Hiring process

This book will guide you through each stage of the selection process and will help you strengthen your test-taking skills to improve your chances of success. The following chapters are filled with useful information, advice, and practice exercises that will help you understand both how the hiring process works and how you can best meet the requirements. 

Behind every heroic moment, of course, are countless hours of preparation. Career firefighters are highly trained professionals. Their services are essential to every community and every stretch of land across this country. If you make this your career choice, rest assured that the need for firefighters is constant and the job prospects are promising. But this is a competitive field. Wherever you apply, you will need to show that you have what it takes to meet the demands of the job—and succeed in every stage of the hiring process. 

Like many candidates, you may think that the oral interview is just like any other job interview, that it s not a major part of the hiring process for firefighters, or that compared to the CPAT or the written exam, it isn t all that critical. 

The qualifying interview—also known as the screening interview—is the first, and sometimes the only, oral interview that fire departments use in their hiring process. By the time you are contacted to go through this interview, you will have completed your application form, you probably will have taken the written examination, and it is possible that you may have taken the Candidate Physical Ability Test. 

Thanks to technological advancements, upwards of 70% of all employers now use the Internet or applicant-tracking software for recruitment, which eliminates even more of the person-to-person contact between a company and an applicant during the hiring process. Applicants who understand how today s technology is being used by HR professionals and recruiters are certainly at an advantage. 

More recently, DARPA has been granted Experimental Personnel Hiring Authority under Section 1101 of the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999. Under this authority, DARPA can directly hire up to 40 eminent scientists and engineers from outside government service for term appointments up to 4 years. These appointments may be extended to 6 years in specific cases. This authority significantly streamlines and accelerates the hiring process. 

The hiring process is similar elsewhere. To get her job at another Big Pharma company, Rebecca Dickinson (also not her real name) had to read the text Basic Clinical Pharmacology and score at least 85 percent on a science test. Then she got six months of paid training, which included reading medical textbooks at home, role-playing with a mentor, and more tests. I did more work in six months than I did in four years of college, she says. 

Looking at Exhibit 31.2, we see that both water flow (FRl) and temperature (FR2) are influenced by both the angle of the cold valve (DPI) and the angle of the hot valve (DP2). The design is therefore coupled. Taking a service example, both the quality of a new hire (FRl) and the speed of the hiring process (FR2) are influenced by the number of interviewers involved (DPI) and the method of scheduling interviews (DP2). 

References. Some employers ask immediately for references, persons they may contact for more information about you and your work or academic experiences other employers ask for references later in the hiring process. If references are requested with the initial application letter, the information may be listed at the end of the r6sum6 or on an attached page. Reference information includes the person s full name and title or position, the name and address of the person s business or organization, telephone number, and e-mail address, if available. 

Careful screening of applicants during the hiring process is the first step in developing a competent, well-trained work force. New employee physicals, substance abuse screening, and skill testing can help identify individuals with the aptitude, literacy skills, and mental and physical capacity needed to handle a particular job and to understand the hazards associated with that job. 

Conduct background checks during the hiring process and on current employees (specifically those with access to security-sensitive information) in accordance with regulatory requirements and your company s policies. 

Screening resumes is an essential part of the hiring process, but it is a formidable challenge for a prospective employer to decide who is best suited for a job when there is limited information for each candidate. Again, mosf resumes simply sfate a person s job responsibilities—fhe day-to-day tasks that he or she was hired to do, such as sorting the mail or handling customer complaints. But two people with the same occupation often get different results on the job. If that distinction (your skills and accomplishments) isn t made clear in your resume, you might be eliminated from the interview pool. 

The author of this text considered HAZCOM as the process employee s best friend because of its requirement for a MSDS which is accessible in all the control rooms either as documents in binders or electronic documents on the site intranet. As a supervisor, the author advised all newly hired process employees to read the MSDS for each of the chemicals on their unit and take careful note of all NFPA hazard ratings of three or four. They were to think of a hazard rating of three or four as a coiled cobra prepared to strike. If the cobra bites them, it will hurt them very badly if not kill them. If they make a mistake with a chemical that has a hazard rating of three or four it is going to hurt them badly, if not kill them. 

When the City of New Haven undertook to fill vacant lieutenant and captain positions in its fire department (Department), the promotion and hiring process was governed by the city charter, in addition to federal and state law. The charter establishes a merit system. That system requires the City to fill vacancies in the classified civil-service ranks with the most qualified individuals, as determined by job-related examinations. After each examination, the New Haven Civil Service Board (CSB) certifies a ranked list of applicants who passed the test. Under the charter s rule of three, the relevant hiring authority must fill each vacancy by choosing one candidate from the top three scorers on the list. Certified promotional lists remain valid for two years. 

Prudent safety professionals may wish to examine each and every aspect of their safety programs to ensure that any potential for discrimination has been eliminated. From the hiring process through the termination process and all safety practices, programs, and procedures in between, a careful analysis and evaluation of issues and situations where discrimination potential could be present should be undertaken, and those identified issues or situations should be addressed to avoid any potential of discrimination within the safety function. Although an applicant or employee cannot win by simply claiming discrimination, proactive measures to avoid any type of discrimination are often the best approach. 

The Company is committed to hiring only the best, safest, and most qualified drivers. To achieve the objectives of this policy. The Company has implemented the following driver qualification standards and procedures. All company employees involved in the driver qualification and hiring process will be expected to conform to this policy and its procedures. 

Once the root causes are identified, start addressing them one at a time. Develop and implement positive change to your hiring process. Continue to monitor results, and watch your numbers improve. 

Special cause variance — In this example, we see a totally rmexpected result (18 new driver turnover events in the month of June). We know that this result was not due to any of the normal inputs of our hiring process. Therefore, we need to examine the specific incident, and not the process as a whole. 

Our journey towards achieving safety excellence now turns to your human resource responsibilities. The main focus of this section of the manual is on driver recruiting, selection, screening, qualifying, and orientating — collectively known as your driver hiring process. 

Your hiring process can be a relatively high-risk investment since eveiy driver you hire is, more or less, an miknown quantity. 

All company employees involved in the driver qualification and hiring process will be expected to conform to this policy and its procedures. 

Established your minimum quantifiable qualification standards. This helps add consistency to your hiring process. Setting minimum qualification standards provides a foundation (or base) for new driver hiring. 

Once you have verified the information provided by the driver, and have used any additional hiring processes to verify the character and performance of the applicant, the next step is to compare the driver to the company hiring standards. These are not provided in the regulations. This is something that each carrier must develop based on the level of risk that the company considers acceptable. There are t3q>ically four areas that hiring standards look at. They are ... 

Driver interviews After interviewing literally thousands of drivers over the last 20 years in this business, I can tell more from sitting down and talking to an applicant for 30 minutes than any psych test could ever tell me. The importance of a quality dialogue and exchange of information in the driver hiring process cannot be overstated. ... 

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