FireNet Community
FIRE SERVICE AND GENERAL FIRE SAFETY TOPICS => Service Training OR Recruitment => Topic started by: Cut Fire Service Pay on September 23, 2006, 08:16:50 PM
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Now that two police forces have openly admitted to rejecting candidates on the grounds that they were white & male, how long will it be before fire brigades around the country admit to doing the same?
We know it goes on, or dare we not discuss that for fear of being censored?
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staffs have been caught out & had to pay out ,nill response from the fbu those nasty white males are only popular when its time to strike!!!!!
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Known as a 'perverse incentive'. You set targets and put recruiters under pressure to achieve them, who then start to push the boundaries. When you get caught acting illegally it hits the news and puts under represented groups off applying in case people think they have only got in through 'special treatment' which from my experience is the last thing anybody, least of all the candidates, want to see.
Back to the drawing board for the BiB me thinks.
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Are you suggesting that this perverse incentive is deliberate or accidental Leftie? Is it an unforseen consequence of people striving too hard and undermining their own best efforts or do you see it as a deliberate, planned objective by management or politicians?
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Not deliberate. Recruiters I have met are decent, honest folk who play by the book, but if the chief officer and his entourage keep dberating your manager who in turn gives it you to deliver on targets that are close to impossible, what should they do? Come to work under that consrant pressure or have smiley faces at work by trying new stuff and perhaps crossing the line?
I think the problem in recruiting is that tghey are bufered from pillar to post by changes in what the 'top landing' wants and have never sat down and thought it through. For example, their marketing is too broad, they see any blackl or female applicant as a good applicant in helping meet targets. In fact what they need are good black and ethnic minority/female candidates, not ANY. For example they put adverts in job centres and local papers. What kind of people read job centre ads and local paper vacancies? I worked with one private sector companty who target specific groups within specific university courses through the careers office and through tutors, to identify the very best BEM candidates and put the job application in their hand after they have been given an insight to the job and have shown some interest. Result: top rate, motivated candidates who have a higher than usual success rate.
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We have done ourselves a dis-service by our past policies. It all comes back to output measures and performance indicators. The top managers are given a target by the Political leaders - always a number that can be easily measured and in the past they have focussed on that number and not thought it through more broadly. The root issue and starting point should be how the service integrates into its community not how the community integrates into the service. When people can identify with the service, when the service becomes an integral part of the community then perhaps more will come forward to join us. I thought fire services were doing better in that respect these days, but of course the newspapers will still want to focus on the negative.
Are things getting better or are we still internally being driven by the numbers game and the thought police as in the bad old days of the 1980s and 90s?