How quickly they find a target in a crowded display.
Not how good their vision is. How efficiently their attention narrows when a search starts.
§ MEASURE / 05 · Selective Attention
On a busy CAD screen,
the right unit is hiding
in plain sight.
Selective attention is the cognitive ability to filter — to find one thing in a busy field and ignore the rest. On the floor, that's locating the unit that just radioed in among the twenty on a CAD screen, while the supervisor asks you something else. Candidates who can't filter aren't slow; they're swamped.
§ Why it matters The console is a noisy environment by design
Console errors aren't usually about ignorance. They're about overload.
-
A unit IDs over the radio. Find them on a screen of eighteen.
The candidate who scans top to bottom every time loses two seconds per lookup. There are forty an hour. The shift ends behind, and they don't know why.
-
A red banner pops on a higher-priority alert.
Switch to it, register what changed, return to where you were. The candidate who loses their place every time is the one whose CAD entries come back incomplete.
-
Supervisor asks a question while you're confirming an address.
The address has to come first. The other thread waits. Candidates who can't filter aren't slow — they're swamped, and they don't always know which thread they dropped.
§ What it tells you Three reads on the same candidate
What you'll know about a candidate's selective attention.
ReadyFirst doesn't ask candidates if they're good at multitasking. It puts a target in a crowded field and reports how their attention behaves under load.
Whether nearby noise slows them down or doesn't.
Similar items, moving elements, color shifts on screen. The candidates who hold target lock when the field gets busy are the ones who hold the console at peak.
Whether they return to the original task cleanly after an alert.
Switching costs are real. The question is whether the candidate pays the cost once and recovers, or pays it twice because they can't find the thread.
Display density is calibrated to uncover real differences without producing failure rates that don't generalize. Practice rounds precede every scored task so first-time test-takers aren't penalized for unfamiliarity.
What you can show your CSO, your counsel, and your CIO.
Validated, not invented
Built on cognitive task families with decades of peer-reviewed evidence behind them. Your civil service analyst can defend the methodology under the SIOP Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures.
Designed to WCAG 2.1 AA
Semantic markup, keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility, and contrast tuned for the dispatch console. Every candidate gets the same shot at the assessment.
SAML SSO, 2FA, full audit trail
Per-organization SAML identity. 2FA on admins. Every action logged with IP, agent, and outcome. Tenant-isolated data via Postgres row-level security.
CJIS applicability statement
Pre-hire cognitive scores aren't Criminal Justice Information under FBI CJIS Security Policy. We give your CJIS Security Officer a one-page applicability statement that documents the data flow and answers the boilerplate question without forcing a full attestation.
§ Next
See who holds the screen
when it gets loud.
30-minute call. We map your current funnel, walk you through what ReadyFirst tells you about selective attention, and quote you in writing.