Executive Chief Officer Leadership II (ECO II)

ECO-209 - Hiring for diversity: Retooling the fire service hiring process

Thursday, August 25, 2022

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Location: Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, 301 AB

Sponsored By

Speaker(s)

Michael A. Cunningham, PhD

Division Chief, Chief of Staff
Cobb County Fire & Emergency Services
Woodstock, Georgia

Slides
Bill Johnson, BS in Fire Science

Fire Chief
Cobb County Fire & Emergency Services
Marietta, Georgia

Diversity initiatives within the fire service are falling short to improve upon the less than 20% minority representation among the near 370,000 career firefighters nationwide. The solution may be a new hiring model which utilizes the statistical method of random sampling to select eligible candidates during the initial stages of the screening process. This one hour lecture will chronicle the journey of a southeastern United States fire department's struggle with diverse hiring and the results of an innovative solution implemented to overcome the challenge.

Learning Objectives:

Following a lesson on diverse hiring practices and equity, the learner will be able to differentiate between the act of educating a target audience about the fire service or the need to introduce process change (equity) to current hiring practices to achieve diversity.
Based on the information presented, learners will be able to evaluate their organization’s current hiring process to determine if they are achieving a level of diverse hiring representational of the community they serve.
Learners will have gained an understanding of the statistical method of random sampling, how it is applied to eligible candidate selection process, and how it can be applied to their organization’s hiring process.