FBI Flooded With Applicants

Pushing to bolster anti-terrorism forces, FBI officials throughout California are scrambling to help meet a nationwide goal of hiring more than 900 agents in the next eight months.

One of the biggest problems facing the state’s four major FBI offices--in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento--is sorting through the thousands of applications received since Sept. 11.

“It’s busier than I’ve ever seen it,” said Jan Caldwell, FBI spokeswoman in San Diego and an agent for 27 years.

“And the quality of the applicants is just incredible. We are literally getting rocket scientists applying.”

There are 500 applicants in the pipeline from San Diego alone, Caldwell added. “We have a tax lawyer and several doctors applying, one woman with a doctorate in philosophy, another with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science,” she said.

The FBI’s hiring goal, announced last month, is one of the largest calls for new agents since the peak of the Vietnam War, Caldwell said. The FBI has about 11,000 agents worldwide, and typically gets 25,000 applications a year, Caldwell estimated.

“In the past, the spikes in people applying to be agents came from television or the movies,” Caldwell said. “First came Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s FBI series. Then there was ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ In the ‘90s, it was ‘X Files.’ This time it was Sept. 11, and that obviously makes a difference.”

FBI officials in the four main California offices said they have no tally of applications received since then. But Annette Nowak, recruiting agent for the Los Angeles office, said that office alone began receiving about 100 job applications a day after Sept. 11.

‘It’s Not Just a Law Enforcement Job’

“It has dropped off, but we are still getting a ton of calls,” she said. “They are thinking differently about the FBI now, I think. It’s not just a law enforcement job now. It’s people wanting to help America. It’s a lot more personal.”

Nick Rossi, FBI spokesman in Sacramento, said his office typically processes 50 to 60 applications a month. The Sacramento office has doubled its testing schedule because of the increase in applicants.

“We saw a huge spike right after Sept. 11, but many of those were motivated by a quick burst of patriotic enthusiasm that later cooled,” Rossi said. “Still, the interest is very high. We get lots of calls from high school and college students still too young to apply, but that is a good sign for the future.”

FBI officials said there are about 650 agents in the Los Angeles office, 320 in San Francisco, about 250 in San Diego and more than 100 in Sacramento.

Together, records show, the four offices annually process about 11% of the FBI’s total of recruits nationwide. The Los Angeles office frequently has produced more agents than any other office nationally.

Announcing the hiring goal for 2002, the FBI said its priorities are people with computer, engineering, science and foreign language skills, especially such languages as Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu and Urdu. But skills in Spanish, Russian, Japanese and many other languages remain in high demand.

California traditionally has produced many of the FBI’s Spanish-speaking agents as well as recruits fluent in Middle East languages. About a third of the 900,000 Arab Americans in the United States live in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Nationwide, Nowak said, the FBI has had 19,000 job applications from people with language skills since Sept. 11. Many recruits are in the hiring pipeline, a difficult process of testing and evaluation that usually takes more than six months.

“Without lowering our standards, we are trying to speed up the process where we can,” Nowak said. Many offices have added agents to their recruiting teams, and the Los Angeles office is conducting a preliminary written test twice a month instead of once.

Immediately after Sept. 11, that office was so swamped with calls that officials had to set up two crisis teams just to handle the phones. One group handled tips and the other processed job applications.

Most applicants are eliminated at the start of the process because they fail to meet basic qualifications. Agents, for example, must be at least 23.

The next step is a four-hour written test, which focuses on psychological traits as well as general knowledge. Typical question: If you were shopping and you saw someone robbing the store, what would you do?

Mike Hilliard, who retired three years ago after 21 years as the chief recruiting agent in Los Angeles, estimated that about half of those who take the written test pass it and advance to competitive oral interviews.

Then comes a physical exam and an FBI polygraph test, mostly on national security and drug use questions. (A serious drug history disqualifies a candidate, but very limited drug experimentation doesn’t.)

Hilliard said that about 20% of those who make it to the polygraph stage fail the test.

Agency Needs to Meet Its Hiring Goals

From 1996 to this year, California’s four primary FBI offices tested 4,724 applicants, and 466 recruits were offered jobs. Officials said they expect the totals this year to be dramatically higher than the yearly totals during that period.

As FBI recruiters see it, the high number of applicants this year should help the bureau meet its goal of more than 900 new agents.

On the other hand, sorting through them all could slow things down.

“It cuts both ways,” said San Diego’s Caldwell. “But the bureau usually meets its hiring goals and we will probably meet them this year. We need them more than ever before.”