When it comes to the CIA, there was a long-held perception that the agency targeted elites. Blue-blooded, generally sons, of elite families educated in equally elite  universities. Jack Bauer, for example, would have been very comfortable in a blue blazer with gold buttons, a (slightly) wrinkled set of khakis, and a pair of boat shoes sans-socks.

That perception, however, has drifted far from the reality of the modern agency. With all five branches headed by women, a diverse workforce, and an urgent need to continue hiring, work has been underway for the past few years to rebrand and attract employees from all walks of American life.

The agencies recruitment efforts kicked into overdrive in 2018, with the appointment of Gina Haskell as the first female director. Since then, the CIA has started advertising on streaming services, launched an Instagram account and an online “onion site,” a feature that makes both the information provider and the person accessing information more difficult to trace.

The CIA's first executive for Hispanic engagement, Ilka Rodriguez-Diaz, a veteran of more than three decades with the agency, was appointed in 2019. She first joined after attending a CIA job fair in New Jersey.

“The CIA had never been on my radar,” she wrote in an op-ed in The Miami Herald after getting the job in October. “I didn’t think I fit the ‘profile.’ After all, the spies I saw on TV were male Anglo-Saxon Ivy leaguers, not Latinas from New Jersey. Still, I went to my expert life coach, my mother, for advice. She said, ‘No pierdes nada con ir.’ (What have you got to lose in going?) So, I went to the job fair. The rest, as they say, is history.”

A Government Accountability Office report to congressional committees in December said the intelligence community as a whole needs to take additional steps to enhance diversity:

“Over the past several years, the intelligence community has demonstrated its commitment to diversity by taking steps to increase the proportion of women, racial or ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities” within the workforce, the report said. “Although some progress has been made in increasing this representation throughout the intelligence community, representation remains below comparable benchmarks.”

Across the more than a dozen U.S. spy agencies, including the CIA, 61% of intelligence professionals in fiscal 2019 were men compared with 39% women, according to an annual demographics report compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In fiscal 2019, the intelligence community saw an incremental increase in the number of minority professionals — 26.5%, up from 26.2%. But that’s still lower than 37 percent in the federal workforce as a whole and 37.4 percent in the civilian labor force, the report said.

The largest minority or ethnic group at all the intelligence agencies, including the CIA, was Black or African American at 12% followed by Hispanic at 7% and Asian at 4%. Persons with disabilities represent 11.5% of the workforce at all the U.S. intelligence agencies — up a point from the year before.

A 2015 report commissioned by the C.I.A. suggested that over the previous two decades, the agency had become less diverse, with fewer senior black officers in the agency.

That report helped prompt John O. Brennan, then the C.I.A. director, to intensify the agency’s recruitment efforts at historically black colleges and universities.

“As an African-American C.I.A. officer, I can say in those years we were doing a lot of great work to reach out to various communities,” said Preston Golson, a former C.I.A. officer. “But to build a pipeline, it takes time. You don’t see the results until a few years down the road.”

One of the most visible examples of the new approach at branding and appealing to a more diverse audience was this recruitment video released in June of 2020:

In January 2021, the agency followed up with the roll-out of entirely revamped career site. One of the first things to notice is how closely the branding and overall design flow from the main CIA site - in fact, the main landing page for the agency has recruitment baked into it. The career site itself has links for browsing CIA jobs complete with starting salaries and requirements, sections on working at the agency, and promises a "streamlined" application process. That last part is optimistic - while the new process may be an improvement over what was in place historically, this is still a government agency with a lot of questions to satisfy, versus a two-minute apply to be a gig worker. This one clocks in around 30 minutes, and still requires manual entry of work history (versus parsing from your resume). The branding is fantastic on the front-end, but the back-end experience will cause a certain degree of applicant drop-off, which is a shame. The length and number of requirements in most roles may also have the unintended consequences of turning away diverse applicants

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