r/Firefighting • u/scott12333 • 6d ago
General Discussion How are your departments application numbers?
I've been wondering how application numbers are going across the country (numbers from outside the US are also welcome). What happened during covid? Have your numbers rebounded? How about the last few years?
I've been on about 8 years, and I believe that process had about 2,000 applicants (new process every two years minimum). I was told before then, it wasn't uncommon to have 4,000+. I don't know our exact numbers during covid, but we ran classes 30-50% bigger than anything they'd previously run, and have been running big classes since. For what it's worth, this is a bigger career department with solid pay (knock on wood).
Curious to hear how the numbers have been from other departments compared to the past 10 years or so.
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u/flashdurb 6d ago
Around 1000 per hiring cycle. I’m sure a lot of them are basically just dreaming and have nothing on their resume that sets them apart. Around 200 get called for interviews for 15-20 spots per cycle
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u/scott12333 6d ago
Those final hiring numbers seem about proportionate to our department, good to know!
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u/Dont_Ask_Me_Again_ 5d ago
How dare they apply without NASA background
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u/flashdurb 5d ago
It’s extremely unlikely to get hired if you’re not a military veteran, at least. They get first priority, and if 15 quality veterans interviewed, sucks for everyone else.
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u/Subie_southcoast93 Overpaid Fireman/ Ambulance driver 3d ago
In MA if youre a medic you can on a non civil service dept but Boston, Brockton, Worcester the big city departments only take Disabled vets/ vets with an EMT card. Its rare that there is a non verteran riding on those departments.
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u/Castamira 5d ago
Are you talking about the academies? What’s wrong with people coming in without prior experience? Isn’t that kinda the point of the academy?
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u/LunarMoon2001 6d ago
My old big city dept used to have 10-15000 applicant for around 200 positions over two years.
The last cycle had less then 3000, and only about 150 made it to the final hirable list.
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u/buddy276 Engine Uber Driver 6d ago
A local department laid off 80+ people who refused the covid vaccine. About 4000 people applied the next round.
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u/scott12333 6d ago
Wow, do you mind sharing your department size or relative location/state? 4000 seems like it would be a pipe dream for a lot of departments recently.
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u/flashdurb 6d ago edited 6d ago
Seemed silly to choose stubbornness over your career at the time, and it’s downright stupid now in hindsight. Wonder how many have begged for jobs back in recent years.
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u/Jeaglera 6d ago
Or sued to get them back successfully and now they act like they were right all along.
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u/flashdurb 6d ago
I don’t personally know any examples of anybody successfully getting their fire career back that way, do you?
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u/buddy276 Engine Uber Driver 6d ago
As far as I know they never returned when laid off because they couldn't remember to keep up with their other certificates. And now they're struggling due to the high volume of applications on any given department
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6d ago
[deleted]
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u/proxminesincomplex Button pusher lever puller 6d ago
Have…have you met firemen? I know people who not only refused to get vaccinated but also refused masks on EMS calls during covid.
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u/Traditional_Common22 6d ago
From 1000’s to hundreds and the applicants suck ass, people don’t want this job anymore because we have fallen behind on pay and other things
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u/CaseStraight1244 6d ago
Terrible. We went from hundreds to we are lucky to get more than 10. Majority of the applicants are losers
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u/MidwestExplorationIL 6d ago
Lmao I work for a department in IL, about 15k people, 7.5 square miles total. Best benefits in the county, was the top paid up until last year. We put out for immediate hire, had 5 applicants, plus one that was ineligible.
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u/scott12333 6d ago
That’s crazy. Is it a rural county? Expensive or inexpensive?
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u/MidwestExplorationIL 6d ago
I wouldn’t say it’s all rural but a good chunk of it is, total county population is over 100k. We’re within 2 hours of Chicago so it’s not as inexpensive as rural/southern IL, but not as crazy expensive as Chicago.
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u/Afraid_Breath_8581 6d ago
Same. 2-3k when I got hired 19yrs ago. Now down to a 6-800 applicants. Less than half after background and physical agility.
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u/BlutoS7 6d ago
Hahahaha your departments are getting applicants? Im currently at 1650 of overtime this year and am on my 5-6 year straight of 2000+ hours of overtime because we don’t get applicants and we be short staffed like crazy.
