The Employer's Struggle of Hiring FP Talent

By Jocelyn Sarrantonio, PE | Technical Director at MeyerFire

Hiring in fire protection is tough.

You can have a perfectly written requisition, offer the right salary, and still watch it sit open for months, waiting for the right person to come along.

Before joining MeyerFire I led a fire protection group of 15 people across 5 locations at a large global firm. Management and running a group isn’t just about managing the team you already have. If you’re lucky enough to be at a growing company, it’s also about finding the right people to join your team and fill open roles in the right locations. Even with a full talent acquisition team and sophisticated systems, we still struggled to fill fire protection roles.

Because the challenge isn’t just hiring. It’s finding people who even know this field exists.
 
WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?
I remember trying to explain to a manager from a few jobs ago, who was not a fire protection engineer, just how special a bunch we were. He thought we could just drive to WPI and show up in the fire protection lab with some pizza, and they’d be knocking down our door to work with us. I appreciated his optimism, but it doesn’t work like that anymore! Especially not in fire protection, those students already had jobs lined up.

So what do we do?

We post on LinkedIn, work with recruiters, and ask for referrals. We hire from within, making fire protection engineers out of people from other disciplines. And we show up at career fairs. A lot of labor and time intensive tactics.
 
WHEN CAREER FAIRS AREN’T ENOUGH
I was lucky enough that because we were a large company, we had a presence at career fairs, and I wouldn’t have to go myself. Periodically I would get a PDF of scanned resumes, complete with handwritten notes that people had gathered from college career fairs. Talk about a needle in a haystack, but I actually found someone that way!

It’s tough out there at career fairs. If you work at a company that does many things, you spend most of your time describing to engineering students what fire protection is. You hear a lot of,  “Oh I didn’t realize that was a job.”

It feels a bit like you’re trying to sell someone a used car.

I think there are a lot of benefits to a career path in fire protection, but conveying all of that in a quick conversation feels a little bit like speed dating.

Another time I had a great conversation, I found the ideal student, someone who already knew about fire protection and was interested, but she lived nowhere near any of our offices. Right person, wrong location.

Sure, the career fair method can work, but there has to be a better way to let people know about how great it is to be in fire protection, and make connections between interested students and potential employers.

In our last post we asked: “Where are the students?”

It’s not just about finding people who are already on a fire protection track - it’s also about marketing what we do to people on the fringe, who are in a position to learn more: the people who are making decisions about their future careers.

We have to catch the students when they’re weighing the options about their future. It’s not just about finding diamonds, it’s about making them.  
 
EVEN INTERNSHIPS DON’T SOLVE IT
One summer, I opened up 3 internship positions. I thought it would work on multiple levels, First, I figured it would be a good mini-management task for some of my high achievers, to mentor college students and teach them what they knew. We would figure out if they liked teaching and managing, in a short term trial. And second, I would expose at least 3 students to fire protection.

When the resumes started coming in, I did not have any expectations that the students would have any fire protection experience. That part I knew, since we all know that most of us in fire protection didn’t get a degree in fire protection. What I was not prepared for, was the flood of resumes that came in, with hardly any way to distinguish from all of these high achieving engineering students.

I started just CTRL + F searching for the word “fire” in their resumes. Anyone that vaguely fit that search got a closer look.

I know it can be tough out there, but some perspective from a hiring manager, if you’re applying for a fire protection internship, try to demonstrate some interest in the subject matter! Even if it’s that statement at the top, “I am seeking a fire protection internship at ABC company for the Summer of 2026”. That would have made it past my filter and landed you in my office for an interview.

This is how I ended up with some perfectly lovely engineering students in my office, trying to find some common ground and tying fire protection concepts to what they’re studying in school. I quickly realized that I didn’t have the luxury of being so selective, I was going to have to market fire protection, even if it was one intern or student at a time. And that’s okay, but I’m sure there’s a better way.

We hired the three interns that summer. I’d like to think our group made an impression them. At the very least, they ended the summer knowing more about fire protection, and understanding our little corner of the industry.

So what’s missing?
 
THE NEED TO CONNECT WITH STUDENTS
Career fairs, recruiters, referrals, and my CTRL + F method, they all work. But they can be time intensive, inconsistent, and reactive.

They will not solve our pipeline problem at scale. How do we know that? Because after all these decades of trying, we still have a pipeline problem.

The bigger issues is upstream: most students don’t know fire protection is a career option in the first place. That’s the gap. And that’s where our initiative with what we're calling the Student Connector comes in.

When I was managing and actively hiring for our group, I would have loved the employer side of the Student Connector. We created the Student Connector to address our pipeline problem in fire protection. If you haven’t read about it, check out our last article here.

Getting a summary of students in my area actively interested in fire protection? Sign me up!

Our hope with this initiative is that it helps with the marketing of fire protection as a career, to catch students while they’re weighing career options. For those who are interested, I hope they stick around, learn more about what we do, and all of the different career paths they can take.

For employers, I hope it reduces the friction to hiring, and saves them time from having to teach engineering students about what it is that we do.

I hope we connect with the right people in the right places, without needing to bribe anyone with free pizza.

If you’re a student, sign up! Tell your friends. It's free. And if you’re an employer, and you maybe know of a student who was great but wasn’t in your location, send them to the Student Connector too! They just might find the match they're seeking.