The Client
The staff of 9-1-1 Operators of Chester County Department of Emergency Services serves the people of Chester County. Seventy-two operators field some 850 calls per day and dispatch fire, police or emergency medical technicians to the scene of a wide variety of emergencies. Chester County is one of the three original counties created by William Penn in 1682. The area is a tourist destination and mostly rural in nature, filled with small, quaint villages.
The Solution
Hay Aptitude Test Battery: The Hay Aptitude Test Battery consists of three short measures of speed and accuracy. These are used to identify individuals who can produce large volumes of work with few mistakes in a short amount of time. These tests are ideal for clerical, teller, warehouse and other positions requiring intense work with names and numbers.Intelligent candidates may still lack the detail orientation necessary for jobs that require speed and accuracy. Even the slightest mistake in accounting, billing or shipping can have a serious impact on your company’s internal processes and reputation.
The Hay Aptitude Test Battery measures a person’s ability to compare numbers and names for accuracy, use short-term memory effectively and quickly identify numeric relationships. The test is used when hiring employees because test scores reflect both the speed and accuracy with which the candidate performs these basic clerical tasks.
Hay Tests Reduce Turnover Among 9-1-1 Operators
A 9-1-1 Operator/Dispatcher deals with life and death situations every day on the job, yet unlike the police, fire fighters and emergency medical technicians whom they dispatch to all manner of emergency situations, 9-1-1 operators get very little glory for their efforts.
They rarely ever see the people on the other end of the line who have called for emergency help, nor do they always know the outcome of their work. It’s rarer still for the public to see or hear about them. Sure, plenty of accolades exist for heroic rescue work, but the cool, unflappable, behind-the-scenes 9-1-1 operator rarely gets the recognition they so richly deserve.
The operator must handle a large volume of calls from people who are usually upset, sometimes to the state of hysteria. They must not only possess the ability to instill calmness so as to elicit critical information from the caller, but also accurately dispatch and keep track of the personnel and equipment in the field responding to the call. The pace of the job adds significantly to the stress. In West Chester, PA., the Chester County Department of Emergency Services fields some 850 to 900 calls per day. Fourteen operators are on the job at one time, and the facility is open 24 hours per day. Given the complex nature of each call and the required attention to detail to handle them, it’s no surprise to find burnout taking its toll quickly on 9-1-1 Operators.
John Haynes, Deputy Director of the Chester County Department of Emergency Services, combats employee burnout by giving his operators more than ample vacation time and by using a four days on/four days off schedule for all 72 of his operators, allowing them to really rest and relax with four full days away from the stress. None of those measures, however, will prevent burnout in an employee who really wasn’t right for the job in the first place.
When poor employee/job fit results in a high rate of turnover, which makes life difficult for the people responsible for staffing those positions, and also for those who train the new recruits. That’s why Haynes began using the Wonderlic Hay Aptitude Test Battery to screen applicants for those demanding positions. The Hay tests ensure that he’s hiring people that are comfortable handling a large volume of detail in a short amount of time, in an accurate manner, which goes a long way toward preventing the burnout that causes high turnover.
“I began using the Hay test eight years ago,” says Haynes. “Before using the test, I’d send eight or ten people through our extensive-and expensive-training program because I knew that after a year, we’d have maybe three of those people left. Now, I hire just three to four people and send them through training, and we’re retaining them.”
Haynes says the Hay tests help him find people who have several key characteristics that are invaluable assets to a 9-1-1 Operator position-but are hard to discern in an interview. “I need to know they’re going to be able to multi-task with a high degree of accuracy under great pressure. The Hay test helps me find those people.” Aside from retaining quality operators, the Hay tests also help Haynes make sure that his new hires won’t lose their ability to handle details under the pressure of those life-and-death calls. That, too, is difficult to discern in an interview.
“You can have the most highly-intelligent person in the world in one of these positions, but it’s hard to predict whether their attention to detail will fall apart the first time they’re on the phone with a mother who is doing CPR on her baby,” he says. “The Hay tests help me find people who are going to be 100 percent accurate under those kinds of conditions, because they simply have those skills, it’s not something they struggle with. And in this job, they don’t get a second chance. They have to come through the first time and every time, period. They are dealing with life and death.”While the national average for turnover is around 17% in a 9-1-1 center, Chester County maintains a 5% turnover rate. This not only saves the tax payers money, it saves lives by having trained, experienced professionals answering emergency calls.
“It takes a lot of money to train Telecommunicators,” Haynes says. “It’s coming from the pocketbooks of the citizens of Chester County.”
Haynes is also concerned about the trainers, who invest time, energy and a bit of themselves in every class of new recruits whom they put through a rigorous, 12 week training program, only to watch as one after another drops out. “Our trainers really invest themselves in these new recruits,” says Haynes. “Being able to hire the right people from the outset has been a great help.”
In a sense, the burnout of 9-1-1 Operators was negatively affecting two positions-the operators themselves, and their trainers, who began to feel as though all the training in the world wouldn’t help retain those recruits. Before he began using the Hay test, Haynes says that his trainers would look with a skeptical eye at every new class of recruits, because they had seen so many people come and go.
“Now the trainers see the classroom as our future,” he says. “They realize every student has the aptitude for the job.”
