EPHRATA — The Ephrata City Council decided to enter into a three-year contract with a Lynnwood, Wash., company to help hire police officers.

Public Safety Testing helps state and local governments hire public safety personnel, according to the company’s Web site. The company collects applications and does the testing for the agency.

This would help the city get a larger selection of candidates than they are receiving right now, City Administrator Wes Crago said.

“(At the moment,) if you want to be a police officer in the City of Ephrata, you need to go through civil service testing,” Crago. “There’s a written. There’s a physical. There’s an oral board and the interview process.”

Once they complete the tests, the city is presented with a choice of three applicants they can choose from or reject all of the candidates, he said. The problem is there seems to be fewer  candidates in the pool recently.

“Our pool of applicants, to get a list of three, has sometimes been three,” Crago said. “We’ve had a very great difficulty finding qualified applicants.”

For $800 a year, the company will collect applications nationwide and create a larger selection of candidates.

“They produce a very long list of people, you get a much broader search,” he said. “It takes (care of) a lot of the difficulties we have of the small pool, but also … the overall quality of the pool that Public Safety Testing puts together is higher, which would stand to reason because of the wider net that they cast in gathering people.”

The service wouldn’t replace the local civil service board, but would give the board more names to choose from for interviewing, Crago said. Also the costs for advertising in media in larger markets could cost the city about $600 for a small ad for a couple of weeks.

“We’ll be money ahead in our first year if we use it once,” he said. “I think if you’re in the (law enforcement) community you check this Web site routinely … And Public Safety Testing advertises nationally on our behalf.”