In 2013, after a five-year hiring freeze, the City of Los Angeles resumed hiring new firefighters for the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD). Within a year, however, the hiring effort was met with waves of criticism and calls for reform.¹ Critics charged, among other things, that the selection criteria lacked transparency and that the hiring process appeared to favor applicants with connections to current LAFD firefighters. They argued that the training class was significantly less racially diverse than the city of Los Angeles and contained only one female candidate. They also cited the fact that more than 20 percent of...

Recruiting is a key element in fostering diversity in any organization. Proactive efforts to reach out to the community and generate interest in working for the LAFD, in addition to mentoring future candidates, are among the most effective means of improving the demographic diversity of the candidate pool entering into the selection process. In this chapter, we present a model for applying these issues to the recruiting context. We then summarize the firefighter recruiting process as it existed at the start of our study, based on our informational interviews and reviews of existing documentation.

Figure 2.1 summarizes the range of...

The firefighter selection process (as it was applied in 2013 and as it existed at the start of this study) is described below. Our description of the process is based on several interviews we conducted with the Personnel Department to understand the process as it existed at the time the interviews were conducted.¹

The 2013 firefighter selection process consisted of ten steps, with participation from the Fire Department, the Personnel Department, and an external organization that administered the CPAT, the California Fire Fighter Joint Apprentice Committee. It took about a year for a candidate to move through the entire process...

In this chapter, we report findings from our statistical analysis of the firefighter selection process, using the 2013 cohort of applicants. The objective of this analysis was twofold: (1) to identify steps in the process where a large proportion of the applicants were eliminated and (2) to identify steps in the process that affected the racial, ethnic, and gender representation of the applicant pool. The former can assist in identifying the steps most useful for narrowing the applicant pool, and the latter can inform which elements in the process are most likely to affect diversity. We considered these findings in...

As mentioned in Chapter One, the recommendations we make here draw heavily on our knowledge and experience in personnel selection and workplace diversity. They are informed not only by the professional guidelines for personnel selection practices described in thePrinciples(2003) and theStandards(2014) but also by the vast literature of applied and scientific research on the validity of tests in employment contexts, successful approaches to increasing diversity, recruiting best-practices, and firefighter selection practices.

Although we rely on that research literature and the professional practice guidelines, we tailor our recommendations specifically to the city’s existing selection process and needs....