Fixing Our Recruiting Challenge - At Scale

One of the recurring frustrations I hear from employers in our industry is the need for more talent.

Not just adding warm bodies, but people who care, who want to be in fire protection, and want to grow.

If you’re in the business of hiring talent, today's read is for you.
 
FIXES FOR RECRUITING
Historically, we keep approaching the problem in the same way.

"We need to recruit." "We need to talk in high school classes." "We should do college lectures." "We should be at career fairs." "We should be doing more fire protection programs." "We should put on middle school events."

All those things can help. All those things are not bad ways to advocate for the industry.

But historically, they haven't moved the needle - because today we still have the same problem we've always had... we have too few people in the industry.

Those are legitimate ways to make connections. The problem is just that it isn’t working.

RELIABLE RECRUITING PIPELINES
Companies and organizations (for-profit and government), especially mid- to large-sized ones, have long recruited more systematically. We show up at college career fairs, maybe do a guest lecture or two at local schools, and try to make connections and build interest in our field.

I am a product of a guest lecturer who came and spoke of the fire protection industry (shoutout to Cindy Gier in Kansas City!). It was my sophomore year in college, while studying Architectural Engineering, where she guest lectured about fire protection engineering and what a career in fire protection could be. It's why I'm here today.

Those approaches are real, and they're positive.

The problem is that it demands a lot of time, consistency, and effort just to find the few of us who make our way into the industry.

There’s a whole lot of time and effort just to get a little trickle of students into our field.

We’re casting many small nets, here and there, in a gigantic ocean.
 
It’s not entirely an effort problem. It’s a scale problem.

FIRE PROTECTION DEGREES
In mechanical engineering, you can show up to one of hundreds of college career fairs and (boom!) you have 100+ candidates that have a relevant, directly-applicable degree.

In fire protection, we have engineering and tech programs, but of course, many of us know that they’re not enough. Too few programs, too scattered, with too few graduates.

There are geographical issues (think "no fire protection programs within a 6-hour drive of my business"). Then there's natural constraints of competition for those students.

We know the numbers – we studied it just a few years ago - in the architectural and engineering space, 88% of people entering the fire protection industry don’t start with a fire protection degree.

There are more people like me (with an Architectural Engineering Bachelor’s degree) than there are with a Fire Protection Engineering Bachelor’s degree when entering the field in the A/E space.

For contractors, it’s even more rare – 98% of people entering contracting work in fire protection didn't start with a fire protection-degree.

We don’t educate fire protection at scale. That’s not necessarily the problem for recruiting, though – you and I and many others often end up in fire protection without an education in fire protection. We tend to do just fine.
 
Though it could certainly help, the problem with sourcing talent isn’t that we don’t have enough formal fire protection education – it’s a scale problem.

ACTING IN SELF-INTEREST ALONE HASN'T WORKED
Imagine you're an employer. You need spin more students into fire protection so that you can hire and grow your business.

If you talk to 200 mechanical engineering students - how many do you think you could convince to pursue fire protection?

Even if the time invested was minimal - say you give a lecture on fire protection in a hall of 200 students.

How many do you think you could convince?

Maybe, what, 1%? 

Get just two students to recognize the potential and be open to fire protection?

Could you do that reliably?

I'm not a betting man, but even just a 1% success rate seems like a very steep hill to achieve once, let alone consistently.

And - here's the kicker - even when you do that lecture, it very likely won't ever even benefit you. 

Even if you do somehow manage to get a few interested students, the likelihood they'll be open to fire protection, and go into the industry, and work on your team is incredibly low. 

The people who are doing those kinds of volunteer lectures really aren't acting in their self interest - they're doing it for the good of the industry. In the case of Cindy speaking to my class, she actually wasn't hiring and didn't even have the intent to hire in the future! Very selfless.

It's not that advocating for the industry in this way is bad. It's a great thing.

But for recruitment, it's simply a scale problem. We probably don't need to be talking to 200 mechanical engineering students to get 2 to go to fire, we probably need to be talking to 1,000 students - or even 10,000 students - to reliably get a half-dozen to join our cause.

It's a scale problem.

I don't know about you, just taking a wild guess here, but I doubt any of us have time to volunteer to talk with 10,000 students in the hopes of bringing a few over to our side. We can't forever rely on word-of-mouth, career fairs, and lectures to address the overall needs of the workforce.

NEW(ER) APPROACHES
Some look at it and say "great, let's create a social media channel" or "lets pay the way for a few students to attend a national conference." 

And that's a start, sure – I shouldn’t bemoan anyone who cares about this and is trying to carry the torch. Carry the flag forward, absolutely.

But social media today too often is an open ‘well I hope someone finds this’ while competing for eyeballs against multi-millionaire TikTok and YouTube professionals. The reality is that getting people attention about what we do, organically, is really, really difficult to pull off.
 
If we truly want to solve the problem, we need to cast a much wider net.

To me, the obvious answer is digital. And not necessarily a social media answer.

Cast a net at scale, so we consistently get in front of lower-visibility students with a real chance to build awareness and provide a path for talent to join us.

A FOCUSED STUDY
I’m excited to say that we’ve started working with an independent team of college engineering students (non-fire protection, intentionally), to take on exactly this issue of scale.

How can we, as the fire protection industry, be relevant to engineering and technical students who don’t know that the fire protection industry exists?

What messaging is most effective?

In what ways can we help them get what they want most?

And how can we cast a net, at scale, so that we find the interested Mechanical Engineering student at New Mexico Tech, or the Architectural Engineering student at The Illinois Institute of Technology, or the student pursuing an Associate’s in Drafting at a local program – all of which have talent and express an interest in fire protection?
 
Our hypothesis, today, is that there has to be a way to sustainably cast that net in front of the right groups of students.

There has to be a way to effectively sample if someone has an open-enough perspective to consider fire as a career.

And, if someone does have an interest, find effective ways to support them with meaningful industry connections who may want to hire them.

My gut says there has to be a sustainable way to pull that off – because there’s so much benefit to the industry in doing so.

Messaging? Incentives? Validation? We’re just in the early starting stages of this effort now, and by June this year (2026), the intent is that we have a path to identify talent and help connect them with industry.

Brainstorm, test, validate.

I'm optimistic that in the right spaces with the right messaging, we'll find the diamonds in the rough.

We (MeyerFire) aren’t hiring – but we do play a role in the digital space in this industry. If we can cast that giant digital net and find the interested talent, and create that student-to-industry connection - then I think we have something here.

Your input here on this goes a long way.
 
So my question for you, as an interested member of our industry: when we’ve identified students with an interest, and given some initial fire protection crash courses…

What are the things you would want to know about a prospective student hire?

What do you want us to validate about potential interested candidates?

What do you want them to know?

Are you only concerned that they’ve expressed interest in fire protection, or that they’ve completed a few initial ‘crash courses’ in fire protection?

If we’re able to find interested student talent, do a small bit of initial training, and introduce them to our field, what is it that you want to know about them and want us to validate?
 
As a student, I would have killed (figuratively) for a list of 20-something fire protection employers and their hiring contacts when I was seeking that first internship or first job.

That would be an incredibly rewarding thing for a student looking for a job or internship.

Conversely, for employers, I would imagine getting a regular email report of students at different local schools seeking internships or jobs and who are interested in fire protection would also be beneficial… ‘here are leads for interested students in the area’ kind of thing.

Right?
 
What do you say?