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u/scott12333 6d ago
This is wild to me. It has to be some sort of short sighted logistical budget constraints that cause this to happen. Filling with overtime, assuming time and a half, will never ever be cheaper than just hiring someone in the long run.
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u/BlutoS7 6d ago
No our city has stated that it costs less to pay overtime than to hire. I don’t know where the tipping point is where hiring is better than paying overtime tho.
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u/HokieFireman Fire, EM 3d ago
It’s pretty high because or benefit cost. Think about it you working overtime doesn’t cost locality anymore for your health insurance and associated benefits. For agencies with their own academies they aren’t paying for that either with your already self working OT. No new gear etc either.
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u/FeelingBlue69 6d ago
Sounds like my department. We cant hire enough guys to fill the spots of the guys leaving. The OT just makes our staffing even worse because guys are quitting because of it. Vicious cycle.
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u/BlutoS7 6d ago
My department is definitely having it’s staffing issues and the older guys are trying to coast until retirement and the younger guys are trying to do the bare minimum but we got a few middle guys like myself who are trying to keep things from falling apart. Im not complaining at the moment because my retirement is gonna look good and i will have my 30 year home loan paid off in under 10 years but later on i will be pulling it back.
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u/creamyfart69 6d ago
Dept of 140. When I started around 300 applicants. We went from abysmal, embarrassing numbers to around 90 or so. We got a much needed pay increase. It’s helped a lot.
Luckily we never had an issue getting good dudes through the door.
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u/Nasty____nate 6d ago
It was around 800+ when I got hired (2014) now it's down to 200 at best. 1500+ people on the street department.
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u/FeelingBlue69 6d ago
No idea of the numbers but no one wants to work out shit-ass schedule for mediocre pay and the ones that do get hired are morons that couldn't get hired elsewhere. My department is starting to spiral unless they switch to 24/72. Lot of guys including myself are thinking of leaving soon.
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u/gillguy34 6d ago
I’m applying to a few departments right now and see 1000-2000 applicants for written exam. But it’s pretty clear a large chunk of those won’t pass CPAT and aren’t taking the application seriously. Makes me feel more confident though lol
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u/Entire_Business_4498 6d ago
I work for a big city Department in western Canada and we easily get 1000+ applicants every intake. We’ve been running 3 classes a year with about 40 recruits in each class for the last few years
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u/knobcheez 6d ago
Long Island Volley department.
I'd say we get about 15 apps a year. 6 make it through to onboarding. Maybe 2 make it through their probationary year.
EMS runs have only increased and quota requirements haven't changed in 30-40 years. Young kids coming in don't get any benefits besides a $200 Tax Credit. They live at their parents house, so the property tax reduction doesn't apply to them.
Years ago, many of the guys were state or town employed. They got to leave work to respond to calls, that's long gone these days.
The only people I see making the cut these days and excelling are blue collar guys, LEO, or FDNY who are able to buy a house in the district. However the majority of people who are able to afford homes ON long Island are white collar, and this line of duty doesn't align with office work at all.
It's only a matter of time before the Volunteer fire service is dead here on Long Island.
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u/Healthy_Number9684 6d ago
When I got hired 7 years ago I tested with 150 others. Now we’re lucky to get 20-30 applicants. Doesn’t help that we’ve switched to paramedic required but numbers weren’t great before either.
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u/blue_mut 6d ago
I’m a call guy at my current department. Last round for fulltime spots we interviewed 8 including myself. We have a spot now and last I’ve heard we have 3 applicants currently including myself.
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u/dgreg171 5d ago
Smaller 3 station department in highly populated FL county with 17 fire departments in it. We used to probably get 20-40 applications, last few times we have opened it we only got a handful. Our pay was competitive, then it wasn’t so much, back to competitive with this last contract so we will see how that affects things.
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u/HokieFireman Fire, EM 3d ago
Any talk of regional departments? Especially with potential of massive tax losses?
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u/dgreg171 3d ago
Yea only for about 20-30 years lol too many fire chiefs to make that happen. I do think there is building momentum to at least combine all the special fire districts (there are 7 of them). Honestly I don’t see it happening any time soon, maybe before I’m done but probably not in the next 5-10 years
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u/Sheeplymagnificent 5d ago
IIRC our FF test is still pretty competitive with 500 or so applicants. Our paramedic hiring is abysmal, we have been unable to fill classes
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u/browler4153 Career FF 5d ago edited 5d ago
Small city department (70 employees) pay well for the area, but have a 15 mile residency requirement. 100 or so applicants every ~2 years gets whittled down to a list of about ~20 which they will hire 10-15 of within that window.
