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Most security businesses, writes Chris Dreyfus-Gibson, Managing Director, DG Advisory, hire control room operators the same way they have always done. A CV review, a short interview, a gut feeling. But decades of research tell us this approach is failing us. The industry is ready for something better.
(He’s among the speakers on day one of three at The Security Event, tomorrow at the NEC.)
Let me ask you a question. When you last recruited a control room operator, how confident were you that your process identified the right person? Not the most experienced candidate on paper. Not the most articulate during interview. The person most likely to stay focused through a quiet overnight shift. To stay calm when three alarms trigger simultaneously. To escalate the right call at the right moment, and be honest about it afterwards when the debrief happens.
If your answer involves a CV and a 30-minute interview, you are not alone. But you may also be operating with a significant blind spot.
What the evidence actually says
The personnel psychology literature has spent over a century studying what predicts job performance. The findings are clear and, for those of us in security, somewhat sobering. According to research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022, the unstructured employment interview – the format many organisations rely on – has a criterion-related validity of around 0.19. In plain language, it is barely better than chance as a standalone predictor of how someone will actually perform in post.
Work history and years of experience, which sit at the heart of most CV screening processes, return validity scores of around 0.10 to 0.18. Again, individually, they tell us surprisingly little about future performance in role. Gut instinct, which tends to fill the gaps, introduces a further problem: systematic bias. Research consistently shows that interviewers favour confident, articulate candidates regardless of whether that confidence correlates with operational reliability. In a control room context, confidence and reliability can be very different things.
This is not a criticism of the professionals making these hiring decisions. It is a structural problem with the tools available to them.
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โThe unstructured interview has a validity of around 0.19. In plain language, it is barely better than chance as a standalone predictor of operational performance.โ |
Why control rooms are different
Most job roles can absorb a degree of selection error. If a hire underperforms, the consequences are measured in productivity and cost. In a control room, the consequences can be much more than commercial.
Control room operators are trusted with safety-critical decisions, often under time pressure, often without direct supervision, and frequently during periods when very little appears to be happening. That last point matters more than most people realise. The research on vigilance – the ability to sustain attention during low-stimulation monitoring tasks – consistently shows that performance deterioration begins within 15 to 30 minutes of sustained monitoring. Most vigilance failures do not happen during high-pressure incidents. They happen in the quiet hours, when an operatorโs guard drops and an anomaly is missed.
Research on CCTV operators specifically found that even trained specialists detected only around half of target behaviours across a monitoring session. The difference between those who sustained performance and those who did not was not experience or technical knowledge. It was a set of underlying attentional and behavioural characteristics that could have been assessed before they were ever given access to a monitor.
This is the core problem with traditional security recruitment. We are selecting for the wrong things, using the wrong tools, at the wrong point in the process.
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WHAT GOOD SELECTION ACTUALLY MEASURES โข ย Sustained attention and vigilance capacity – not just experience of monitoring roles โข ย Conscientiousness and reliability – consistent, accurate behaviour when unsupervised โข ย Emotional regulation – staying calm and clear-headed when pressure builds โข ย Situational judgement – reading context and responding proportionately, not rigidly โข ย Risk awareness โ identifying risks and knowing when to escalate, and when not to โข ย Communication quality – clear, structured, and accurate under time pressure โข ย Integrity – honest reporting and consistent behaviour whether observed or not โข ย Learning agility – the capacity to train safely and develop reliably |
The competencies that actually predict success
When you analyse what separates effective control room operators from those who struggle, the picture that emerges is not primarily about technical knowledge. It is about a cluster of cognitive, behavioural, and motivational characteristics that determine how a person functions under the specific demands of the role.
Conscientiousness is the single personality trait that research consistently shows predicts job performance across all occupational groups. In control rooms, it translates directly into procedural compliance, accuracy, and the kind of reliable, repeatable behaviour that governance and audit processes depend on. Emotional regulation determines whether an operatorโs cognitive performance degrades under pressure. Integrity determines whether behaviour remains consistent when no one is watching. Situational judgement determines whether an operator can distinguish signal from noise and respond proportionately rather than reactively.
None of these are things a CV tells you. None of them are things a thirty-minute interview reliably surfaces. And critically, none of them are things that improve significantly with a few months of prior experience in a different control room environment.
They are, however, things that can be assessed before appointment; objectively and consistently, using structured behavioural methods that the wider personnel psychology literature has validated extensively. Assessment centre approaches that use behaviourally anchored rating scales, multiple scenario-based exercises, and objective performance measurement return criterion-related validities of 0.35 to 0.45 for individual competency dimensions. Composite assessments explain around 20 per cent of performance variance. That is a substantial and meaningful improvement on what most security organisations are currently achieving.
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โNone of these are things a CV tells you. None of them are things a 30-minute interview reliably surfaces.โ |
What a better process looks like in practice
The good news is that raising the bar on operator selection does not require scrapping your existing recruitment process. It requires adding a structured, science-based assessment layer that gives you the behavioural insight you currently lack before the interview, so that your interview becomes a richer, more targeted conversation rather than a general assessment exercise.
