How to Recruit Better Fire and Police Officers

Departments of Public Safety across the United States provide essential, and even life-saving services. With lives on the line, it is critical that jurisdictions hire the right men and women to serve. Agencies must strategically implement data-driven processes for screening, shortlisting, and interviewing to secure qualified talent.

Changes in hiring processes for any organization are significant, and if not implemented appropriately, serious challenges involving staffing, resources, communication, and leadership can result. Therefore, departments are turning to pre employment skills testing companies, like eSkill, an industry leader in employment testing, to provide the necessary technology and support.

Behavioral Assessments Provide Deeper Insight

Emotional intelligence is imperative when working in public safety. Fire personnel and police officers must possess behavioral characteristics that demonstrate suitability to the extraordinary demands of the job. To ensure candidates are mentally fit to handle a career in public safety, agencies must employ valid and reliable measures of emotional intelligence and personality traits.

When eSkill’s online behavioral assessments are used as a component of a comprehensive screening process, department leaders can make sound, evidence-based hiring decisions.

With eSkill, hiring teams can evaluate:

• Capacity for empathy, compassion, and engaging in teamwork
• Ability to multi-task, exhibit impulse control, work under supervision, collaborate, and tolerate stress
• Honesty, integrity, dependability, and personal bias or lack there of

eSkill’s pre-employment assessments for fire and police personnel serve two primary functions. The behavioral assesssments evaluate candidates’ personality traits as well as their emotional intelligence to ensure they are well suited for a career in public service from a psychological standpoint. This evaluation is typically supplemented with an interview by a psychologist when determining candidates’ fit for a job in law enforcement.

Measure Skills Critical to Success

While writing and mathematical skills may not stand out as a critical skill for fire police personnel, these basic abilities are fundamental to the occupations. Including eSkill’s pre employment skills tests in the vetting process results in better hire.

Hire top fire and police personnel with these skills tests:

• eSkill’s Basic Math Test: this test measures candidates’ grasp of basic arithmetic. Officers need to perform simple math for a variety of reasons. For example, law enforcement personnel need to understand how to apply math concepts to conduct investigations of vehicle collisions to take measurements and discern angles to compile evidence and reconstruct the scene.
• eSkill’s Directional or Spatial Reasoning Test: this test evaluates job-seekers’ ability to understand and utilize maps and plans. This test is critical to understanding candidates’ likelihood to succeed in any position in public safety, as it tests job-seekers’ ability to look at a map and determine the fastest route.
• eSkill’s Technical Writing Skills Test: this test measures candidates’ ability to effectively and clearly write information in a professional setting. The ability to write concisely and coherently is arguably one of the most important tasks officers performs. Police and fire personnel’s reports are often used in court or to determine insurance payouts. There is no question that writing skills are vital to any career in public safety.
• eSkill’s Reading Comprehension Skills Test: this assessment evaluates candidates’ ability to read and understand the meaning of text, including essential information, implied ideas, and interpreting information.
• eSkill’s Mechanical Skills Test: this test measure the mechanical aptitude for the position.
• eSkill’s 911 Dispatcher Skills Test: this skill test measures the specific skills required to be a 911 dispatcher.

These generalized pre-employment assessment tests enable agencies to identify candidates with the fundamental intellectual capabilities required to excel in roles throughout fire and police departments.

Develop a Comprehensive and Compliant Testing Protocol

eSkill’s online pre-employment skills testing platform provides agencies with the tools to develop a comprehensive testing protocol.

eSkill’s Test Author enables organizations to:

• Select from over 800 “off-the-shelf” single-subject and job-specific tests
• Combine tests to create a single evaluation
• Edit or delete individual questions
• Add questions to tests, including proprietary information
• Include open-ended questions in evaluations
• Add voice or video questions

For skills tests, with the ability to configure assessments to match the exact requirements of a position, eSkill makes developing a testing protocol compliant with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines simple. In fact, eSkill boasts a nearly 20-year record free of employment testing free of litigation.

eSkill’s dedicated U.S.-based Client Success Managers are available to guide your organization through selecting, customizing, and administering valid and legally compliant pre-employment assessment tests.

Streamline Situational Judgement Tests with On-Demand Video Interviews

eSkill’s on-demand video interviewing platform provides departments with the framework to consistently and objectively score situational judgement tests. eSkill’s video interviewing solution enables hiring teams to record and present candidates with a policing- or firefighting-based scenarios. When candidates complete the on-demand video interview, they watch the scenario and record a response.

eSkill’s video interviewing solution enables hiring teams to:

• Assign multiple members of a hiring team to watch, score, and share candidates’ responses
• Select and configure scorecards that detail how to consistently and fairly rate responses
• Appoint an administrator who can monitor and approve the scores reviewers assign to responses
• Aggregate or average the scores of multiple reviewers for improved consistency

In addition to situation judgement testing, departments can use on-demand video interview to assess candidates’ interpersonal skills, problem-solving ability, judgement, and dedication to career in public safety.

Today, police officers and fire personnel are increasingly tasked with intervening in complicated social problems, such as substance abuse, untreated mental illness, and homelessness. As a result, the types of skills, characteristics, and aptitude needed to work in these career fields continue to grow and become more complex.

Improving recruiting with eSkill’s pre-employment testing solutions on the front end will ultimately help with a familiar problem on the back end: retention. Although departures are unavoidable in professions as demanding and stressful as law enforcement, implementing a rigorous and comprehensive screening process will ensure candidates are the right fir at the outset and minimize the risk of turnover.

Interested in Recruiting Better Fire and Police Officers with Comprehensive Pre Employment Skills Testing?

Learn more about the benefits of using eSkill’s pre-employment skills tests, behavioral assessments, and on-demand video interviewing platform to find qualified candidates quickly.

Request a demo today.