Northamptonshire FRS Attract to Train

Early in 2017, Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service approached the College for support in running an attraction and selection recruitment campaign for wholetime firefighters.

It was agreed that, alongside a local campaign run by the Fire and Rescue Service, the College would run its tried-and-tested, intelligence led, multi-dimensional and highly targeted online attraction campaign, with the use of targeted social media adverts and other digital communication channels. The original objective was for the College to provide a list of 16 applicants for further consideration by the Fire and Rescue Service. Specific target groups were to include women and BME’s.

The College attraction campaign ran for three weeks, attracting 760 unique applicants to the dedicated website. Of these, 87% were male and 13% female. Alongside local positive action, the campaign was also successful in that 13% of applications were from ethnic minorities. 700 of these applicants went on to complete the eligibility stage of the selection process.

Our specialist selection team sifted down the number of applicants through the use of SIFT™ for Firefighter and the National FRS Ability Tests. After shortlisting applicants through to the final 40, they were invited to complete an Assessment Day at the College. Here, they were put through their paces with a morning of practical testing on the incident ground and an afternoon Assessment Centre. Following the Assessment Day, Northamptonshire FRS were supplied with a shortlist of the final applicants to fill the vacancies available.

The recruits arrived at the College in September 2017 to start their FFDP training.