If you were in a group of 10,000 fire recruits and each of you paid for a custom resume writing service that asked you to pick one resume style from 10 templates, what is the likelihood of your custom resume looking like another fire recruit’s in the same firefighter applicant pool?
The answer is highly likely.
Fire recruits must learn how to discuss what is on their resumes and sell themselves in an interview. The likelihood of recruits gaining this personal experience in a generic fire recruitment service or course is slim to none.
Fire recruits who are serious about becoming firefighters need to step up in order to stand out. Recruits have to start vetting the fire recruitment services available to them as there are far too many services that will take their money without regard to the individual fire recruit’s success.
What is the First Step to Become a Firefighter?
The first step to become a firefighter is to understand the fire recruitment process.
After obtaining firefighter qualifications, there are other certifications, licenses, and training recruits must invest in to become competitive in a fire recruitment applicant pool. After all, the posted firefighter job requirements are the MINIMUM requirements needed to become a firefighter.
Fire recruits need to gather information from a variety of fire recruitment services and resources to support their fire recruitment. This includes emails, articles, books, websites, and professional services.
The next step to becoming a firefighter then, after understanding the recruitment process, is to take the time to understand the fire recruitment services available and how they can assist a recruit in making it easier to become a firefighter.
It is Important to Evaluate Fire Recruitment Services
First and foremost, fatalities have happened on the firefighter training ground. We can prevent them from happening by requiring the services we work with in the fire recruitment industry to uphold moral, ethical, and professional standards.
Second to this, fire recruits who are serious about becoming firefighters spend money, time, and effort on every aspect of the fire recruitment process to obtain a conditional job offer within the fire service. Using critical thinking skills and making a plan for their fire recruitment will save the recruit in the long run.
Professional firefighters are critical thinkers. They consider and evaluate information to make informed decisions on the fire ground and in the fire hall. Recruits who want to become firefighters refine their critical thinking skills throughout their firefighter recruitment process to become the best candidate for the job. The journey to becoming a firefighter starts here.
Consider the Services Available to Assist Recruits Who Want to Become Firefighters
- Firefighter recruitment job alerts
- Firefighter application, resume, and cover letter
- Firefighter aptitude test preparation
- Firefighter personal characteristic assessment
- Firefighter physical fitness test preparation
- Firefighter clinical assessment
- Firefighter skills assessment
- DZ truck driver training
- Firefighter technical skills training and certification
- Emergency Medical Responder (EMR) certification
- Other licenses related to firefighting: Boating, Drone
- Firefighter interview preparation
Vet Fire Recruitment Services Before Investing in Them
It is important to evaluate each fire recruitment service or product to determine the quality of the information provided within it. Take the time to thoroughly investigate an individual, company, website, or resource before investing significant amounts of time, money, and effort into it.
Reputable fire recruitment services are registered businesses that are owned and operated by those who comply with legal and regulatory measures. Not all reputable businesses in the fire recruitment industry are owned by firefighters and not all firefighters operate reputable businesses. To assist you in determining whether a service is trustworthy, use this guide and set of questions to vet all of the fire recruitment services noted above.
1. How is the Service or Product Relevant to Your Fire Recruitment?
Question what you pay for.
I’m going to use firefighter aptitude test preparation services as an example, because this is my area of expertise.
First, I provide a free consultation to discuss the fire recruit’s needs and answer any questions they might have. I disclose that I am an experienced Professor and Learning Strategist at the Post-Secondary level with over a decade of full-time experience in firefighter aptitude test preparation.
Currently, I charge $60 per tutoring session. In that session I provide the fire recruit with relevant test preparation materials that I wrote and published. I teach recruits how to identify and answer test questions in addition to providing other test-taking strategies to improve their time management in tests. Every session is structured to make the most out of the time spent with the recruit.
My competitors charge the same rate for the same amount of time. However, the service they provide is subpar at best. They charge for consultations. They hire people with little experience in firefighter aptitude test preparation who stumble around with someone else’s material on paid tutoring time.
Additionally, some companies include irrelevant materials like career guidance, resume reviews, and promotional swag in their paid tutoring packages. None of this is relevant to developing the fire recruit’s academic and test-taking skills, which is precisely what firefighter aptitude test preparation and tutoring is for.
2. What Makes the Business or Service Provider an Authoritative or Reliable Source?
It seems that everyone is an “expert” in the fire recruitment industry, but what qualifies a person as an expert?
According to Google, an expert is a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.
Reputable businesses and service providers do not hide from the public. If you can not identify the full name of the person selling and/or providing you a fire recruitment service, start to question why.
Reputable businesses specify what makes their employees experts in the fire recruitment industry. Be wary of vague or blanket statements in promotional materials. It is one thing for a business to say they have experts with years of experience, for example. It’s an entirely different thing to back up what they say with specifics as it relates to the fire recruitment industry.
A retired school teacher might have a lifetime of classroom teaching experience, or a firefighter might have passed several aptitude tests and gone through many interviews, but a serious fire recruit must ask how that type of experience translates to their own firefighter recruitment.
3. Where is the Business’ Paid Content Coming From?
If someone creates their own content, then he/she should absolutely be able to take you through their research and creative process. They should have no problems answering questions about their experience, qualifications, and how their data was collected. Moreover, their claims should be backed by research and their facts and/or statistics should be verified in other sources outside their competitive space.
