Social Media and Your Reputation

When it comes to social media, it can be a valuable tool to promoting yourself to potential clients and employers.  This also goes the other way, in that it can also work against you.  Social media must be constantly managed to keep business and personal platforms separated.  Posts by others need to be screened on a regular basis, even though you didn't post it, it can be scrutinized just by association.  Good luck and talk to you soon.

Blog Tips

Tips for blog design

Vertical alignment is important, keeping everything uniform gives you a better look.  A crowded Keep important links in plain view, categories, featured posts, search box, links to archives, and other links to resource/static pages.

A tip for choosing colors

keep your blog layout neutral so that you can go color wild in my blog posts. If both your layout and blog posts are colorful, it becomes confusing because there isn't a focal point the eye can rest on.  

Podcast script

Firefighter Retention

One problem that plagues volunteer and combination fire departments around the country is retention of members.  I am here to give you some tips that will let potential candidates make an educated decision and have a realistic view of what is involved with becoming a firefighter.

The way I like to start out is to form a committee of  3 firefighters of various levels to conduct the interviews.  Keep them short and to the point and conduct them as more of an orientation.

With that being said I like to present the candidate with the statistics of the department and initial training process.  Such as:

·       We have approximately 500 calls a year

·       65% of our calls are medical in nature

·       3% are actual fire calls

·       20% are false alarms

·       12% are other calls such as hazmat car accidents CO2 alarms and such

So very little of our time is actually fighting fires.

·       It Takes around $2500 of the tax payers dollars to get you your initial training

·       You have to commit about 150 hours of your time for that initial training

So it is a significant investment on everyone’s part and that does not include any continueing education.

·       You must participate in 2 3 hour trainings a month

·       You must respond to at least 10% of the calls

This paints a realistic picture of what it is all about.  Some think we are heroes and we just go rushing in to fight fires all day long, in fact it is a lot of training and little fire action.  I follow this up with a station tour, question and answer session and let them know that I will follow up in a couple of days to make sure they are serious about making the commitment.  Our department has shown improved success on retention since this implementation.  Good luck and always be safe.

Firefighter Retention