How long they hold accuracy on a low-stimulus monitoring task.
Not whether they can pay attention for a minute. Whether they can pay attention through stretches where almost nothing happens.
§ MEASURE / 03 · Sustained Attention
Smart and fast
doesn't mean
alert at hour nine.
Dispatch isn't a sprint. It's a twelve-hour stretch where many calls are routine and the one that isn't shows up without warning. Sustained attention is the capacity to keep monitoring at hour nine the way you did at hour one. Candidates who can't decay quietly, then miss something that mattered.
§ Why it matters The shift outlasts the adrenaline
The call that matters is rarely the first one of the shift.
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Anyone is sharp at the top of the shift.
Catching a slip on a familiar address while the room is fresh and the queue is short is the easy version. It tells you nothing about the candidate at hour nine.
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Five hours in, the rhythm flattens.
The monotony of routine traffic dulls the response. The low-priority queue is the trap, not the high-priority one — that's where the quiet drift first shows.
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Hour nine, a rare event after a quiet hour.
Most of the past hour was nothing. The candidate who's still scanning is the one who registers the unusual call before a supervisor has to flag it.
§ What it tells you Three reads on the same candidate
What you'll know about a candidate's sustained attention.
ReadyFirst doesn't ask candidates how alert they think they are. It puts them on a sustained monitoring task and reports what their performance does over time.
How fast their hit rate drops as time on task accumulates.
Two candidates can start the same and end very differently. The slope is what predicts the late-shift performance.
Whether they catch a low-frequency signal or wave it through with the noise.
The cost of a missed rare event in a comm center is asymmetric. This is where you find out which candidates absorb that risk and which ones quietly create it.
Tasks are designed long enough to surface the decrement and short enough to keep candidate completion rates high. 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's still alert
in your last hour.
30-minute call. We map your current funnel, walk you through what ReadyFirst tells you about sustained attention, and quote you in writing.