IT was heaving rain two weeks ago when Salvatore J. Cassano, New York City’s fire commissioner, showed up on a Sunday to pitch his department to the congregants at Concord Baptist Church of Christ on Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn. No doubt because of the weather — people had stayed home at “Bedside Baptist,” the pastor joked — Mr. Cassano, gamely dressed in pinstripes, was confronted by empty pews. A trumpeter had just played hymns to some restless boys, a few old men and clumps of hatted matrons. From a microphone, the commissioner delivered to the half-filled room what had become the most important, and thorniest, public message of his career.

“We’re going to be hiring,” he told the all-black crowd, listing benefits of what is known across New York as “the job”: a starting salary of $40,000, the chance to earn $100,000 after five years, four weeks of paid vacation, lifetime medical care, a generous city pension. “I raised five kids and four grandkids on this job, and starting at the bottom I became commissioner.” He added proudly, “When you join the Fire Department, you inherit a second family — a family where, if something happens, people rally around you, just like they do in this church.”

The trip to Concord Baptist, Mr. Cassano’s fifth this summer to a black church, was the latest personal effort in a drive to recruit minority applicants that is unprecedented in the department’s history. In 18 months, officials say, recruiters have sought black candidates at more than 6,100 events at high schools, colleges, shopping malls, boxing gyms, softball games and military picnics, all but begging them to apply for the next entrance test, in January, by the Sept. 15 deadline.

A phone bank in Queens has placed more than 100,000 calls to minority residents who expressed even passing interest in the job. There is a recruitment Facebook page and advertisements in New York’s Caribbean newspapers. More than $1 million has been spent for radio spots on stations with heavily black audiences like Hot 97 and Kiss FM.