If a service provider is using someone else’s work, then that author should be credited for it. Far too often we see fire recruitment services promoting someone else’s work as their own. It is always best to invest in the primary source of information, rather than paying top dollar for second-hand advice from a copyrighted content thief whose main objective is to make money off the work of others. Integrity is a key characteristic in the firefighter personality. Don’t be caught associating with the wrong people.
4. What is the Reason for a Business’ Writing and Does it Promote an Agenda?
As a successful business owner, professional writer, and educator, I personally prefer content marketing over all other types of marketing. It’s a creative outlet for me to communicate with fire recruits and earn their trust over time while educating them with something of value.
Often, free resources that require a fire recruit to sign up via email lead into a business’ sales funnel. Take fire recruitment email alerts, for example. The fire recruit signs up to receive free fire recruitment alerts from a business in return for their email address. The business then sends a weekly newsletter with the free alerts and ads promoting their services and the services of their paid affiliates and sponsors. While the free job alert might be useful, fire recruits need to be mindful of this type of marketing because the business is set on selling them something under the guise of free help.
5. Is the Business Transparent in its Advertising?
If so, the business should disclose all material connections it has with any business interest, product, and/or service it is promoting according to the deceptive marketing practices provisions of the Competition Act.
This may include the following material connections:
- Receiving payment in money or commissions
- Receiving free products or services
- Receiving discounts
- Receiving free trips or tickets to events
- A personal or family relationship
All business representations made to the public should be truthful and presented in a way that recruits can see clearly and understand them correctly: “Linking to or tagging a brand, posting a discount code, or linking to an affiliate webpage is unlikely to be enough.” (https://ised-isde.canada.ca).
6. What do Public Reviews Say about the Business?
Online reviews can offer fire recruits insight into a fire recruitment service’s history, customer service, and the quality of the products and/or services being offered.
Reputable businesses connect to third-party customer review sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook so that their clients can leave a public record of their services and/ or products.
Look for history and consistency when evaluating online reviews.
For example, our public record of Google reviews started nine years ago. Since then, 73 clients took their time to review our services and products. Our average Google review rating is 4.7. The data on our Facebook reviews is similar: They started in 2016, and 65 reviews were written from different clients. Our average Facebook review rating is 4.8.
Be wary of professional services and products that are not connected to customer review sites for the public to review them. Question a lot of negative reviews that are posted over time and across customer review sites by different people. Understand reviews that are solely posted by the business owner, like reviews on the business’ website and social media pages, are often written by the business owner and not an actual client.
7. What are the Personal Characteristics of Fire Recruitment Service Owners?
If becoming a firefighter also involves understanding and demonstrating integrity, it might be counterproductive to invest in and learn from people who have no integrity. The best way to determine whether a fire recruitment service or product is worth your time is to contact the owner directly and ask questions about who they are and how they operate their business.
In my 12.5 years of professional experience in the fire recruitment industry, I have found that reputable business owners in this industry will applaud your seriousness of purpose when asked questions rather than get defensive about it and/or gaslight you.
Reputable fire recruitment service providers know what’s at stake. If asked, a reputable business owner will likely go above and beyond in assisting you with understanding their business and what makes it reputable within its perspective field.
Ask the Owners of Fire Recruitment Services these Questions
- What is your story?
- What is your experience as it relates to the specific service/ product you provide?
- What knowledge and qualifications do you and/or your employees have in the specific service you provide?
- Do you have a registered business?
- How long have you been operating?
- Who creates your content?
- Do you have insurance?
- Are your programs in compliance with NFPA and the Ontario Fire Service?
- How do you get paid?
Do some online digging to determine if a fire recruitment service is trustworthy. Finding negative stories about a company from news sources is one way to determine if a business is reputable. Checking public records for any bankruptcy or criminal proceedings against a company is another.
If you’re still not sure, try the business’ free resources and ask for a free consultation to discuss your fire recruitment needs. This will give you the chance to ask your questions and experience the products or services firsthand without making a substantial investment.
Conclusion
If the fire recruitment industry is a sandbox, the fire recruit must watch out for cat feces. It is up to the fire recruit to do their homework and vet fire recruitment services. Otherwise, they risk losing their time, money, and effort put into their fire recruitment.
I recently heard that, after a full day of interviews, an Ontario Fire Chief trashed every applicant’s resume that day because the applicants answered the interview questions exactly the same. These fire recruits invested in a fire recruitment service that gave them canned interview answers. Unbeknownst to the recruits, it cost them their chance at a conditional job offer.
As business owners in the fire recruitment industry, it is our duty to not take advantage of new fire recruits who are unfamiliar with the fire recruitment process. It is our responsibility to guide fire recruits in the right direction, so that they can get through the fire recruitment process safely and in a time- and cost-efficient manner. Before investing in a fire recruitment service, VET the business!
TL;DR
Marketing is deceptive. When I published this article, my competition changed their websites to use these ideas as their own. This is precisely why new recruits must examine the fire recruitment services available to them. Some fire recruitment services just aren’t trustworthy. Use this guide and set of questions to assist you in identifying them.
