U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Skip Header


Let the Testing and Hiring Begin!

Written by:

“Testing This Week Could Lead To One Of Hundreds Of Open Census Jobs”

“Census Bureau To Hire 23,000 In Wisconsin”

“Bilingual Applicants Needed For Census Jobs”

“Census To Hire Workers”

“US Census Bureau Looking For Recruits”

News articles with these kinds of headlines are coming out at a rapid rate these days, as we prepare for the mass hiring that the decennial census will require next year. It’s all because the Census Bureau follows up with households that don’t mail back a completed paper questionnaire. For each one not mailed back by May 1, we’ll send a trained census taker out to that address to ask for the information in person.

To get ready for non-response follow up, we expect to test about 3 million applicants for skills in map reading, arithmetic, and reasoning skills. We’ll have them go through an FBI criminal background check. Those we hire will be fingerprinted for another check. At the end of this process we will hire a little over 1 million people. There is no other activity of this scale ever mounted in the country.

This decade we will continue our focus on hiring locally. We want to ensure that the census taker and local resident relate to each other with a high degree of comfort, culturally and linguistically.

The competition for the jobs is fierce this year because of the high unemployment rate. We want all applicants to know we appreciate their interest in working on this great national effort and serving the American public in this way. Given the massive scale of this effort, we’ll not be reaching out to candidates until the spring of 2010.

Director Robert Groves

Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021
Is this page helpful?
Thumbs Up Image Yes Thumbs Down Image No
NO THANKS
255 characters maximum 255 characters maximum reached
Thank you for your feedback.
Comments or suggestions?

Top

Back to Header