ORLANDO, Fla. — Working with the
largest online pool of applicants ever pulled together, the
Transportation Security Administration hired, trained and deployed
65,000 airport screeners in only five months, according to one
official who helped develop the screening system.
The online system sifted through nearly 2 million applications, most
of them submitted online at Monster's job search (www.monster.com),
said Steve Maier, vice president for homeland security at NCS
Pearson Inc., speaking today at the Information Processing
Interagency Conference (IPIC) here this week. IPIC is the annual
conference of the Government Information Technology Executive
Council.
At one point, TSA was hiring a worker every minute in the
congressional mandate to turn private airport workers into federal
employees at 429 airports nationwide after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, Maier said.
More than 90 percent of the applicants applied for their jobs
online, answering a checklist of 170 questions. One out of three
people passed the screening test and qualified. While 65,000 have
been hired and assigned to airports, another 65,000 who qualified
remain in a "ready pool" if they are needed.
The discussion of the TSA hiring process came on the second day of
IPIC, as federal and private-sector officials looked at the problems
of homeland security and how technology can help make the nation
secure.
Mark Holman, the former deputy assistant to the president for
homeland security, likened the new agency to "building a ship at
sea."
"Technology is the opportunity to become safer and stronger," Holman
said.
Nathaniel Heiner, chief knowledge officer at the Coast Guard, told
the gathering that homeland security officials are hard at work
tightening the borders. Among the initiatives are:
* Developing standards and technology for tracking ships in
international waters.
* Tracking people and cargo across borders.
There are a lot of people coming into the United States, and "every
one of them needs to be looked at," Heiner said.
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