The CritiCall Problem

The standard pre-employment test for 911 dispatchers measures typing speed, data entry accuracy, cross-referencing, and maybe map reading. CritiCall is the most common platform. It's been the industry default for years.

Here's what it doesn't measure: whether someone can process a caller screaming about a house fire while simultaneously monitoring a pursuit on the secondary channel, triaging a pending call queue, and deciding whether the engine company they just dispatched needs a second alarm before the first unit arrives on scene.

The hiring filter and the job are measuring different things.

What typing speed actually tells you

It tells you someone can type. That's useful. A dispatcher who hunts and pecks at 25 WPM is going to struggle with CAD entry volume during a busy shift. Baseline keyboarding competency is a legitimate screening criterion.

But the difference between a 45 WPM typist and a 65 WPM typist almost never determines whether a critical call gets handled well. What determines that is cognitive processing under pressure - the ability to listen, evaluate, decide, and act simultaneously across multiple information streams. No dispatcher screening test on the market measures this reliably.

Centers that set their CritiCall cutoff at 40 WPM are probably fine. Centers that set it at 55 or 60 are screening out candidates who might have been excellent dispatchers and can't type fast enough to pass a test that has marginal relevance to their worst day on the console.

The multitasking myth

CritiCall has a multitasking component. You listen to audio, enter data, and cross-reference information simultaneously. It's closer to the job than a pure typing test, but it's still a controlled, predictable, low-stakes simulation with no caller emotion, no radio traffic, no supervisor asking you a question, and no awareness that a real person's safety depends on what you type next.

The multitasking that matters in dispatch isn't mechanical - it's cognitive. It's the ability to hold multiple incomplete pictures simultaneously and allocate attention to whichever one is most likely to go wrong in the next 30 seconds. That's a judgment skill. It develops with training and experience. It is not measurable in a 90-minute computer-based test administered in a quiet HR office.

What better screening looks like

The honest answer is that nobody has fully solved this. But centers that supplement CritiCall with structured interviews, scenario-based role plays, and realistic sit-along evaluations during CTO have better retention rates than centers that use CritiCall as the primary gate.

The typing test gets you through the door. The structured interview tells you whether someone can organize their thinking under pressure. The sit-along tells you whether they can tolerate the environment. None of these individually predict success, but together they build a more complete picture than any single computerized test.

The profession deserves a better screening tool. Until one exists, the worst thing a center can do is treat the existing one as more predictive than it is.