January is always a busy month for us. Quite a few forces have got assessment cenres on the go, hence our courses in Exeter and Soutahmpton. TVP have has to postpone their assessments for this month due to bad weather, but we have sorted out a new course for those of our students affected by that. The new exercises interestingly enough put a bit more pressure on forces. The exercises issued in November are only vaild for six months. This means that say in TVP (Thames Valley Police), as they have had to delay they wll have to reschedule prior to the end of April, otherwise all the prep they have done for the new exercises will have to be skipped. This is why they have been so quick to come up wiht new dates, and yet another flaw in the NPIA system.

The new exercises continue to cause a few raised eyebrows amongst our people who have gone through them. As I have said, the emphasis on diversity is ridiculous, but preparation is as always the key. Having reviewed them, however, it is simply a matter of applying what we have always precahed, just with more frequency.

On police recruitment applications, there are usually four main competency questions on the application form. Broadly speaking, these cover the areas of:

• Diversity and respect
• Team working
• Working under pressure
• Communication

Each of these police competencies is broken down on the form into a number of specific segments. Each segment asks the candidate for certain specific parts of the example. Photocopying the pages and practising your answers will pay huge dividends before you write anything onto the real form. The best way to go about completing these questions is to consider each one separately. Without worrying too much about the specifics of the example, compile a list of potential examples for each question. Once you have some examples in mind for a given competency, you can then start comparing each one to the specific parts of the question.

Your examples must be about you, in terms of showing “you” in the best possible light as being the one who has contributed to the scenario. They should not be instances where you merely observed something happening, or were just a minor player. Anyone can watch a film – the police service are looking for people to work in front of the camera!

Use “I” not “we”

This is a common failing by candidates both on application form and interview. Most of us play down our involvement in situations due to modesty. In this recruitment process though, the form is looking for specifically what you did. Therefore, your answers must always refer to the word “I”. It is you being assessed and your actions, not the person you happened to be with at the time the incident occurred. Using the word “we” often suggests that in the reality of the situation you’re describing, you simply happened to be there and the other person who you are speaking about actually did all the work. This is a particular problem with special constables and police support staff applicants. The application form is no place for modesty.

What if you can’t think of any examples?

This is a common cry from police assessment candidates. However it is unacceptable. If you have no evidence of a certain skill area, then quite simply you will fail. One student on a course lived in a small village in rural South Wales. There were only thirty or so residents, all from the same ethnic background and religion as the student. She was only 19 and had never lived or gone to school outside the village. She therefore made the point, and it is not an unreasonable one, that she had had no opportunity to gain experience of diverse communities. However, from a police recruitment perspective, this would be unacceptable. Quite simply, the police assessors would consider that this candidate has no evidence to convince an assessor that she would be able to deal with a diverse policing environment. No one is saying that she could not do it, just that she’s not evidenced it. There are 60,000 other applicants to choose from. There will be more than enough of those people who do evidence such qualities. If you were the police service, would you choose the candidate who cannot produce any evidence, or the one that can?

Consider this when you are filling out your police application. The same skills of course need to be displayed throughout the police recruitment process.

To be fair to the police service, there is no foolproof way in the world today to guarantee that a person selected using any available criteria will be able to perform in the role required of them. The best an organisation can do is to utilise a method of selection that offers the highest chance of successful candidates being able to do the job. Assessment centres in general have been proved time and time again to provide the highest probability in a successful candidate being able to do the job. In general, assessment centres are presently the best way to assess a candidate’s potential.

Having said that, the police being the police have built several flaws into the assessment system which can impact very heavily on whether or not the right candidates are selected. The qualities required of a police officer are many and varied. The person who makes a good detective may make a terrible public order officer. A great traffic officer may be a terrible custody officer. That is one of the interesting things about the service. However, the new national system tests people in a comfortable (relatively speaking!) environment, where, for example, the people they meet in role-plays may be rude, but never obnoxious, verbally but never physically threatening, and the situations themselves have a huge dollop of “ideal” as opposed to “real” world about them.

