Classes started this week for 43 firefighters-in- training, following a revamp of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD)’s recruitment process.
There are four women in the group — two are white, one is Asian and one is Hispanic. The rest of the class is made up of 19 white, 13 Hispanic, five black and two Asian men.
More than 10,000 people applied for firefighter jobs and 302 were randomly picked to take part in the hiring process, according to the LAFD.
The recruitment process was changed after concerns arose that relatives of existing firefighters were getting extra help, and after the previous process for whittling down the enormous number of applicants to a more manageable number was criticized as being too arbitrary.
The new process uses a stratified random sampling method that retains the demographic makeup when the initial applicant group is scaled down to a smaller pool of candidates.
The fire department plans to start two additional classes — one in March and another in June — with city leaders budgeting for 165 new firefighters to be hired in 2015.
