How To Get An Intel Job Using LinkedIn

Most job seekers are very familiar with job related search engines such as Monster or Indeed or, among intel professionals, sites such as USAJobs.  One of the most effective and efficient websites for finding a job, however, is LinkedIn, and it is surprising how many job hunters fail to take advantage of its powerful tools for searching and applying for intel related jobs.

There are, of course, some legitimate security concerns among some sectors of the intelligence profession regarding social media sites like LinkedIn.  However, for the vast majority of job seekers - particularly entry-level job seekers and particularly for those interested in intelligence in business positions - LinkedIn is a must-use site.

Much of the power of LinkedIn comes from the size of an individual's network.  The larger and more diverse the network, the better the results.  Thus, the first step for individuals trying to break into intelligence is to build a network.  The time to do this is not three months before graduation, however.  

Intelligence professionals are a cautious bunch and are highly unlikely to take kindly to spam-y requests to connect from unknown or unverified contacts.  A far better avenue is to start early in your academic career and to build contacts slowly.  Start with professors, alumni or others you know who are already in the business or already have contacts with intelligence professionals.  Join organizations such as the SCIP and IACA.  But don't just join them - become as active in your local chapter as you can.

Within LinkedIn, try to identify some specialty groups where active discussions take place in an area of the intelligence field in which you are interested.  There are a number of these groups and joining them, listening to others discuss the issues of the day and, eventually, contributing to them with cogent, well-thought out observations of your own is a good way to steadily build a reputation within the community.

All this is the undercard, however, to the main event:  The LinkedIn job search feature.

At the top of every LinkedIn page is a Jobs Link.  Clicking on that link takes you to a jobs page with a number of interesting sections.  First is the Jobs You May be Interested In section.  Here, based on your profile, LinkedIn tries to guess which jobs might be right for you.  

LinkedIn also looks for commonalities among employers within your network (under the premise, perhaps, that if all your professional contacts work for Company X, you might be interested in a job there as well) and offers job recommendations along those lines in its Discover Jobs in Your Network section.  If your network is still small (and it may well be if you are looking for an entry level job), this latter section may not be much help.

You can also search for jobs in the search box near the top of the page but this search box defaults to a local search.  If you live in a small town, such a narrow area search is unlikely to reveal many intelligence related jobs.

However, the search bar that always sits at the very top of the page allows you to easily conduct national level searches for jobs.  Getting good results typically depends on which search terms you use (a more difficult question in the world of intelligence in business...) but a good starting place is simply "intelligence analyst".

LinkedIn will typically generate a number of jobs from this kind of search.  If it generates too many or the search needs to be otherwise focused, you can use the filters found on the left hand side of the page.  Two of the most useful are Experience and Relationships.  Experience is easy to understand and LinkedIn helpfully tells you how many jobs there are currently within each experience level.  For example, in the screenshot on the left (taken from my profile), you can see LinkedIn found 127 entry-level jobs.  

The Relationships filter helps you understand who you know that works at the same company or organization as the job advertised.  For example, I have a first level connection to 351 individuals at companies or organizations who are currently offering intelligence analyst jobs.  Knowing that someone in your network works at a company you are considering is very helpful.  You can ping them for insights about what it is like to work at that company or, if they know you well (not always true on social networks like LinkedIn), they might be able to refer you within their own system, giving you somewhat of an edge in the hiring process.

The Job Profile itself offers similar information.  First, a simple click on the People In Your Network link (if any) will let you know who you know who works at a given company or organization.  It will also give you insight into the second level contacts to which you might be able to be introduced. More importantly, perhaps, for entry-level job seekers with smaller networks is the link to Similar Jobs.

Finally, once you have selected a job of interest, be sure to look for the Apply Now button.  This allows you to apply for the job directly through LinkedIn.  Otherwise, you typically have to apply on the company's website.  A final hint is to check LinkedIn jobs often.  In the two days it has taken me to write this post, I have seen a number of jobs pop up and disappear.

This is just a start, however.  There are any number of other tips and tricks to using LinkedIn to get a job.  If you know any, please leave a comment!

Help! Where Can I Find A Job?? (RFI)

I am in the process of updating and compiling my list of job resources for entry-level intelligence analysts and I could use your help!  

If you  know of any good websites or resources, please either send them to me (kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu) or post them in the comments below.  

What kind of links am I looking for?