The most effective approaches assess candidates across multiple methods: objective cognitive performance tasks that cannot be easily coached, scenario-based discussions that surface how someone thinks under realistic pressure, and collaborative exercises that reveal how they behave within a team rather than in the artificial context of a one-to-one interview. Results are measured through timing, accuracy, and consistency – behavioural evidence rather than impressions. Candidates are evaluated against consistent, anchored criteria derived directly from the demands of the role.
The output is a competency profile for each candidate that tells you not just whether to hire them, but where their strengths lie, where the development risks are, and what your onboarding and training should prioritise. It makes your hiring decision more defensible. It reduces training attrition. And it improves the quality and consistency of your operational team over time.
A legislative imperative
The urgency has a new legislative dimension. The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, known as Martynโs Law, received Royal Assent in April 2025. On April 15, 2026, the Home Office published its statutory guidance under Section 27 of the Act, setting out precisely what responsible persons must do to comply. The Security Industry Authority (SIA) has simultaneously launched consultation on its own regulatory guidance. Enforcement is expected from spring 2027, leaving a narrowing window to prepare.
For enhanced-tier premises – those with a capacity of 800 or more – the Act requires the implementation of public protection measures covering monitoring, movement, physical security, and information security, alongside documented compliance evidence submitted to the SIA. Monitoring sits at the heart of that requirement. And in any professionally operated venue, estate, or facility, monitoring means control room operators.
The statutory guidance is explicit that the responsible person cannot delegate legal responsibility, only tasks. Where your control room function is central to your Martynโs Law compliance response – and for most enhanced-tier premises it will be – the competence and reliability of the people staffing it is no longer simply an operational question. It is a statutory one. A structured, evidence-based selection process that produces documented behavioural evidence for each candidate is the natural and defensible complement to the compliance framework the Act demands.
Introducing ControlReadyโข
This is the rationale behind ControlReadyโข, a competency-based assessment framework that DG Advisory has developed specifically for control room operator recruitment across security, safety, and emergency services environments. Unlike generic occupational assessments, ControlReadyโข was built from the ground up around the specific performance demands of control room roles –continuous monitoring, low-frequency high-consequence events, multi-source information processing, procedural governance, and high accountability.
ControlReadyโข evaluates candidates across eighteen distinct competencies organised into five themes: Foundational Traits, Cognitive and Decision-Making Capabilities, Communication and Coordination, Learning and Adaptability, and Values and Role Fit. The framework uses individual online cognitive assessments, scenario-based discussions, and a group interaction exercise to build a complete behavioural profile. Hiring managers receive a detailed ControlReadyโข Profile for each candidate, including an overall readiness tier, a competency radar, a narrative summary, and a set of personalised interview questions tailored to each individualโs profile.
Critically, ControlReadyโข does not replace your hiring decision. It gives you the behavioural evidence to make it with confidence.
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SIX REASONS TO ACT NOW โข ย Training attrition is expensive. Early identification of development risk reduces costly drop-out. โข ย Regulatory and governance scrutiny is increasing. Defensible, evidence-based selection is becoming a professional expectation, and Martynโs Law makes operator competence a statutory compliance matter for enhanced-tier premises. โข ย The talent pool is broadening. Structured assessment identifies capable candidates from non-traditional backgrounds that traditional screening would overlook. โข ย Mis-hire in safety-critical roles carries reputational and operational risk that extends beyond HR. โข ย The gap between what we assess and what actually predicts success is well-evidenced. Closing it is within reach. |
Raising the bar is within reach
The security industry has made significant strides in operational technology, physical design, and procedural governance over the past two decades. Recruitment has not kept pace. We are still largely selecting the people we trust with our most sensitive systems and our most consequential decisions using methods that the science has consistently shown to be inadequate for the task.
That is not inevitable. Aviation went through this reckoning in the late 1970s, when analysis of serious accidents revealed that technical capability was not the limiting factor. The failures were in judgement, communication, and team behaviour – exactly the competencies that structured non-technical assessment targets. The industry changed. Standards improved. Incident rates fell.
Security is at a similar inflection point. The evidence is clear, the tools exist, and the operational case is compelling. The only question is whether we choose to use them. If you are responsible for control room operations and you are not confident your selection process is identifying the right people, ControlReadyโข was designed for exactly that challenge. I would welcome the conversation.
About the author
Chris Dreyfus-Gibson is Managing Director of DG Advisory, a consultancy to directors of security and executive teams for turning mission-critical control rooms into high-performing, resilient operations. DG Advisory integrates people, process, and technology through proven frameworks and design. ControlReadyโข is DG Advisoryโs competency-based assessment framework for control room operator recruitment. Visit https://dgadvisoryglobal.com/.
Photo by Mark Rowe.
