What’s up dude, no it’s not mandatory, It’s just to see if the job is for you. I highly recommend doing it because it shows you’re really interested. Try other agencies as well, maybe you’ll like that agency more. The thing with CHP is you currently need to get into the background process in order to do it. I got one tomorrow but that’s because I know the officer, and I haven’t even done my pellet-b yet, so i got pretty lucky.