I'm Ryan Coffey. I spent six years deciding who got hired.

The five years nobody puts on a resume

I got into the fire service in 2008. I did not become a professional firefighter until 2015.

Five years. Three of them testing casually, telling myself I was building experience. Two of them going at it hard, applying everywhere, driving to any department that would let me sit in front of a panel.

I failed about 30 interviews before Everett hired me. Speed dating rounds, panels, chief's interviews. Every format there is.

Not because I was unqualified. I had the certs. I had the volunteer time. I was in shape and I wanted it badly. I would walk out of an oral board thinking it had gone fine, and then the letter would come, or worse, nothing would come at all, and I would have no idea what I had done wrong.

That is the part of this process nobody warns you about. Not the failing. The not knowing why. You cannot fix what nobody will tell you, and departments almost never tell you.

If you are in that stretch right now, testing over and over and watching people you trained with get hired ahead of you, I am not guessing at what that feels like.

What actually changed

It was not a new cert. It was not getting into better shape.

What changed was understanding that the panel was not testing my knowledge. By the time you are in that room, they already assume you can be trained to do the job. What they are trying to answer is simpler and much harder to fake: do we trust this person, will they fit our crew, and do they actually understand who we are and why we do this work here.

Once I understood that, three things changed in how I answered:

I stopped giving textbook answers and started telling real stories from my own life. I stopped talking about the fire service in general and started talking about that specific department, its mission, its culture, and what it actually valued. And I stopped performing and started connecting.

I got hired at the Everett Fire Department.

Seven years later I tested at the Port of Seattle Fire Department and got hired on the first try.

Six years on the other side of the table

At Everett I was asked to serve on the hiring panel. I did it for six years and conducted hundreds of interviews. I have been part of the process that put more than 100 firefighters into this career.

Sitting on that side changes everything you think you know about interviewing.

I watched candidates who were clearly the strongest people in the applicant pool score in the middle of the pack, because they gave safe, polished, forgettable answers that could have been given to any department in the country. I watched candidates with thinner resumes score at the top, because they said something specific and true about themselves and tied it to what our department actually cared about.

I also watched a lot of people walk out of that room with no idea that they had just talked themselves out of a job.

That is what I could not let go of. The gap between how prepared people thought they were and how prepared they actually were was enormous, and almost nobody was closing it for them.

I have helped departments define what they are looking for

Beyond hiring, I have facilitated mission, vision and values development for both the Everett Fire Department and the Snohomish County Fire Chiefs Association.

That work matters more to this than it sounds like it should.

When a department tells you to connect with their values, most candidates go to the website, find a bulleted list, and try to work the words into an answer. Panels can hear that from across the room. What they are actually listening for is whether you understand what those words mean in practice, on a call, at three in the morning, with a crew.

I have sat in the rooms where departments argue about which words to choose and why. I know what is behind them. That is what I teach candidates to hear, and it is why my clients sound different from the person who memorized the values page the night before.

Why I still coach

I am still an active firefighter. I did not leave the job to do this.

I coach because of the version of me that spent five years getting rejected without ever being told what to fix, and because of every candidate I watched from the panel side who deserved the job and did not know how to show it.

The information that closes that gap is not secret. It is just never shared with the people who need it, because the people who have it are on the hiring side and they are not talking.

I am talking.

How I work with people

Everything I teach comes from the panel side of the table, not from a general interviewing framework with fire service words swapped in.