• Job links for entry-level intelligence analysts.  If you know of a company or organization that has intelligence analyst jobs on the books that can be filled by an entry-level analyst, send a link.
• Job links for intelligence analyst-like positions.  Lots of positions within the private sector (such as anti-money laundering positions with most banks) are good fits for entry-level intelligence analysts but they are rarely easy to find through straightforward job searches.  
• Job links for international positions (for nationals and expatriates).  There doesn't appear to be a good list of job resources for individuals with intelligence analyst skills who want to work outside their native country.  Likewise, expatriates often having a hard time finding intelligence-like jobs in foreign countries.
• Job links for Non-Governmental Organizations.  NGO's rarely if ever title analyst positions as "intelligence" positions, yet the intelligence analyst skill set is often the best fit.

Beyond job boards or specialist search sites, what else can you provide?  Job preparation resources.  Getting a job in any intelligence position in challenging.  Any hints or tips that are particularly relevant to the intel job search would be appreciated.  What kind of stuff am I talking about?

• Interview skills
• Resumes
• Social Media Usage/Presence (LinkedIn in particular)
• Job Fairs
• Hints and tips for breaking in

Once I get everything compiled, I will post the list here!

Social Media For The Soon-To-Graduate (Or How To Talk To Digital Immigrants)

Digital Immigrants?

If you are about to graduate from college, you likely think you know how to use social media.  You have grown up with it -- you are a digital native.

Unfortunately, most of the people who hold the keys to your employment post-college are digital immigrants.  This is particularly true in the business, law enforcement and national security intelligence communities.

Digital immigrants often have a surprisingly high level of expertise when it comes to networking but likely have a different definition of social than a digital native.  Likewise, there are a number of digital immigrants who arrived in the future only by way of forcible deportation and still pine for the "old country" where every copy of a classified document is printed and numbered "1 of X".

(A quick caveat:  The advice I am about to give is generic.  Different agencies and organizations, particularly within the three major intelligence communities, likely have different standards or advice.  Obviously, their guidelines trump mine.)

Given this, what should you do?  I think there are four things you can do that will at least reduce your frustration if not actually improve your chances:

Learn to use social media effectively.  Social media can be a competitive advantage for digital natives but few really know how to use it.  For example, did you know that when you apply for an internship through LinkedIn, it will tell you when someone actually looks at your application? Did you know that, in a recent survey, 98% of recruiters surveyed used LinkedIn to research candidates?

These are just a few examples of what I am talking about.  Every social media platform has a variety of bells and whistles that can be very useful to you as you look for a job and throughout your professional career.  Few students take the time to actually study and learn these tools and wind up losing out.

Use different services for different purposes.  Not all social media platforms are alike and some work better for certain purposes.  I like to use Facebook but treat it as primarily a social space.  LinkedIn and various email forums are where I have most of my professional conversations.  Finally, I use Twitter as a way to curate the web in real-time.

Of course, my interests occasionally overlap and spill over into all of the social networks to which I belong.  In general, however, I find using different networks for different purposes allows me to optimize my privacy settings.

Whatever you do, though, never forget that everything you put on a social network is theoretically or actually visible to anyone who looks.  Of all the digital immigrants who have become expert at social media, human resource people are some of the best...

When in doubt, do it old school.  One of the best lessons I learned early was, "If you don't know what the dress code is, wear a coat and tie."  If it turns out to be a casual event, it is easy to take off a coat and tie; it is not so easy to put them on if you guess wrong...

The same thing goes for using social media for professional purposes.  If you don't know what the social conventions are of a particular group on Facebook or LinkedIn, if you don't already have a history with a particular Twitter user, go formal first.  Start at the top and, just like taking off a tie, it is easy to become casual.  Make a bad first impression, though, and you may lose credibility or even access, to a crucial forum for your profession.

Social networking is as much social as it is networking.   No one owes you an internship, an interview, a job or even an answer.  More importantly, social media makes it very easy to ignore or block people who are clearly in it only for themselves. 

Ideally then, you should start early (like in your freshman or sophomore years) to develop relationships with people you can help and people who can help you as you progress in your career.  Ask yourself, "What LinkedIn or Facebook groups should I be following?" or "Who is worth listening to on Twitter?" or "Who's blog is worth reading?"  More importantly, ask yourself, "How can I contribute to the groups/tweet streams/blogs I do follow?"  Simply being a member is not enough - networking is a two way street.

