NSA Set to Snap Up Displaced Tech Talent

The tech industry’s losses may prove to be the public sector’s gains.

As the National Security Agency (NSA) pointed out in a recent statement, it is undertaking “one of its largest hiring surges in 30 years,” with openings for more than 3,000 new employees. More than half of the roles the Fort Meade, Fla.-based intelligence agency is hiring for are in cyber- and other tech-related roles, including software engineers, systems engineers, mathematicians and data scientists.

“As NSA shifts to an era of strategic competition, it is critical that we’re able to build and sustain the diverse and expert workforce we need to continue working our missions,” said NSA Executive Director Catherine Aucella.

And, with tech titans like Amazon, Google and Microsoft continuing to lay off tech talent, the NSA is hoping to fill thousands of openings with the workers that these and other private sector technology companies and startups have jettisoned.

‘A Soft Landing Place’ for Tech Workers

As many media outlets have reported, the tech sector is in the midst of a massive wave of layoffs, with tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs over the past several months.

“The high-flying tech industry is facing a reckoning,” wrote CBS News’ Irina Ivanova, “as the economy slows and customers pull back on spending.”

In the past month alone, tech companies have cut nearly 60,000 jobs, Ivanova reported, “reversing a hiring spree that surged during the pandemic, as millions of Americans moved their lives online.”

IBM, for example, is among the latest to reduce its headcount, announcing 3,900 layoffs, or around 2% of its workforce, in January.

The NSA is eager to snap up this displaced talent.

Molly Moore, NSA’s deputy director of workforce support activities, told Nextgov that “we absolutely are trying to take advantage of these tech layoffs” to beef up the organization’s tech and cyber workforce. The organization’s recent hiring efforts have included “augmenting [our] current recruitment strategy to reach these audiences through social media, participation at job fairs and expanding the locations of job postings,” Moore said.

As Nextgov reported, the NSA is also turning to existing internal services to streamline the hiring process for applicants coming from the private sector, using a communications dashboard to enhance engagement with NSA applicants, for example. The dashboard, which first went live in June 2022, has seen its use increase in recent months, as the NSA works to keep interested applicants informed about the agency’s hiring procedures and activities through more direct outreach.

From October through November, the NSA ran a LinkedIn recruitment initiative that reached out to tech workers who had been affected by the layoffs rippling through the tech sector, Moore told Nextgov.

And, in January, the NSA launched another tech-focused hiring campaign, “with an emphasis once more on using LinkedIn to contact laid off tech workers and leveraging social media to spread the word about the agency’s vacancies,” wrote Nextgov’s Edward Graham.

The agency intends to run this new campaign through mid-March, in part to help the NSA “keep up with the companies that are experiencing layoffs,” NSA Senior Strategist for Talent Management Christine Parker told Nextgov, and to “put messages out there that NSA is a soft landing place for people.”

The organization’s initial efforts have led to an influx of applications, and has already helped the NSA hire around 1,000 new employees for tech, cyber, intelligence and business positions, according to the agency.

Moore urges potential applicants to consider the valuable contributions they could make to the NSA’s intelligence and security operations.

“NSA is here, we’re hiring stable, and we work on really hard problems,” she told Nextgov. “And, so we really are looking for some of the best and brightest to help us with those problems.”