The Department of Fire and Emergency Services in Western Australia doesn’t run an annual recruit firefighter campaign. That single fact reshapes how you should prepare. Candidates who treat DFES the way they would treat Fire Rescue NSW — wait for the published cycle, prep for eight weeks, sit the assessments — frequently miss the window entirely, because by the time a DFES campaign is publicly announced, the gap between announcement and assessment is short. The Expression of Interest register exists to close that gap, and how you use it (or don’t) is the difference between being ready when a cycle opens and watching one go past.
This post is a plain-English walk through what the DFES EOI is, how DFES recruit campaigns actually run when they open, and what a sensible preparation cadence looks like between campaigns. Everything below comes from material DFES publishes on its careers page and the Career Firefighter Recruitment Information Pack. When a campaign opens, the Pack for that cycle is the authoritative source.
The cycle that isn’t a cycle
DFES recruits career firefighters periodically rather than on a fixed annual rhythm. Campaigns open when DFES workforce planning identifies a need. Cohort sizes have ranged from approximately 30 to 60 in recent years. The full process from application to recruit course commencement typically runs 6–9 months, and recruit courses are conducted at the DFES Academy at Forrestfield, Perth.
There is currently no active campaign. The next one will open when DFES needs it to.
That doesn’t mean nothing happens between campaigns. DFES operates a continuous Expression of Interest register where prospective candidates submit name, contact details and demographic information and receive notification when the next campaign opens. There is no commitment, no application fee, and no penalty for registering and then deciding not to apply.
Why the EOI matters
A few practical reasons:
- The window from announcement to assessment is shorter than candidates expect. If you’re not preparing in advance, your prep time inside the open window is not enough to move your physical, cognitive or interview readiness materially.
- Information Pack updates flow to EOI registrants. Each cycle’s Pack contains the published selection criteria, assessment timeline and FAQs for that cycle. Reading it before applying is high leverage.
- Familiarisation events and information sessions are sometimes offered to EOI registrants ahead of formal advertising. Attending one is the single best way to calibrate what DFES actually wants in candidates, beyond what the published material can convey.
How to prepare during an inter-campaign period
The honest answer is: like a candidate. DFES’s process tests the same capabilities as every other Australian career firefighter pathway — aerobic capacity, functional strength under PPE, cognitive aptitude including mechanical reasoning, behavioural fit and resilience. None of those move quickly. All of them respond to consistent work over months.
A reasonable inter-campaign cadence for a candidate who wants to be ready when DFES opens:
Physical: three to four aerobic sessions a week, two strength sessions with a functional bias (squats, deadlifts, lunges, farmer’s carries, loaded step-ups), and one specifically-loaded session a week — vest, stair climbing, sled work. Train in long sleeves and pants at least once a week to build heat tolerance. WA’s climate adds a heat dimension that candidates training in cooler climates need to deliberately replicate.
Cognitive: a free practice test from Criteria Corp, practiceaptitudetests.com or psychometricinstitute.com.au once a fortnight, with deliberate review of the explanations on every question you got wrong. Specific focus on mechanical reasoning — this is consistently the weakest area for non-trades candidates and the area with the highest payoff per hour of preparation.
Interview readiness: build a STAR bank of eight to ten stories from work, sport, study, volunteering. Each story should flex across multiple capabilities. Practise them out loud, ideally on camera. Watch the recordings back. Most candidates underestimate how distracting their own filler words are until they see them.
Knowledge: subscribe to DFES recruitment notifications. Download the latest Career Firefighter Recruitment Information Pack from the publications page and read it twice. Track DFES public communications — major incidents, USAR taskforce deployments, bushfire season activity — so that when an interview asks “why DFES specifically”, you can engage with the organisation’s real operational context rather than generic firefighter motivations.
What happens inside an open campaign
When a campaign opens, the published shape of the DFES process is broadly the standard six-stage Australian fire service pattern.
