As the Director of Business Development for ProspectHR MMI, I was honoured and delighted to be given the opportunity to co-present with Karen Roche, Fire Chief for City of Burlington at the recent Fire-Rescue International Conference.

In this blog I will walk readers through some of the highlights of our presentation, including the results the City of Burlington experienced using the vMMI, as well as the origin of how the City of Burlington came to work with ProspectHR MMI.

The objectives of our presentation at the Fire-Rescue International (FRI) Conference were to:

• Share a new approach to recruiting and selecting firefighters,
• Share the positive outcomes that have been achieved with the Multiple Mini Interview within the public sector with a focus on the City of Burlington’s Fire Service, and
• Demonstrate the potential that the MMI selection process can have in shifting the culture within Fire Services

During the presentation, Chief Roche described the challenges that her department has had historically in their recruitment process. These challenges are not unique to Burlington Fire:

• There is a lack of diversity among firefighters. Predominantly white male firefighters make up their new recruits. When potential candidates don’t see someone who looks like them in recruitment materials, in their community, or in the media, they may be reluctant to apply,
• Fire Services has historically been focused on masculine traits such as brawn and courage,
• There has been little focus on assessing for client service and how firefighters deal with members of the public and their peers,
• There has been little focus on soft skills and emotional intelligence. Creating an inclusive culture requires emotional intelligence, soft skills, and self-awareness when it comes to unconscious bias. 

Chief Roche rightly noted that hiring a firefighter was a 30-year decision, so she wants to ensure her department makes the right choice.

“It’s virtually impossible to part ways with a firefighter unless it is their choice to leave”. Yes, technical skills are important, but you also need to know if “that firefighter is narcissistic, blaming, negative, whiny, inflexible or any number of other undesirable character traits that make these “talented terrors” demoralizing to the workplace.” 

“We need people with resilience, innovation, proactivity, determination, passion, and flexibility. Those attributes aren’t something that a person receives by having a degree or some advanced certification”. 

“Our residents trust us to be proficient at hiring employees who have a positive attitude, great people skills as well as technical skills to perform their roles well. Emotionally intelligent people have higher self-awareness and impulse control that help them apply knowledge to immediate situations dealing with our public”. 

At the City of Burlington – trust, respect, honesty, and integrity are foundational values of the organization. Given their corporate values and the trust that the public places in firefighters the Fire Service pursued a path of looking at candidates that demonstrated personal attributes and soft skills such as: 

• Selfless sense of duty 
• Shows initiative – seeks out challenges and opportunities to improve, grow and advance,
• Ability to perform under stress, demonstrates resilience, remains calm and composed under pressure,
• Provide leadership by setting an example that others follow,
• Has integrity – speaks up on matters of principle, owns up to mistakes, ensures tasks are completed correctly, 
• Establishes effective relationships – shares knowledge, puts team interests before their own interests, respects others’ feelings,
• Demonstrates effective communication – listens, asks clarifying questions, responds to questions asked.

Chief Roche told the audience that her 34 years plus experience has shown that these personal attributes contribute to an inclusive, supportive, and respectful workplace and great fire service delivery. She also recognized that recruiting and hiring the right person is one of the most difficult and important tasks that an organization undertakes. Avoiding the wrong hire requires assessment of an applicant’s soft skills which are difficult to measure. 

Chief Roche spoke of her experience of turning to ProspectHR MMI to help her build a process to assess personal attributes, soft skills, and emotional intelligence. She then turned the presentation over to me to provide an overview of the MMI.

I described the origins and research behind the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) and practical experience that has proven the benefits of this process including:

• Reliability (ability to distinguish between candidates) and validity (has been shown to predict performance in some health disciplines),
• Supports diversity and inclusion,
• Significantly reduces interviewer and rater bias,
• Very efficient way to interview a high number of applicants, 
• Saves a lot of time in interview preparation time as there are more than 650 interview scenarios to choose from that have been developed and vetted by experts,
• Useful for any discipline that requires soft skills to be effective in their role, and
• Effective way to identify high potential leadership skills for succession planning or internal promotion.

There are 10 soft skill attributes that the MMI was designed to assess for – accountability, collaboration and teamwork, ethical and moral judgment, communication skills, conflict resolution, self-awareness, empathy, resilience, problem solving and conflict resolution. Organizations can select stations that align with their values as well as soft skill attributes.

When I asked, “What sold you on the MMI?”, Chief Roche responded that she “Liked the simplicity of the questions and the ability to elicit responses that were not “pre-scripted” or canned ". Responses are unique to the individual’s background, experience, and character”. She also liked the fact that it is very hard to make up answers – no BS”. 

Chief Roche was the first Fire Service in Canada to use the virtual MMI which ProspectHR MMI launched during the pandemic to help organizations achieve business continuity. 

The vMMI has all the benefits of the MMI done virtually. The virtual process expands the candidate pool as there are no economic or geographic barriers. Recruiting outside of the local talent pool can provide access to higher quality candidates and a more diverse workforce. It also expands your interviewer pool as they can interview from anywhere. This enables the inclusion of diverse interviewers external to an organization, demonstrating commitment to diversity and inclusion. The vMMI also provides enhanced confidentiality for leadership candidates and greater engagement of senior level interviewers when promoting internal talent or identifying high potentials for succession planning and leadership development. 



Chief Roche spoke to the positive outcomes that have been achieved with the addition of the vMMI in their firefighter recruitment process: 

• The MMI process is much more efficient than the previous panel interview process. It used to take 3 solid weeks to interview 90 candidates which was a significant time commitment for both Deputy Chiefs, Platoon Chiefs, and an HR consultant. With the MMI this could be done over the course of 3 days. 
• High quality candidates with crucial soft skills have been selected over the last 2 years. While we weren’t able to attract more diverse candidates in our most recent process (2023), we are confident that we have selected great allies for diversity that will make a positive contribution to our workplace culture based on their responses to the MMI scenarios that we chose. 
• Engaging our platoon chief early in the MMI process has given them more ownership in the future makeup and success of our Fire Service 
• We are currently well above the provincial average for recruitment of female firefighters. 
  

Since the conference, I have been having conversations with Fire Chiefs who attended the FRI Conference. If you wish to learn how the MMI might be beneficial to your recruitment and internal promotion process for Fire Service or any other service in your municipal organization, connect with me at helen.tomasik@prospecthrmmi.com.