Series Introduction & It Starts with a Plan 

This episode kicks off our South Carolina Volunteer Recruiter Education Series to help guide local recruitment efforts. Firefighters from South Carolina and industry professionals share their success stories, best practices, as well as strategies and tactics to attract and retain volunteers. The ten basic steps of recruitment are introduced with tips of how to be successful along the recruitment process.

Building Community Equity Through Partnerships

This episode emphasizes the importance of building partnerships within your local community to help grow and foster your organization. These relationships grow community equity, encouraging reciprocal support between businesses.

Starting & Growing a Successful Youth Program

This episode showcases best practices for how to start and grow a beneficial youth organization. New members and youthful energy is highly desired in a firefighting community, so we outline the steps needed to ensure success.

Process is Progress

This episode introduces the process of mapping your organization’s volunteer life cycle. How to address obstacles during recruitment and retention is explained in order to help your organization maximize each member’s volunteer life cycle.

Follow-Up & Follow Through

Host Tiger Schmittendorf discusses the importance of staying engaged with volunteer candidates through effective post-meeting communication. Implementing a standardized, yet flexible recruitment process is crucial to success of any on-boarding program.

The Art of Speed-Recruiting

Host Tiger Schmittendorf goes into detail about capturing the attention of potential volunteer firefighters within a limited amount of time. Following five simple steps, recruiters can maximize their impact on any audience.

Going to Market

Host Tiger Schmittendorf elaborates on how to market your recruitment program, implementing all of the skills learned in this series. Here he outlines how to effectively build your recruitment message and determine the best channels to promote it.