The Client
The Clayton County Fire Department employs 300 full-time firefighters and 15 administrative positions to serve a community of 259,736 people in Riverdale, Georgia.Firefighters respond to a variety of calls, including medical emergencies, natural disasters, and accidents, in addition to fires.Firefighters must also become emergency medical technicians in order to respond accurately to the range of emergency situations they face.
The Solution
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The 50-question WPT, which has been used by thousands of organizations since 1937, is a 12-minute, timed test that accurately measures a candidate’s ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions, and apply knowledge to new situations.
This test provides hiring managers with objective information about candidates, and based on minimum test scores, can automatically eliminate a significant portion of the applicant pool enabling recruiters to focus their time on those candidates most likely to succeed.
The Clayton County Fire Department has been using the WPT since 1991 to help them choose the best candidates for the high stress, grueling, many-faceted job of firefighter.
The WPT Helps Hire Firefighters in Today’s Changing World
Firefighter trainees in Riverdale, Georgia’s Clayton County usually come into the job with little or no experience to prepare them for what lies ahead.
“You can teach a person this occupation,” says Clayton County Fire Chief Mark Trimble. “But our jobs are very dynamic, and that’s the part of it you can’t teach. Much of the time, we have to make snap decisions based on little or no information. I rely on the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) because, in 12 minutes, it gives me the best measurement of what we’re looking for in a firefighter trainee.”
Before 1991, when Clayton County began using the WPT, it used a basic civil service test to separate potential new hires from those they’d send home. “We’d been using that same civil service test for decades,” he laughs. “Nothing had changed since I took it when I first applied for the job, and that was more than 20 years ago.”
And that was becoming a problem. Although the hiring test remained the same, the profile of a perfect firefighter trainee had changed dramatically over the years. Firefighters had new responsibilities and new roles in today’s world, and that old civil service test didn’t tell Trimble what he needed to know to make sure his new hires would hit the ground running.
The WPT is a short, timed test that measures a person’s cognitive skills, ability to learn and to make decisions. It tells you whether a candidate can be trained quickly to start and then easily retrained, as new knowledge is required.
The old test judged some skills and some aptitudes, he says, but it wasn’t sufficient to encompass the changing role of the firefighter. “70 to 80 percent of what we do now is healthcare related,” Trimble says. “When we’re hiring a firefighter, we’re hiring them to become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician.) We’re not just firefighters anymore, now we also must be medical personnel. We do it all. That’s the history of the fire service. We don’t know how to say ‘no’.”
In Clayton County and in many other areas across the U.S., when a call comes into a 911 operator, if it’s not a crime, it goes to the fire department. The Clayton County fire department serves a population of 259,736 people. “We’re getting cats down from trees, sure, but we’re also responding to medical emergencies, natural disasters, accidents, storms and floods, in addition to fires,” he says.Trimble knew that it took a different type of individual to handle the job than someone who could simply pass the decades-old civil service test. “We felt there must be a better way to find people who were truly suited to this job,” he says. “When I found the Wonderlic Personnel Test and saw all the research that went into it and all of the material they had produced, and especially the fact that the scoring is based on the Department of Labor job classifications, I knew this was the product we were looking for.”
Not only is the fire service as a whole changing, but Trimble’s department itself is changing as well—and that’s another reason why the Wonderlic test is so valuable to him. He has 300 line positions (firefighters) and 15 administrative positions. Lately, 40 to 60 of those firefighters are retiring or leaving each year. That’s unusual for Clayton County, where firefighting is a lifelong career for those who join the force, not simply another job.
“We’re coming to the end of a cycle,” he explains. “Back in the 1960s, we went to a new schedule: 24 hours on, 48 hours off, instead of 24 on, 24 off. That new schedule meant we had to hire another shift of firefighters. Well, now those guys are reaching retirement age, and we’ve got to hire a whole new crop of firefighters to replace them. Our median age now in the department is in the 20’s, whereas just a few years ago, it was in the 40’s.”
“With fewer seasoned veterans to show the new pups the ropes, training becomes all the more important,” he says. The WPT helps Trimble choose the new hires because the scores indicate how quickly and effectively new candidates will be able to absorb the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job. It’s not just about having the strength and guts to fight fires. New firefighters train for 13 weeks, just for job training. And recruits are required to get national EMTI (Emergency Medical Technician Intermediate) certificates, which take an additional 13 weeks. It’s hard, grueling work, both in-classroom training and on-the-job.
“It takes a unique individual to run into a building that everyone else is running out of,” says Trimble. “We see things every day on the job that most people don’t see in a lifetime. The ability to handle that kind of thing is hard to judge in an interview. The WPT gives us an indication that they can handle it.”
