◆ SpookStack

however, we need to continue developing a workforce with critical skills and the experience and flexibility ta adapt quickly to. changing priorities. Accordingly, we have made a number of changes to the way we recrult, hire, train, and promote our personnel — changes which are in addition to the recent persannel initiatives (discussed above) that focus specifically on intelligence capabilities. These new efforts to realign our workforce will help ensure that the FBI is ready to address evolving threats well into the future. Revised Personnel Selection Process in the years prior to September 11, 2001, Special Agent hiring efforts focused primarily on individuals with law enforcement, military, accounting, and legal backgrounds For example, of the 285 agents hired in 2001, 19 had law degrees, 15 had a background in accounting, 26 had language skills (mostly Spanish to. assist with narcotics trafficking investigations), and the remainder were primarily fram law enforcement or military backgrounds. This hiring approach produced tremendous investigators, whose efforts and dedication have. been the building blocks of the FBI's reputation for excellence. Now that the FBI's mission and the threats we face are changing, there is a new need for certain specialized skills, such as intelligence, engineering and language capabilities. While we continue to draw from traditional sources in our hiring, we are augmenting our recruitment efforts and personnel selection process to ensure that we hire more individuals with the specific skills and expenence that match our priorities and overall intelligence efforts. We devised a new recruitment strategy that includes: 1) initrating a major marketing campaign, 2) recruiting at colleges and universities with outstanding programs in critical skills areas, 3) partnering with the U.S Copts Association to recruit individuals with Arabic language skills; 4) changing the FBI's web site to focus on job opportunities in the intelligence and counterterrorism fields; and 5) modifying the Presidential Management Fellows Program and the Honors Internship Program to recruit only candidates who possess critical skills. In February 2003, SACs were given guidance and instruction on leading targeted recruitment efforts. Since that time, the SACs have been evaluated on their recruitment efforts on a quarterly basis, We also revised the hiring process itself by changing the list of critical skills we are | Special Agents hired looking for in candidates to include. intelligence background (including experience in the intelligence Community or significant expertise in international studies); languages helpful to our counterterrorism and/or counterintelligence missions; information technology and computer science, engineering; physical SCIENCes; accounting: and international business. We similarly changed the screening criteria on which candidates for Ln Special Agent positions are evaluated at each stage of the hiring process. The result has been a significant increase in the number of new Special Agents with expertise In these areas, MISC Doc. #5 58 000000397