Open your department's website on your phone right now and try to apply as if you were a 22 year old who has never set foot in a firehouse. If you cannot find how to apply in under thirty seconds, that is your recruiting problem, and it is the cheapest one you have to fix.
The gap nobody measures
Departments track the things that are easy to count. Booth events worked. Flyers printed. Open house attendance. What almost nobody tracks is the step in between: the person who went home interested, looked you up that night, and could not work out what to do next.
That person does not call you to complain. They just do not apply. So the number never shows up in a report, and the department concludes that nobody wants to volunteer any more.
Some of them genuinely do not. But some of them tried, and your website sent them away.
Where people actually look now
Two things happen when somebody gets curious about volunteering. They search your department by name, and they search something like "volunteer firefighter near me". You want to exist in both places.
For the second one, the fire service already built the answer. The United States Fire Administration points departments at the National Volunteer Fire Council's "Make Me a Firefighter" program, where your department can post its own volunteer opportunities so somebody searching nationally can find you. The IAFC runs a companion recruitment and retention toolkit, built with SAFER grant support.
Both are worth an hour of somebody's time. Neither replaces your own site, because the first search, your department by name, lands on you.
What a recruitment page actually needs
Not a brochure. Five specific things, and you can check all five in ten minutes.
| What | Why it stops people |
|---|---|
| The actual requirements | Age, residency, driver's licence, physical. People rule themselves out politely rather than ask and feel stupid. |
| The time commitment, in hours | "A commitment to service" tells nobody anything. "Two drills a month plus one weekend shift" lets a person check it against their job. |
| What the training costs them | Most candidates assume they pay for certification themselves. If the department covers it, that sentence is worth more than any flyer. |
| A real application, on the page | A PDF that has to be printed, signed and driven to the station loses people who work days. |
| A human name and a direct contact | "info@" gets ignored. A name and a number gets a text that evening. |
None of that is web design. It is information your department already has, written down in one place, on a page somebody can find.
The trap that will catch you in 2027
If your recruitment form is a scanned PDF, you have two problems, not one.
The first is the obvious one above. The second is that a scanned PDF is an image of a form, so a screen reader cannot read it, and a person using one cannot apply at all. Under the Department of Justice's Title II web rule, PDFs are web content like anything else, and the standard named is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The dates are April 26, 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for everyone else including special districts.
So the accessible version of your application is also the version more people can actually fill in. That is the unusual case where the compliance fix and the recruiting fix are the same piece of work. I wrote up whether that deadline applies to your department and what WCAG 2.1 AA actually means in plain language, both with the rule linked so you can check me.
Do this before your next drill
Not a project. One sitting, on your phone, the way a candidate would do it.
- Search your department's name. Does your own site come up first?
- From the home page, count the taps to reach an application. More than two is too many.
- Read your requirements out loud. Could a stranger tell if they qualify?
- Try to submit the form on your phone. Actually submit it.
- Check the address it goes to. Somebody still reads that inbox, right?
Step five is the one that surprises people. I have found departments whose application form had been mailing a chief who retired in 2019.
Why I am writing this
I build websites for fire departments, so you can reasonably assume I am building toward a pitch. I am, and here it is: every one of the five things above is free for you to fix yourself, today, on whatever site you already have. Do that first.
If you get to the end of that list and the honest answer is that the site itself is the problem, that is when I am useful.