Finding & Hiring Dispatchers

With unemployment at a 25-year low of 4.1%, it's difficult for any employer to find enough qualified candidates. For a comm center manager, figure that it's even tougher.

We've collected some information about the recruiting and hiring portion of the process and hope that it helps you improve the chances that you'll find enough candidates, that many of them are qualified, and that they ultimately decide to make public safety dispatching a career. Good luck!

Check our information intended for applicants, which has more information about the hiring process, and our best advice on solving the nation's comm center staffing crisis. Also check our diagram of the hiring process for an overview.

We're asking for your best long-term idea to solve the staffing crisis. Our feedback page allows you to provide your best idea and share it with other dispatchers around the nation.

Finding Applicants

First, you may not want to rely on the ordinary process of putting ads in newspapers and hoping that qualified applicants show up. You may want to go looking for them! Many fire and police departments attend job fairs, and you should, too! You should also be forging close ties with your local community college district to recruit persons who have the skills and talents to become dispatchers. You might even think of an intern, appretice or work-study program to help bring in talented persons earlier in their job-hunting process.

You should set up a sit-along procedure or periodic open house to allow interested persons visit the comm center, see what it looks like, talk to dispatchers and make their own evaluation if it's the type of job they'd like to pursue. This is sometimes a controversial proposal--should I let a prospective dispatcher talk to current dispatchers? The answer is, "Yes." The benefits derived from an informed applicant outweight any discouraging words that your current employees might make to a sit-along. Perhaps the most important benefit is that you'll eliminate most persons who were unsure what a dispatcher did, and who would have quit in the second or third week of their training.

Next, the application process should be streamlined! Today's tight job market means that your applicants don't have to wait for your response--they'll likely have job offers from other employers in the private sector within days or hours of their application. With competition of employees, you can't afford to draw out the process to weeks or even days. Again, work with your personnel department, offer to supply screening or paperwork assistance to get the job quickly.

The time from application closing to testing should be not more than two weeks. The oral interviews with those who pass the test should be no more than two weeks later, and you should be prepared to offer jobs within 2-3 weeks of the interviews. That's still 7 weeks down the road--a lifetime to someone who is unemployed and looking for a job. If possible, shorten the process even further.

One way to do this is to grade the test the day it's given, and hand out personal history questionaires (PHQ) to those who pass right then. They would fill them out within one week and return them, and that information is then the basis for the background investigation that will start right away. If you wish, you can rank the test candidates by test score, and start backgrounds only on the top 10 or 15 candidates. If you require the backgrounds to be completed within 1-2 weeks, you'll be far ahead of the process of evaluaing the candidates when the show up for interviews.

The overall goal is to consolidate as many steps as possible--don't perform one step, wait a week, and then perform the next step. Combine the testing, backgrounding, interviewing and other screening steps whenever you can.

The Job Ad

After looking at both the active and inactive job listings on our Web site, you may have noticed common elements. We've boiled down the best and most effective methods of listing a public safety dispatcher's job to help you create your own job ads, either here on our Web site, or in local newspapers or other publications.

The purpose of a job listing is to throw a sufficiently wide and all-encompassing net to capture a large number of applicants, who can then be sifted and further qualified by your agency or the personnel department. If you make either the job qualifications or the job ad too restrictive, you'll eliminate persons who might be qualified, but who think they are not, or persons who are just slightly below qualified, but who could be trained and become excellent dispatchers. This portion of the recruitment process is always a trade-off--try to narrow the field down with the job description or ad (you'll have fewer apps and people to deal with), or open it up to a wider field (and perhaps have to shuffle around hundreds of apps). In today's tight job market, the latter might be a more effective approach.

First, your job ad should not duplicate the official job offering as prepared by you or your personnel department. The ad should should be short, include those items that will help attract a reader to the job, decide if they are qualified, or even tickle their curiosity. Don't feel embarrassed to describe the attractions of the job, including the opportunity to serve the public, excitement, vitality, variety, etc. List only the absolute qualifications required so the person knows immediately if they're disqualified. List an easy method of obtaining more information--and then make sure that contact is always available and can answer any question. If possible, have the contact be someone from the comm center, instead of the personnel department. Lastly, make sure you highlight any closing date.

Also see our extensive list of current and expired job listings for examples of job ads.

job title		Public Safety Dispatcher
name of agency, city and state		Johnson City (Mont.) Police Department
salary		$2,218 to $3,112 per month. Retire at 55 after 20 years and receive 75% of your salary!
basic description of the job		Exciting and rewarding public service position with excellent benefits and retirement plan.Dispatcher answers emergency and service calls from the public and dispatches police, fire and medical units.
minimum qualifications		Applicants must be at least 21 years old, have valid driver's license, submit 35 wpm typing certificate, have no felony convictions.
contact for more information, applications, etc.		For more information or to schedule tour, contact Bill Johnson at (811) 322-5112.
filing deadline		Applications accepted until Jan. 21, 2000 at 5 p.m.