Although it would be denied by the police service, the system totally fails to sufficiently test strength of character. Anyone can act “assertive” in a role play lasting five minutes, or challenge an inappropriate comment. Whether they can do so on the street outside a nightclub to an aggressive drunk at 3am is a different matter. Conversely, any trace of “political incorrectness” will result in an automatic fail. Whilst that is all well and good, sometimes in the real world of policing, you need people whose idea of political correctness is less important than their ability to act decisively in the face of danger. One of the best police officers I know is ex army and totally politically incorrect. He does not believe in force strategy, or the wider implications of issues such as sanction detections or corporate development (if you are not sure what they are, have a look at your local force’s website!). All he is interested in is arresting the bad guys. He is also extremely capable in defending himself in a physical encounter (or to put it the old fashioned way, he is a “hard man”!). This officer is the one that I as a supervisor and operational officer was always glad to turn to when either a prisoner became violent, or we were dealing with a nasty public order situation. By way of example, at one incident, the officer responded alone one night to an assault in progress on a pub car park. On arrival, he found two offenders hiding, who upon realising he was on his own, attempted to assault him. By the time other colleagues arrived to assist the officer, suffice to say he had already put both offenders on the floor, and they were begging him to let them surrender. Whilst I am not suggesting that every officer should be like this one (as that would be a supervisory nightmare!), some officers like him are needed in the police. The new system would never have allowed such a character to get in.

So, do assessment centres work? Maybe. Ultimately though, for you the candidate, it does not matter. They are a fact of life, and if you want to join the police, you need to accept their rules and play by them.

Had a busy week this week, as we ran large courses in both Southampton and Hatfield. However, when I logge donto my email this morning, I fund the below comment one delegate had obvioulsy shot home and done. We are all very proud of Talking Blues and the success our people have, but the below does make us all feel that we are very god at what we do: Forgive me for blowing our own trumpet, but this comment sums up the company ethos for me. yes, we all go to work to get paid (including you dear reader and me), but we try to get across our passion as well, and clearly here we have. This is why we are so successful in the police recruitment field.

John,

I would like to send you both my utmost gratitude, for the wonderful course you provided yesterday 03/05/09 in Hatfield. I have to be honest your course was fantastic, informative, humorous, a real eye opener. It has been without a shadow of a doubt a) The best £145 I have ever spent and b) The best 10hrs I have ever given time to. The day went really quick and I could have stayed on listening to the wise words. I have to admit I am now quietly confident I will do well on my assessment day, I say quietly because I don’t want to assume. In the weeks leading to my assessment I will be working hard to dissect all the information provided by yourselves and within your guide all the while remembering ‘’Piss poor preparation leads to piss poor performance” Again thank you, and I will keep you guys updated on my progression.

Warm Regards
XX

That kind of comment works for me!
We actually get loads of stuff like that on our feedback sheets, just maybe not quite as eloquent.
Made my day anyway
John

Following on from the last blog entry, many of you have emailed me saying you are not entirely convinced by the story about integrity. That’s okay, it is good to be a cynic, but ask most operational officers and they will be aware of similar stories. I had one officer on my shift in Cheshire Police who moved to another shift for career development. Within a week, he and a “colleague” locked up a drunk in the town. In the cells, something happened, and the drunk received a facial injury. The result of this was that the officer (who had an outstanding arrest record, and was a person you wanted next to you in a disorder environment) ended up in crown court on a very serious assault charge. He was cleared. Cheshire however then put him in front of a discipline panel, and sacked him on the basis that he had asked other officers to lie for him. As a crown court jury had found him not guilty of the crime to begin with, I am uncertain how he could have asked others to lie (as he had not done anything wrong to begin with), but such is life at police discipline panels!

This same double think is carried on in police recruitment. Using Cheshire as an example again, a few months ago one candidate got fed up (not unreasonably) with waiting for an assessment date and being fobbed off by recruiting. He expressed this frustration on one of the unofficial police forums, such as www.police-information.co.uk, calling Cheshire recruitment arrogant and unhelpful. When he phoned again a few weeks later to see if there was any update, they informed him that his application had been terminated. When he asked why, it was because of his comment on the forum! Naturally, no one in Cheshire recruiting had the courage or decency to call him and tell him this! Personally, whilst he was unwise to put enough information in his forum entry to identify himself, I think he was another victim of high handed bullying. This is why the same force lost 11 recruits a while back, ten of whom were female. This caused such concern that the Police Federation actually highlighted the issue in their magazine. It is a problem in some small forces, the bigger ones tend to be fairer and even handed. Cheshire never saw the link to this, which is probably why in my time with Cheshire I only ever saw two black officers. A staff survey the same year in Cheshire showed 75% of staff felt they were not valued (this was quietly buried after a big fanfare about how important it was to take part and have a say in the future of the force.)

In my time in the job, I cannot ever recall officers coming in and complaining about the residents in such a place, or the attitude of the criminals. No one minded agro from them, it is after all part of the job. What everyone complains about however is the attitude of bosses sometimes, especially those who have never spent any time on the streets.

Still, one can only be thankful that there are still people willing to do the job, not because of the leadership, but in spite of it!