A few (21) guys in my dept. are interested in changing form the membership voting on our officers to some other way. Ideas that have come up are either holding interviews, a hole hiring process, or just having qualifations. We want to do away with just voting someone in because you like him.
Can anyone please let me know how your dept gets officers?
Ours is still the old vote system, with one proviso, before being elected as Captain (Chief to North America) a person has to have served as a Lieutenant. Headquarters (we're a State-wide FRS) is slowly changing things to ensure that Captains and other officers have the relevant fireground training and have done the officer course.
Voting has it's problems, it can so often be a popularity contest. If you change to more of a hiring process, who will do hte interviewing and what criteria will they observe? You may well find that changing the process will simply give you a smaller pool of voters in the popularity contest...