The Test

There are both state-approved, locally-developed and commercial tests that claim to measure the skills and abilities that a dispatcher needs. Properly validated tests are rare, because the process is time-consuming and tedious. The test must be based on the actual tasks that a dispatcher performs, and should measure them in a way that can be easily measured. Most agree that short and long-term memory and the ability to perform simultaneous manual, listening and hearing tasks are most important. Most tests use both written and auditory (tape) methods for testing these skills. Best advice: determine if your state provides a standardized test, otherwise pay a commercial company to provide a validated test. Don't make up your own.

Screening Process

You should schedule oral interviews for candidates who passed the written test. The interview should conform to federal laws (certain questions are prohibited--consult your personnel department), and focus on their general skills and abilities, motivation, and demeanor. Interviews are generally considered stress or non-stress. In the former case, the interviewers are asking "Jeopardy-style" questions that require a correct answer (they display a card with letters and numbers, and later ask you what the letters and numbers were). In the latter case, the interviewers merely have a conversation with the applicant. Most agencies use the non-stress interview, especially for this early phase of the process.

We've compiled a list of possible interview questions for an initial job interview, explained from the point of view of the applicant. We also refer you to Web pages from Washington state (pdf), iSeek, and TheEffectiveAdmin.com about what questions you cannot ask of applicants during an interview, and a labor law quiz on acceptable interview questions.

Profile Evaluations Inc., CritiCall by Biddle & Associates, and and Ergometrics & Applied Personnel Research Inc. provide paper and computer-based candidate screening systems respectively that test for several key dispatch-specific skills and abilities: long and short-term memory, written and verbal comprehension, writing, reading, etc.

The U.S. Department of Labor has compiled "Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures" that can be used as a guide to the process. The private company Biddle Consultants Group Inc. has posted their own copy of the guidelines, along with some "Questions and Answers." The federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) has a section of their extensive Web site that answers many questions about discrimination and the application of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

As early as possible, the candidate should complete and submit a detailed personal history questionaire (PHQ). This series of forms collects information on all aspects of the applicant, including their identifying information, history of jobs, arrests, education, marriage, residence, military and more. It should have at least one page that asks questions on drug and alcohol use, and prior criminal history. This page should clearly inform the applicant how their answers would affect their chances of obtaining the job--disqualifying, not necessarily disqualifying, etc. In either case, it should state that any dishonesty on the answers would be disqualifying. The applicant should be asked to submit copies of pertinent documents--birth certificate, military discharge papers, any pertinent diplomas or training certificates.

Applicants who pass both the written and oral interview should be subjected to a background investigation that includes interviews with prior employers, current and past spouses, friends, as well as checks of criminal and driver histories, credit and education. The investigator will use the PHQ as the basis for most of the investigation, but it should also cover any other persons or areas that are appropriate. A thorough investigation can easily take 2-3 weeks, so you may wish to consolidate this phase with the the oral interview phase in order to shorten the time it takes to hire a new dispatcher.

The Offer

Once suitabe candidates are found, the agency extends them a conditional job offer, and schedules them for any medical, psycological or polygraph testing. These tests cannot be required prior to a conditional job offer without running afoul of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). [see this 2001 DOJ Consent Order for an example] Once a candidate successfully completes the required exams, the agency extends a final job offer. Upon acceptance by the candidate, the agency schedules his/her first day of training.

Most public safety comm centers are limited in the incentives they can offer to a prospective dispatcher. In contrast, private industry can offer a higher pay rate, free parking, cafeteria service, stock options, hiring bonus of either cash, sick leave or vacation, etc. Try matching those!

You should be authorized to hire candidates at a higher pay scale. That is, if the normal pay range is $2,814 to $3,212, your personnel rules and regulations should allow you to offer a candidate a higher than $2,814 starting pay rate. If possible, ask for the authority to offer an immediate vacation or sick leave balance, possibly justified by the previous employment.

Keeping Them

As any comm center administrator will tell you, once you have a new dispatcher, it's difficult to keep him/her! At least 25% of trainees don't complete the training process--either they cannot perform the job duties satisfactorily, or they realize that dispatching (actual duties, job conditions, job stress) is just not-for-them.

The indoctrination and training process can be startling and overwhelming, especially to someone with no previous exposure to law enforcement, firefighting, crime, injury or death. Consider that most people don't have co-workers that wear guns.

A new dispatcher should have both a trainer and a mentor. Besides the trainer, there should be someone to talk with the trainee about larger and broader issues, and help ease them in to the "family."

Also check our Web page on the current comm center staffing crisis for more ideas on how to retain dispatchers.