Advice for Employers and Recruiters
Intelligence Community Needs More Language Specialists
Steven Rothberg
President George W. Bush swore in retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell recently as the nation’s new spy chief. What was one of the first instructions Bush gave to McConnell? Find more recruits with the language skills and cultural background to collect information on our terrorist enemies. Both Bush and McConnell said that the nation’s 16 spy agencies have a severe shortage of operatives who speak critical languages such as Arabic and Farsi.
One solution suggested by McConnell was to increase the “…hiring of first- and second-generation Americans who possess native language skills, cultural insights, and a keen understanding of the threats we face.”
Another suggestion for Bush and McConnell is that they should have a closer look at the demographics of today’s college students. Our targeted email database of 120 million candidates, of which 8.5 million are students and recent graduates, contains the following numbers of people with language skills:
- Arabic – 40,372
- Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, others) – 77,607
- Farsi – 10,705
- French – 59,859
- German – 32,434
- Italian – 40,806
- Korean – 40,592
- Portuguese – 15,173
- Russian – 16,917
- Spanish – 755,692
Languages which are available are Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Ashanti, Azeri, Bantu, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and other dialects), Comorian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongha, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Flemish, French, Georgian, German, Gha, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Kirghiz, Korean, Kurdish, Laotian (includes Hmong), Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Moldavian, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Oromo, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhalese, Slovakian, Slovenian, Somali, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Tongan, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmeni, Urdu, Uzbeki, Vietnamese, Xhosa, and Zulu.
So are we already helping the intelligence agencies recruit students and recent graduates with these foreign language skills? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