Digital immigrants look at it this way:  Why should I place my reputation at risk for you?  Simply knowing of you doesn't really justify the risk.  I need to know what you can actually do.  Digital immigrants are also a little leery of things like grades and other purely numeric measures of quality.  Most of us can think both of a few all-stars who look mediocre on paper and of some paper tigers that turned out to be worthless on the job.

And if you didn't start early?  Start now.  Resign yourself to the fact that it is going to take some time to build your professional network (and even more time before that network is willing to invest time in you).  You might be able to speed the process up a bit but even if you can't, it makes no sense to continue to delay the development of a professional network.

Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now)

There has been a good bit of recent evidence that the gap between what spies do and what we all do is narrowing -- and the spies are clearly worried about it.

GEN David Petraeus, Director of the CIA, started the most recent round of hand-wringing back in March when he gave a speech at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit:

"First, given the digital transparency I just mentioned, we have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy...We must, for example, figure out how to protect the identity of our officers who increasingly have a digital footprint from birth, given that proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come."

Richard Fadden, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), added his own thoughts in a speech only recently made public:

"In today's information universe of WikiLeaks, the Internet and social media, there are fewer and fewer meaningful secrets for the James Bonds of the world to steal," Fadden told a conference of the Canadian Association of Professional Intelligence Analysts in November 2011. "Suddenly the ability to make sense of information is as valued a skill as collecting it."

Next I ran across a speech given by Robert Grenier, a former case officer, chief of station and 27 year veteran of the clandestine service, given at a conference at the University of Delaware.  In it, he describes the moment he realized that the paradigm was shifting (and not in his favor):

"Grenier said he came to realize the practice of espionage would have to change when he received a standard form letter at a hotel overseas, while undercover, thanking him for visiting again.  When he realized electronic records now tracked where he had been for certain date ranges, he said he knew the practice of espionage was going to have to change.  “It was like the future in a flash that opened up before my eyes,” Grenier said."

(Note:  While I could not embed the video here, the entire one hour speech is well worth watching.  The part of particular relevance to this post begins around minute 8 in the video.   This is, by the way, fantastic stuff for use in an intelligence studies class).

Finally  (and what really got me thinking), one of my students made an off-handed comment regarding his own security practices.  I needed to send him a large attachment and I asked for his Gmail account. In response, he gave me his "good" address, explaining that he only used his other Gmail address as a "spam account", i.e. when he had to give a valid email address to a website he suspected was going to fill his in-box with spam.

That's when it hit me.  Not only is it getting harder to be a traditional spy, it is getting easier (far easier) to do the kinds of things that only spies used to do.  The gap is clearly closing from both ends.

With all this exposition in mind, here is my list of the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now) -- Don't hesitate to leave your own additions in the comments:

#5 -- Have a cover story.  That is precisely what my student was doing with his spam account.  In fact, most people I know have multiple email accounts for various aspects of their lives.  This is just the beginning, though.  How many of us use different social media platforms for different purposes?  Take a look at someone you are friends with on Facebook and are connected to on LinkedIn and I'll bet you can spot all the essential elements of a cover story.  Need more proof?  Watch the video below:


The only reason we think this ad is funny is because we intuitively understand the idea of "cover" and we understand the consequences of having that cover blown.

#4 -- Shake a tail.   It used to be that spies had to be in their Aston Martins running from burly East Germans to qualify as someone in the process of "shaking a tail."  Today we are mostly busy running from government and corporate algorithms that are trying to understand our every action and divine our every need, but the concept is the same.  Whether you are doing simple stuff like using a search engine like DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you or engaging "porn mode" on your Firefox or Chrome browser, or more sophisticated stuff like enabling the popular cookie manager, NoScript, or even more sophisticated stuff like using Tor or some other proxy server service to mask your internet habits, we are using increasingly sophisticated tools to help us navigate the internet without being followed.

#3 -- Use passwords and encrypt data.  Did you buy anything over the internet in the last week or so?  Chances are good you used a password and encrypted your data (or, if you didn't, don't be surprised when you wind up buying a dining room set for someone in Minsk).  Passwords used to be reserved for sturdy doors in dingy alleyways, for safe houses or for entering friendly lines.  Now they are so common that we need password management software to keep up with them all.  Need more examples? Ever use an HTTPS site?  Your business make you use a Virtual Private Network?  The list is endless.

