As the espionage agency experiences one of the biggest hiring spurts in the past 30 years, it is doggedly courting laid-off Big Tech employees. The NSA started secretly contacting Big Tech workers via LinkedIn last fall as word circulated that significant American businesses like Meta and Amazon were losing tens of thousands of highly trained staff.
Senior strategist for NSA talent management Christine Parker claimed that the intelligence organisation acted quickly after hearing projections of additional layoffs.
According to Ms Parker, “NSA started reaching out through LinkedIn, through some of our career boards, specifically sending messages to people that we thought might be linked to some companies that either were in the news saying they are going to lay off or were predicted to be laid off.” “Just kind of let them know that we’re here and that we have this robust, ongoing hiring program.”
Nearly 30,000 people clicked on the NSA’s advertisements using the social media network LinkedIn, along with job boards like Glassdoor and Indeed and computer discussion forums like Stack Overflow, and around 2,000 people applied, according to Ms Parker. According to Molly Moore, NSA deputy director of workforce support activities, the NSA is actively employing 3,000 additional personnel to work across the nation, from the D.C. metro region to Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Texas, and Utah.
NSA is trying to shed its reputation as a stuffy organization
The NSA withheld the number of taxpayer funds allocated for the hiring endeavour. $89.8 billion was spent on the intelligence community overall in fiscal 2022. Meta said in November that it would stop hiring and lay off 11,000 employees. Both Google’s parent firm and Amazon announced job cuts in January. Amazon announced last month that it would reduce more than 18,000 roles. Similar announcements of mass layoffs made by other major technology businesses are anticipated this year.
“We certainly offer stability, and that’s what’s really kind of front of mind for a lot of people these days in the wake of these layoffs,” Ms Moore said. “But we offer amazing missions, things that people can’t do in private sector companies for the most part. This is not just a job, it’s a mission.”
The NSA is likewise trying to shed its reputation as a stuffy organisation with the smug title “No Such Agency” in favour of a far more open culture.
Director of NSA Cybersecurity Rob Joyce has used the hashtag “you do you” in tweets urging individuals to apply for jobs. He said current marijuana usage would be inappropriate, but prior marijuana use is no longer a bar to employment.
The NSA has similar hiring requirements to certain tech companies. In the northeast and midwest of the United States, Bill Driscoll, senior district president of the Washington-area company Robert Half, handles staffing for the technology industry. He noted that businesses are hiring cybersecurity specialists, front- and back-end developers, user-experience, and user-interface designers.