No more than for any other sort of job interview. They’re not answering calls, they’re sitting there listening.

And honestly I thought it was a great experience when I got hired, it gave me a real inside look to what the workplace culture was before I started here, and a chance to talk to and ask questions to people who are actually doing the job I was applying for instead of some HR/supervisor/deputy director type.

And since we obviously work 24/7/365 we can pretty much make any time work for these applicants, so they don’t need to take off from work or anything to come in and do it. We get a lot of them on nights and weekends.

It’s also pretty necessary to make sure people can handle it. It can get really intense at times, and seeing an incident unfold in real time is a very different experience than listening to a recording of a call after the fact. Class space to train new dispatchers is limited, and almost every dispatch center is constantly short-staffed, so we really need to make our hires count, and we lose plenty enough throughout the training process as it is, we don’t want to spend a couple months training someone only to get them out on the floor to realize that they can’t emotionally handle listening to, let alone actually handling 911 calls.