At CIA headquarters, iPods are banned. So are cellphones.
"No personal media things," said Karen Mullet, the agency's chief of employee support.
Workplace restrictions like these are among the smaller sacrifices that CIA employees make on behalf of the nation's security. But a wave of new hires at the agency are very, very tech savvy and, it seems, not shy about their interests.
"They are pushing us to change in ways that, from a security perspective, we might not be ready to change," said Cindy Bower, the CIA's chief of human resources. "They want to use BlackBerrys, and they've got iPods they want to bring in and listen to music."
The new hires also are prodding the agency to improve its information technology systems. "They want it faster and better," said Michael J. Morell, associate deputy director and the No. 3 at the agency. "I think it is a very healthy thing."
Perhaps no federal agency is changing as rapidly as the CIA. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, shook up an intelligence community that had been downsizing since the end of the Cold War. Since then, recruitment and hiring have become a CIA priority.
Forty percent of the workforce has arrived since Sept. 11, 2001. Of the new hires, 60 percent are under age 30, and 85 percent are under 40. One in six have military experience.
"We are bringing in today more people than we ever have before," Morell said. The agency set a record for new hires in fiscal 2006 and is likely to come close to doing so again this year and again in fiscal 2008.
Today's CIA looks like "what we call a double-humped camel," Morell said. Most employees have been employed less than five years or more than 15 years, "and not much in that five- to 15-year period," he said.
Despite criticism and controversy in the months after Sept. 11 from Congress and outside investigators, the CIA has proved to be one of the most attractive parts of government for people interested in public service.
Last year, the agency received 134,000 résumés and is on pace to get 160,000 this year, Morell said. That's up from 39,000 to 63,000 a year before the terrorist attacks.
The CIA reviews every résumé, but cannot respond to every applicant. Morell and Mullet said the agency is working to change that.
The agency is increasing its ranks of analysts and operations officers (better known as spies), but also needs engineers and professionals in finance, logistics and medicine.
Getting hired, of course, is not easy. The agency looks for people with language skills who have lived abroad and who are at mid-career with experience in industry. About 60 percent of recruits have overseas experience, and about 40 percent have advanced degrees.
Although a quarter of job applicants say they have foreign-language capability, CIA tests find that only 12 percent are proficient.
The hiring process takes nine to 12 months -- from the time a résumé is submitted until a letter of acceptance is sent, setting a start date. Employment offers hinge on receiving security clearances, and about 25 percent do not get them, Mullet said.
The hiring surge is part of a "strategic intent" developed by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden that includes an "analysts forward initiative," aimed at getting more intelligence analysts into overseas positions so they gain regional expertise more quickly, and a "leadership development initiative" to make sure the CIA has people who can manage its changing workforce.
Hayden also has called for enhancing diversity at the CIA, eliminating time in grade as a factor in promotions to put more weight on job performance, and requiring rotational assignments across directorates before promotions.
Senior officials are making progress on reshaping the workforce, Morell said. They have identified jobs that require foreign-language skills, and about half have been filled by officers "with significant language capability," he said. That's an improvement over the past four years, and Hayden has formed a group "to figure out what we can do to make it even better," Morell said.
The CIA is especially interested in hiring people who speak Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Farsi, Dari, Pashtu, Urdu and other "mission-critical" languages.
Efforts to improve diversity are paying off and should make it easier for the CIA to operate around the world, Morell said.
In fiscal 2006, 23 percent of new hires were African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans. The CIA also is hiring Arab Americans, Persian Americans and South Asian Americans, Morell said.
Half of the managers are minorities or women, a higher proportion than four years ago. Of Hayden's senior leadership team, 35 percent are minorities or women, Morell said. About 30 percent of station chiefs are minorities or women, up from 20 percent three years ago. "So the trends are in the right direction, but we need to do better," Morell said.
The hiring surge, he said, "puts a huge responsibility on this organization to hire the right people, to train them, to develop them." That, and "how well those folks do, will determine how well this agency does 10, 15, 20 years from now," Morell said. "So we are taking very seriously how we invest in them."
Even though employees must leave their iPods and cellphones in their cars while at work on the CIA campus near McLean, the agency has not had problems keeping younger workers.
"We have not yet seen the conventional wisdom of the last five years that Generation Xers and Gen Ys are going to job-hop," Morell said.