Stage 1 — Application via the DFES careers portal. Personal details, citizenship/residency evidence, driver’s licence (front and back), resume with full work history, and written responses to selection criteria questions. Use STAR structure and reference DFES values explicitly: courage, commitment, compassion, team-orientation, problem-solving. Reference WA-specific operational context where you can — DFES’s bushfire interface work, USAR taskforce role, regional and remote operations are differentiators.
Stage 2 — Cognitive and behavioural assessment, online and proctored. Verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, abstract/spatial reasoning, mechanical reasoning, personality/behavioural inventory, situational judgement. Standard proctoring rules — closed quiet room, no other people, phone off, single monitor, photo ID ready.
Stage 3 — Physical aptitude. A job-task simulation circuit in supplied PPE, designed to mirror the physical demands of structural firefighting in WA conditions (which include significant heat exposure). Task elements typically include an aerobic component, equipment carries, hose drag and advance, ladder lift, casualty drag with a manikin, stair climb under load, and a tool/forcible-entry simulation. Pass-fail against a strict cut-off.
Stage 4 — Structured interview. A behavioural panel conducted by DFES officers, scored against published selection criteria. Common areas: working effectively in teams (especially with diverse colleagues), operating safely under pressure and uncertainty, resilience and recovery after setbacks, service orientation with a WA-specific framing, integrity and ethical judgement, adaptability and learning capability, communication and listening. Be ready to discuss willingness for regional postings in concrete terms — this matters more for DFES than for east-coast services because regional and remote postings are a larger share of DFES operational deployment.
Stage 5 — Medical. Comprehensive medical history (full disclosure mandatory), physical examination, vision (acuity, colour vision, field, depth perception), audiometry, spirometry (particularly important given respiratory PPE in heat conditions), cardiovascular screen, blood and urine tests including drug screen, BMI/body composition, musculoskeletal screen. Risk-based assessment against sudden incapacity, functional limitation and aggravation by firefighting work. Candidates likely to be posted to remote regional locations are assessed against access to specialist medical care in those locations — conditions requiring frequent specialist review may be flagged for that reason alone.
Stage 6 — Background checks including criminal history.
Successful candidates attend the DFES Academy at Forrestfield for approximately sixteen weeks of full-time recruit training covering structural firefighting and breathing apparatus, road accident rescue, HAZMAT, pump and water supply, bushfire and grassfire response (significant content given WA conditions), Heavy Rigid licence acquisition, emergency medical response, USAR awareness, and physical conditioning.
The regional reality
Candidates frequently underestimate how much “willingness to be posted anywhere in WA” actually means in practice. DFES is geographically vast. Regional and remote postings — Bunbury, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Albany, Karratha, Port Hedland — are a significant share of DFES operational presence, not an edge case. Graduates are posted in order of merit, and candidates who cannot relocate to regional or remote postings struggle in ranking.
If your honest answer is that you can’t relocate, DFES may not be the right fit, and there’s no harm in saying that to yourself early. If your honest answer is that you can but you’ve never thought about it concretely, do the thinking now — visit a regional centre, talk to someone who’s lived in one, look at what your life would actually look like there for two to four years.
What “ready” actually means between campaigns
A useful test for whether you’re using the inter-campaign period well: imagine DFES announces a campaign tomorrow with the first physical assessment six weeks out. Could you pass it cold? Could you sit the cognitive battery without two weeks of cramming? Could you walk into an interview tomorrow with a STAR bank of eight stories you’ve practised out loud? If the answer to all three is yes, you’re using the period well. If the answer to any is no, that’s where your next month of work should go. Candidates who treat the inter-campaign period as a holding pattern and then scramble inside the open window consistently underperform candidates who treated it as a deliberate ramp.
Where this fits
If you’re cross-applying to NT — another service where geography and climate are central to the role — the NTFRS heat and remote postings post covers what changes when the job comes with tropical and desert conditions. If you’re considering South Australia, where MFS also doesn’t run an annual cycle but does run a more compressed two-stage PAT, the SA MFS two-stage PAT post covers what to expect.
When you’re ready, the free 15-minute readiness check will give you an honest read on your current readiness against DFES’s published capabilities and which area to prioritise — and the AI coach builds your personalised preparation plan from there — regardless of whether a campaign is currently open.