Are you looking for qualified cleared candidates for your Intelligence Community (IC) contract? Worry not! We’ve got the ingredients here.

What is Intelligence Community (IC)?

The Intelligence Community (IC) is a coalition of Executive Branch agencies and organizations working separately and together to engage in intelligence activities necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security interests of the United States. The 17 Executive Branch agencies and organizations (generally referred to as “IC elements”) conduct a variety of intelligence activities. These work together to promote national security, to provide timely, relevant information to U.S. policymakers, decision-makers, and warfighters.

Intelligence Community Contractors

Over the past several years, the Intelligence Community has been heavily dependent on private contractors for different types of support given the historic and developed ties between the Intelligence Community and private corporations. The growing corporate presence within the Intelligence Community has been controversial, as some would argue that contractors increasingly outnumber government employees in IC workspaces. The main concern relating to this development is that private contract employees may have started to complete tasks that were previously constitutionally governmental functions, such as intelligence collection or analysis.

17 US Intelligence Communities

• • Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
  • Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
  • Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
  • Department of Energy (DOE)
  • Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS I&A)
  • Department of State (DOS)/Bureau of Intelligence and Research
  • Department of the Treasury
  • Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
  • National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
  • National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
  • National Security Agency (NSA)
  • U.S. Air Force
  • U.S. Army
  • U.S. Coast Guard
  • U.S. Marine Corps
  • U.S. Navy (Naval Intelligence)

The largest numbers are employed by NSA, CIA, DOJ, DHS, the Military, and other Defense Departments. Below is a brief description of these departments and some examples of contract awards:

NSA
The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT).

CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency is a foreign intelligence and counterintelligence agency of the United States government, officially tasked with collecting, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT).

The CIA has awarded one of the most-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E contracts to five companies—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM.

DOJ
Also known as the Justice Department, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is a federal executive department of the United States government that enforces federal law, seeks just punishment for the guilty, and ensures impartial and fair administration of justice. DOJ is composed of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Department of Justice awarded a long-awaited contract to Baraka Enterprise Consulting (Pty) Ltd with an amount of $14,830,760.00. The Contract Period: 3 Months (26 April 2021 to 26 July 2021.)

DHS
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-terrorism, border security, immigration and customs, cybersecurity, and disaster prevention and management.

DHS awards 7 seats on a $300M testing, acquisition support contract. The Homeland Security Department has chosen seven companies for a seven-year, $300 million contract to perform independent test and evaluation services in support of major acquisition programs.

USMC
The United States Marine Corps (USMC), also referred to as the United States Marines, is the maritime land force service branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for conducting expeditionary and amphibious operations through combined arms, implementing its own infantry, armor, artillery, aerial and special operations forces. The Marine Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States.

Marine Corps Systems Command awarded a contract to Harris Corporation of Roanoke, Virginia, a maximum $249,000,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract.

US Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution. As the oldest and most senior branch of the U.S. military in order of precedence, the modern U.S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, which was formed (14 June 1775) to fight the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

The US Army awarded a $1,287,572,649 cost-plus-fixed-fee, cost-plus-incentive-fee, fixed-price-incentive-firm Undefinitized contract to Lockheed Martin Corp.

Categorization of Contracts

> Non-Core Contracts
> Core Contracts

• Non-Core Contracts
  The non-core category includes individuals who perform services not related to the mission or operations of the intelligence community (e.g., food services), or who are not required to have security clearances.
• Core Contracts
  Core contract personnel generally perform mission-related work which has implications for the ability of intelligence community components to maintain control over inherently governmental functions and their missions and operations. Intelligence communities limit their review to individuals who possess Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances.

Intelligence Community Recruitment

Hiring Intelligence community roles is difficult because competition with the private sector is high and the candidate pool is often restricted by the capacity to effectively screen the volume of applicants. In order to manage high volumes of candidates, agencies limit the amount of time the positions are open and rely on self-assessments and resume reviews to understand potential. But resumes oversimplify the vetting process, focusing on characteristics that are known to be less predictive of performance like grades, previous experience, or tenure. Phone screens are also highly unstructured, leading to even greater variability in hiring outcomes. iQuasar helps you create a consistent and fair evaluation of candidates, resulting in a more inclusive process with better hiring outcomes.

