Recruitment & Retention
Finding, signing up and keeping volunteer and career members: recruiting strategy, applicant follow-up, onboarding and retention for fire, EMS and law enforcement.
You’re on the clock: It’s time for your volunteer fire and EMS agency to get SAFER!
Federal grants for volunteer recruitment and retention are a great way to secure funding support to maintain and grow your ranks in your volunteer and combination fire and EMS organization. The U.S. DHS/FEMA SAFER grant application period opened Monday, February 13 and closes Friday, March 17, 2023 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time, so there’s plenty of time to get creative and formulate your recruitment marketing plan and grant application.
Read moreFire and EMS Volunteer Retention Deserves Your Constant Attention
Fire and EMS departments must pay constant attention to connectedness and retention if they want to keep their volunteers. Otherwise, their volunteers will tune out and silently fade away
Read moreSurvey Says? Managing Recruitment & Retention Feedback in Volunteer Fire/EMS Departments
Conducting surveys and asking for member input in your fire/rescue/EMS organization is the sign of a healthy organization focused on volunteer recruitment and retention. However, mismanaging the process can irrevocably harm trust, loyalty and rapport in an organization that so heavily relies on teamwork to serve its community.
Read more6 Tips to Maximize Interviews in the Volunteer Fire & EMS Service
Remember, YOU and the panel represent your department, and remember your candidate is also interviewing you. When the interview is over, you want them to be motivated by the opportunities for growth and development and your department’s culture.
Read moreHow to Create the Ideal Volunteer Advertisement
To create the ideal volunteer advertisement, you must know your audience. You should be aware of their needs, demographics, interests and concerns. It would help if you also had a good grasp on their goals. The more information you can gather about your ideal volunteer base, the better able you will be to tailor your advertisement accordingly.
Read moreChasing the Unicorn: Recruiting Today’s Fire and Emergency Services Volunteers
Fire & EMS is a volunteering opportunity like absolutely none other. We in Volunteer Fire & EMS get to do *stuff* that no other volunteering opportunity offers.
Read moreGet Back to the Basics: 4 Good Volunteer Recruitment & Retention Ideas
As a recruiter, You must view every person who contacts you as a valuable asset who wants to join your team; when someone takes the time to fill out a form and show interest in something these days, they must be serious about it!
Read moreTop Gun Recruitment & Retention Tips for the Volunteer Fire/EMS Service
You can’t put a dollar amount on volunteer engagement in the fire and EMS service. Feeling relevant, needed, and understanding that the time given has meaning is the jet fuel of a volunteer’s service. Thanking your members for a job well-done too often gets placed on the back burner.
Read moreFour Essential PARTS to Recruiting a Farm-Team for Your Volunteer Fire/EMS Agency
Spring is in the air and so is the opportunity to get out of our COVID-confined cocoons and go recruiting. A recent email to my volunteer fire department’s recruitment team “accidentally” caused me to write this piece about recruiting in a high school career/college fair environment, an opportunity we welcomed with open arms.
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