The Client
Sedgwick County in Wichita, Kansas, has a population of 463,800. The county employs 60 to 100 emergency call dispatchers, better known as 911 Operators. It’s a 24-hour a day job with life-and-death consequences
.The dispatchers take calls for police, fire, ambulance, accidents, people in trouble—most every situation you can think of—and must route those calls to the proper department in a split second.
The operators sit in front of three computer screens, use a telephone and foot pedals to quickly route calls to their proper destination.
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, automatically eliminates a significant portion of the applicant pool enabling recruiters to focus their time on those candidates most likely to succeed.
Wonderlic Helps Select the Right 911 Operators to Deal With Life and Death Situations
The job of an emergency call dispatcher—better known as a 911 Operator—is about as far from glamorous or glitzy as it’s possible to get. These dispatchers make life-and-death decisions in a split second, eight-to-ten hours a day, five days per week, sitting in a dark, windowless room—dark, so they can quickly and accurately read the many computer screens before them.
In Wichita, Kansas’ Sedgwick County, 911 Operators receive calls from citizens all over the community—emergency rescue calls, police, fire, and ambulance—they run the gamut. Mike Mueller, Employment Manager for Sedgwick County knows it takes a very special type of person to fill that job and do it well.
“These are unique individuals,” Mueller says. “This is a very high-pressure, high-stress position. The volume of calls alone can be staggering. These are critical services with life-and-death circumstances.”
Like hospital emergency rooms, emergency call centers see call volumes rise for a variety of reasons, says Mueller. “If there’s a full moon—seriously—if it’s too hot, if the economy’s bad, if it’s Friday night or it’s rush hour, all those conditions contribute to whether or not they’re going to be inundated with calls.”
And it’s not just the stress from the calls themselves, he says, it’s also the environment in which the operators work. “These operators are in a secure environment,” he says. “It’s like a bomb shelter. The lights are dim so they can read the computers easily. And, for the most part, they need to stay at their posts. When you and I have a bad situation at work, we can remove ourselves from it, go outside; take a walk or something, to clear our heads. These folks can’t. They have to be there for the next call.”
Not just anyone is able to survive, let alone thrive, in this sort of extreme work environment, which is why it’s critical—life-or-death critical—for Mueller to hire the right people for this job. If an operator cracks under pressure and walks off the job, it could mean the next caller is hanging on, literally, for his or her life.
Mueller explains that Sedgwick County administers a myriad of psychological profiles and tests to any potential new hire for the 911 Operator position. He has come to rely on the Wonderlic Personality Test (WPT) to help him identify a potential good hire. The WPT is a short test of a person’s cognitive skills and ability to learn new information.
What are the desired characteristics of a good operator? The ability to deal with extremely high stress on a daily basis and the skills to interface with different types of technology. Every operator has two or three computer screens in front of them, a telephone, and foot switches to help route calls to the right place. Someone who is confused about technology will not be able to do the job. Also, operators need to have cool heads. They cannot panic during life-or-death situations. Another critical component is the ability to learn. That’s where the WPT becomes an invaluable piece of the puzzle.
“I use the WPT to determine if the person is trainable,” says Mueller, noting that the ability to be trained in this job is crucial because operators must know, inside and out, the policies and procedures of many different county departments, including fire, police and hospitals.
“Each department has different procedures, different things that need to be done in an emergency situation,” Mueller explains. “The dispatcher needs to know who to dispatch: police, fire, an ambulance, or all three.”
In order to learn this mountain of policies and procedures and to be able to apply them on-the-fly, Sedgwick County emergency call dispatchers go through a 12-week training academy. “If a person can’t be trained for this job, I’ve wasted those 12 weeks,” he says.
Using the Wonderlic test, Mueller is able to determine how well his potential new hires will respond to training. And administering the test online tells him how easily the new hire relates to technology.
Mueller doesn’t keep records of how much training time is saved by using the Wonderlic test. But he does get feedback from the Training Director—the person who runs the 12-week training academy. “The Training Director depends largely on the Wonderlic test to determine who is going to succeed and who isn’t. He looks seriously at it, relies heavily on it and won’t recommend that we hire someone who doesn’t pass that test,” he says. “He wouldn’t like me very much if I stopped using it, I’ll tell you that. He tells me that it makes his job much, much easier.”
As for Mueller himself, the Wonderlic test gives him peace of mind, knowing that making the right hiring choices will help save people’s lives.
