stretched ICT team”.

The 2018 wholetime recruitment campaign only allowed applications from candidates with Shropshire, Cheshire, Herefordshire, Powys, Staffordshire, West Midlands, Worcestershire or Wrexham postcodes, “in line with the ethos of providing local jobs for local people”, they write.

The 2016 campaign did not apply postcode restrictions and “has seen four of the eight candidates leave following completion of their development programmes and apply for their ‘home’ brigades”, Ms Edwards and Officer Hammerton add.

They recommend using postcode restrictions again. They admit doing so will slightly curtail the brigade’s ability to “recruit the ‘best candidates’ from a wide and diverse background”, but add: “Postcode restriction including the West Midlands regions should provide a balance of providing applications from under-represented groups but enable the process to be manageable and limit a high volume of initial applications from all over the country.”

In 2018, they write, “Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service used a fully-managed online application system provided by the Fire Service College”.

They add that “this is no longer a viable option” as the college “no longer holds access rights to the system”, so outline three alternatives.

“In-house” processing is not recommended, Ms Edwards and Officer Hammerton write, as a wholetime recruitment campaign can expect “1,000+” applications, and an in-house system would not be robust enough for that.

WMJobs, a regional public sector job portal, is a second option. Neighbouring Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service have found it sufficient for one-off recruitment, but, “when used for a campaign requiring additional questions at application stage, these had to be marked and shortlisted separately which was extremely onerous and resource-intensive”, the report authors say.

They instead recommend external provider HR Solutions Hub, which has already been used by 15 out of the England’s 49 fire brigades and “provides an online service for the entire process” until the physical and job-related tests.

Shropshire and Wrekin Fire and Rescue Authority will discuss Ms Edwards’ and Officer Hammerton’s report on Wednesday, October 14.