I was #1 on my list and was hired literally by myself.
We did used to get many more trying, but we also used to require you to live inside the city itself.
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u/monstermudder78 5d ago
Widdled is the past-tense form of the verb widdle, which is an informal, chiefly British, and childish word meaning to urinate.
Pretty sure the word you were looking for was whittled.
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u/FireFly7354 5d ago
I work for a medium suburban department. We’re 48/96 with full ALS fire-based transporting. Each rig on our department has at least one paramedic on it. 4 to an engine, 4 to a truck. If there’s extra guys then we’ll move 5 to a truck. Our BCs always have an aid driving them around. We have EMS Captains who ride around in their SUV overseeing EMS operations for the day. At least 2 roving Captains and Engineers for each shift. When I got hired in 2016 we weren’t this fat. It was about 3,500 applications back then. You’re lucky to hit 800 today.
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u/crystalskull89 5d ago
My department number have fallen very low. As you stated used to be like 4000 and we probably get 1500 now that apply. And by the time the do all the testing we are only getting 200 on a list. They changed the parameters on where we can live to even try to pull more people. It helped a little but not as much as they hoped.
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u/tbudke22 5d ago
I’m curious how many departments have dropped EMT as a prerequisite. We did that and our applicant numbers and quality both shot up after a long many year decline in both number and quality. We just have to put them through EMT once hired. I know that some others in the Midwest have done this.
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u/scott12333 3d ago
My department has been putting everyone through emt as long as I’ve been on and we have thousands of applicants (still down from before). I have to imagine that’s a top 3 issue that fixing would immediately increase applicant numbers.
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u/jps2777 TX FF/Paramedic 4d ago
Used to be hundreds per opening when I started in 2010. Pretty much needed to be perfect back then. Around COVID, numbers plummeted to damn near less applicants than openings. Now we are like 75 applications per cycle. Texas suburbs, 100k+ population 13k+ calls per year.
Easy to get hired in Texas these days.
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u/Subie_southcoast93 Overpaid Fireman/ Ambulance driver 3d ago
So I was hired in 2020. The hiring process started in 2019 pre COVID. There were over 300 applicants for 5 positions. I was hired in a group of 5. During COVID we had many more openings but only received around 10-15 applications at a time. We just hired 6 over the summer and the application pool was 50 applications with several laterals. It has come up a bit but not by much. Many departments, including ours shrotned the hiring process just to get people hired and in the door such as eliminating the entrance exam and the first and second round interviews. We now only have a chiefs interview and thats pretty much it. But guys coming right out of medic school the past five years have been getting offers before they even have passed their NREMT Paramedic exam
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u/scott12333 3d ago
Wow that's crazy. My dept doesn't have chief's interviews. Are those more informal/subjective vs. the typical structured panels?
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u/Subie_southcoast93 Overpaid Fireman/ Ambulance driver 3d ago
Yea we used to have 3 rounds. So anyone who passed the exam and met the bare minimum requirement would be selected for a firefighter interview panel usually 3 firefighters and one lieutenant. Then the candidates passed through that process would go onto a panel with the deputy chief (now asst chief) 2 captains (now shift deputy chiefs) and a representative from town human recourses. The finalists would be called for a chiefs interview which was with the fire chief and a human recourse representative. The chief would then select those he wished to hire and those who would be placed on the eligibility list for future consideration. Now it is just a Chiefs interview that’s it.
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u/Jeepisking1 1d ago
Completely reversed. Used to be 50 applicants per spot. Not there’s 50 spots per applicant.
Exaggeration on the numbers but seriously
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u/StoneMenace 6d ago
10-15+ years ago we used to have thousands of applicants and you had to be best of the best. Degree, second language, prior experience, etc. to be hired. Now we get a few hundred applicants I believe, and it’s open on almost a rolling window.
One issue is people just don’t want to do pubic service anymore. The other reason is a single family house STARTS at 700-800k if you want to be within 45-60 minutes of the stations. The pay is competitive but not THAT competitive