The Denton Fire Oral Board and Chief's Interview: Format and Scoring, From the Agreement

30-second answer. The written exam decides who reaches the interviews. The interviews decide the order of hire. Under the city's Meet and Confer agreement with the firefighters' association, applicants who pass the background check and the physical ability test go to an Oral Interview Board of four: three Denton firefighters and one Denton citizen chosen by the department head, with four trained alternates. Each member scores you from zero to one hundred and the average is your board score; under seventy, you are out. Then the Fire Chief interviews you, with assistant or battalion chiefs invited at the chief's option, and scores you from zero to one hundred; under seventy, you are out. Your place on the eligibility list is the board score times seventy percent of the weight plus the chief's score times thirty percent. The written grade does not carry into that number.

Where it sits in the order

Exam, then background packets by rank, then up to thirty of the highest-ranked who pass background to the physical ability test, then the interviews for everyone who passes it. If the names run out after the interviews, the department head calls the next fifteen on the Commission List to the physical ability test and the sequence repeats. For the January 2026 cycle the department's hiring-instructions page put the interviews in March, after a February 28 physical ability test.

The board

Section 5 of the hiring article. Four members and four alternates; three of each are firefighters from the department, one of each is a citizen member from the city of Denton chosen by the department head. All receive training to conduct interviews. Each member assigns a score from zero to one hundred; the average of the four is the final board score. A score under seventy disqualifies the applicant from any further consideration.

The chief's interview

Section 6. The Fire Chief interviews the applicants the preceding steps produced and may invite one or more assistant chiefs or battalion chiefs to attend. The chief assigns a score from zero to one hundred, folding in any input from the invited chiefs. Under seventy disqualifies.

How the list is built

Section 7 prints the formula: the four board scores divided by four, times seventy percent of the weight; plus the chief's interview score, times thirty percent. That sum is the applicant's final overall score, and the eligibility list ranks by it. When a vacancy occurs the department head appoints the eligible applicant with the highest final overall score unless there is a valid reason not to. The list lives one year after the written examination unless exhausted. Two consequences follow. First, the written exam is a gate, not a tiebreaker: a 98 and a 72 arrive at the board as equals. Second, seventy percent of your hire order is decided by three firefighters and a citizen in one room.

What the agreement does not publish

The questions, the scoring rubric behind the zero-to-one-hundred, and the length of the interviews. The agreement refers to the department's hiring guidelines for procedure and does not print them. What is published is enough to prepare for: a panel that is mostly working firefighters, a citizen's view of you as a public servant, and a chief's interview that carries nearly a third of the weight on its own. The ride-along, open to applicants who have passed background, is the department's own suggestion for having something real to speak from.

After the interviews

The hiring-instructions page lists the conditional job offer, by which your certifications must be viewable on the state commission's and DSHS's public lookups, then the psychological and medical evaluations, then hire. Section 9 sets probation at up to eighteen months, or twelve for a recruit already certified as both a firefighter and a paramedic; the probationary-year guide covers it.