France - Can’t recruit enough spies?

AX INTEL BULLETIN: France - Can’t recruit enough spies?
DATE: 08May2020

France’s primary external intelligence agency has expressed frustration with the overall poor quality of job applicants, as it tries to expand its staff by 20% in the coming years. The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) is France’s equivalent to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). It is tasked with procuring secret political, military and economic information from foreign targets…
AX INTEL BULLETIN: France - Can’t recruit enough spies?
DATE: 08May2020

France’s primary external intelligence agency has expressed frustration with the overall poor quality of job applicants, as it tries to expand its staff by 20% in the coming years. The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) is France’s equivalent to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). It is tasked with procuring secret political, military and economic information from foreign targets.

During the past decade, the DGSE has nearly doubled the size of its personnel. In 2008, it employed fewer than 4,500 people. By 2019, its staff size had grown to over 7,000, including many thousands of operations officers serving secretly abroad. Last year, the agency announced that it planned to grow its personnel size to 8,500 by 2022. To do so, it launched an unprecedented recruitment campaign, which French security experts described as nothing short of revolutionary. The staunchly reclusive DGSE sent recruiters to job fairs across France —mostly at universities— and began advertising its job vacancies online, primarily on YouTube and LinkedIn.

As a result of its efforts, the agency received 400 applications for 14 positions that were advertised in January. Of those 14 positions, 10 required advanced knowledge and understanding of foreign affairs and geopolitical developments, while two sought candidates with logistical and administrative expertise. The remaining two positions required fluency in Arabic.

But the French spy agency struggled to fill the positions. On Thursday a DGSE report said that the performance of candidates during the selection process “revealed critical shortcomings”. Candidates appeared for interviews severely under-prepared and their level of knowledge, as demonstrated in interviews, was “unacceptable for someone wishing to join the ranks of the DGSE”. Job candidates showed “markedly limited grasp” of global geopolitics, while their knowledge of intelligence work was even more limited. Even minimum requirements, like a résumé free of spelling mistakes were rarely met.

Consequently, and despite the fact that majority of the applicants had graduate degrees, the DGSE is struggling to fill the positions, with the process taking much longer than expected. The report said that 12 of the 14 job posts were eventually filled. The remaining two posts —requiring fluency in Arabic— remain unfilled “for want of suitable candidates”.

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