The Los Angeles Fire Department is falling behind on its goal of hiring 165 new firefighters this year, after adopting a new method of whittling down the high number of prospective candidates to a more manageable group, fire officials told a City Council committee Monday.
The department had to delay a training class that was supposed to start in March, and will now begin on April 6 “because we didn’t have enough applicants for a meaningful class size,” Fire Department Administrator June Gibson told the Budget and Finance Committee today.
The delay was also caused by some candidates still needing to undergo medical and psychological evaluations, Fire Department spokesman Peter Sanders said.
Gibson said the department started running into trouble when trying to get enough people for the first training class starting in December. They wanted to hire 60 recruits, but ended up only being able to hire 43, she said.
For a third class scheduled for June 1, “we’re really not optimistic that a class of 60 is even a viable number,” Gibson said. “If we get 50 within the third class … we’ll be lucky.”
The department has been using a new way of reducing the high number of people who typically apply for firefighter jobs, after the department faced criticism that its candidate selection method was too arbitrary and could leave out many qualified or minority or women candidates.
The new method — stratified random sampling — retains the demographic makeup after the initial applicant group that typically numbers more than 10,000 people is scaled down to a smaller pool of candidates.
Because of the way the new process was set up, the fire department has had trouble keeping a large enough pool of candidates in the running at various stages of the process to hire as recruits, according to Gibson.
“I think part of the problem in terms of our inability to hire quickly enough is because of the use of the stratified random sampling methodology that was used by the personnel department,” Gibson said.
About 300 applicants were selected last fall to continue onto the written test portion and other stages of the recruitment process, but a little more than 200 people actually showing up to take the exam, Gibson said.
The previous method had all of the interested applicants take the written test and jump through other hoops before the city made its first major cut to the applicant pool.
The department has been working to build back its fire department staff after a five-year hiring freeze that started in 2009, and Gibson said she agreed with the City Council members today that “we can’t hire quickly enough.”
However, Gibson said it is likely “we’re not even going to be able to hire the 165 that we originally anticipated.”
“If we are able to graduate a 130 I think we’ll be incredibly lucky,” she said.
Even with that number, the department would still have about 230 vacant positions by the end of the fiscal year, she said.
Fire officials also said today the fire chief has been considering the possibility of hiring firefighters who have been laid off from other departments as a way to more quickly restore staffing.
— City News Service