We help you to enlist for these intelligence agency contracts to meet the unprecedented challenges. iQuasar provides a modern and inclusive candidate experience resulting in more applicants while increasing the diversity of your talent pool. Incorporating a structured and scalable interview process enables you to quickly evaluate candidates to ensure you can identify and hire the best candidate for every role.

Strategies you can follow while searching candidates for your Intelligence Community contract

• Use of Intelligence Keywords/Jargon
  Make sure you use Intelligence keywords/jargon in your candidate search strings so that you find resumes that match your requirement.
• Candidates with Prior Experience with Intelligence Agencies
  Candidates already having past experience with the DoD or Intelligence Community Agencies should be the first priority to contact.
• Develop/Construct a Candidate Channel
  Most of the candidates in the market already have a job. Make sure to create a solid pipeline of these passive candidates.
• Dilate Your Connections
  To make sure you’re able to always fill your pipeline with great talent, your team needs different plans for sourcing Intelligence professionals. Networking is one of them. Networking helps to find the best candidates. So take the time to search for candidates on social media platforms so that you can contact them about your openings.
• Google Boolean Search
  For many recruiters and resume sourcers, LinkedIn is at the top of the heap for places to find and engage prospective candidates. One of the rare yet effective methods to do this is via search engine which we call Google Boolean Search. You will need to understand some basic Boolean operators to use the Google Boolean Search. The most important Boolean operators to know are:

• • Quotes – quotes signal that the phrase between the quotation marks must be in the search results exactly as shown
  • AND – words or phrases on either side of AND must be in the entry to be included in the search results.
  • OR – words or phrases on either side of the OR are included in the search results.
  • Parentheses – just like algebra, the parentheses identify the order of operation as anything between the parentheses is acted upon first.
• ATS
  A reliable ATS (or Applicant Tracking System) can help you manage your entire Full Recruitment life cycle. It will help you to boost the candidate management process and significantly reduce time-to-fill. ATS keeps track of all the activities that take place in recruitment from listing jobs online to making the job offer.
• Employee Referral Program
  An employee referral program is an effective way to source new talent, but it may create an unintentional disparate impact if employees refer to candidates of the same race, religion, national origin, or other protected class.
• Active Campaigns
  Active campaign is less about the tools you use, and more about your brand’s unique, differentiated voice. And, the success of your campaign depends on how this voice resonates with the target audience. So, ask yourself the following questions before designing your next recruiting campaign:
  • What’s your objective: awareness, a larger talent pool, or immediate vacancies?
  • What does your ideal candidate look like?
  • Where does this candidate hang out, and what are the channels they use to communicate?
  • Finally, what value can you offer them as an employer?

These brands reimagined recruitment as a candidate-first experience, where they attract talent just like they do their customers. Using similar strategies, you can arrive at the perfect formula for recruitment campaigns geared for near and long-term outcomes for your contracts and attract talent that will be assets to you.

• Harvesting/Mining
  Harvesting involves reviewing a document, such as a resume or home page, and finding keywords, links, references, and locations that assist with subsequent searches.
• Recruitment Marketing
  A Recruitment Marketing Platform or RMP is software that’s used to market your jobs and your company so that you can attract candidates and convert them into applicants and new hires. RMPs mirror the functionality of marketing automation systems like HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketo but are designed to market to candidates rather than customers.

iQuasar has been in the recruitment business for more than 15 years and we can help you to find qualified candidates for your Intelligence community contract, given our experience, our internal ownership, commercial vigor, external portal licenses, and profound expertise. We have a well-defined strategy to help our clients fulfill their recruitment wants. Our recruiters work as an extension of your team to find the right people with the right skills for an existing project or contract.

 To learn more, set up a time with one of our specialists