“Randomly selected” police candidates for assessment centres

Dfydd Powys pulled a sly trick this week on potential recruits. Their recruiting campaign has just finished its paper sift selection, and invited people to assessment centre. However, letters sent out to candidate’s sates that only 30% of candidates succeeded in passing the paper sift. This made a total of 235. However, only 96 were being invited to assessment. The lucky 96 were chosen on the basis of “being either the highest scorers at CBQ (Competency Based Questions) or being randomly selected”. I do not quite follow this. Either you pick people on the basis of highest scores, which is fair enough, or else you define a pass mark, and then randomly pick from the pool of people who have achieved that score or higher. Why do both? I would be interested to know what the breakdown of people who were invited to attend was by gender, sexuality and ethnic background. I would hope that the force did not cherry pick from minority groups, then have a raffle for the remaining slots. There would be a precedent for this. A few years back Avon and Somerset were taken to court by an applicant after all the white male applicants were sifted out. GMP went through a phase of not inviting males to the next stage of the process (a fitness test) whilst inviting females. This is how they managed to have the first all female intake (how did they get away with that!). The Met meanwhile have phases where they only hand out application forms to those attending open evenings, which seems fair enough. Anyone can go, in terms of gender, sexuality etc. Only thing was, they do not tell anyone who does not come from an under represented group the assessment evenings are on! I would look forward to Dyfdd Powys sending me the figures or explanation of their decision anyway.

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