#2 -- Have an agent network.  Sure, that's not what we call them, but that is what they are:  LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare and the best agent network of all -- Twitter.  An agent network is a group of humans who we have vetted and recruited to help us get the information we want.   How is that truly different from making a connection on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter?  We "target" (identify people who might be useful to us in some way), "vet" their credentials (look at their profiles, websites, Google them), "recruit" them (Easy-peasy!  Just hit "follow"...), and then, once the trust relationship has been established, "task" them as assets ("Please RT!" or "Can you introduce me?" or "Contact me via DM").  Feel like a spy now (or just a little bit dirtier)?

#1 -- Use satellites.  Back in 2000, I went to work at the US Embassy in The Hague.  I worked on a daily basis with the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia.  That collaboration, while not always easy, bore results like the ones that led US Judge Patricia Wald to say, "I found most astounding in the Srebrenica case the satellite aerial image photography furnished by the U.S. military intelligence  (Ed. Note:  See example) which pinpointed to the minute movements on the ground of men and transports in remote Eastern Bosnian locations. These photographs not only assisted the prosecution in locating the mass grave sites over hundreds of miles of terrain, they were also introduced to validate its witnesses’ accounts of where thousands of civilians were detained and eventually killed."  It is hard to believe that only 12 years ago this was state of the art stuff.

Today, from Google Earth to the Satellite Sentinel Project, overhead imagery combined with hyper-detailed maps are everywhere.  And that is just the start.  We use satellites to make our phone calls, to get our television, and to guide our cars, boats and trucks.  We use satellites to track our progress when we work out and to track our packages in transit.  Most of us carry capabilities in our cell phones, enabled by satellites, that were not even dreamed of by the most sophisticated of international spies a mere decade ago.

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If this is today, what will the future bring?  Will we all be writing our own versions of Stuxnet and Flame?  Or, more likely, will we be using drones to scout the perfect campsite?  Feel free to speculate in the comments!

How To Write An Awesome Resume, How to Organize Your Internship Search, How To Make Money While You Are Waiting And Other Advice For The Job Hunter (Link List)

It has been some time since I talked about the unspeakable horrors of the entry level intelligence analyst job search and it will probably be some time before I re-visit that particular issue.  Here are some useful sites to tide you over while you wait:

Top 10 Ways To Rock Your Resume.   Lifehacker has put together a good list of their advice to resume writers.  It is an excellent place to start.

Create A Master Resume For Easy, Targeted Applications.  If you are a college student you should be reading Hack College.  If you know one, forward them this link.  It is one of the best blogs for useful advice about how to get the most out of the college experience and this post is a good example.

MeganMcCollum.com.  Resumes, they are a changin'!  Meg McCollum, one of our recent grads, is on the job market again and took a very different approach this time to the traditional resume for analysts.  It is worth a look if only for some ideas (of course, if you are looking to hire an extraordinary young analyst, you should take a look in order to offer Meg a job...).

RezScore.  This site allows you to upload your resume and get feedback on how good or bad it is.  It actually gives your resume a letter grade!   Even if you are hesitant to upload your resume to the site, you still want to take a look at the "A", "B" and "C" resumes available on RezScore's home page.

The Idealist Guide To Non-Profit Careers For First Time Job Seekers.  While not written with intelligence analysts in mind, this online guide provides a wealth of useful guidance for all entry-level job seekers.  In addition, I find that many people who are interested in intelligence jobs are also interested in serving their country or their communities in other ways.  This guide is even more useful for those students.

Organize Your Internship Applications With A Spreadsheet.  Internships not only help secure a job, they are also one of the best ways to help you figure out if intelligence analysis is right for you.  These internships are typically pretty difficult to find and to get, so multiple applications are a necessity.  This useful tip from Hack College (again) is worth exploring if you find yourself submitting multiple internship applications.

8 Websites To Get Tips On Job Interview Questions And Answers.  After the applications and the resume comes the interview.  These sites offer some helpful tips for managing that part of the job hiring ordeal with equanimity.

5 Salary Comparison Tools For Your Next Job Search.  Another handy list from MakeUseOf.com

A Mind Map Of 100+ Tips For Using LinkedIn More Effectively.  Most students are familiar (too familiar?) with Facebook.  In my experience, though, the social networking site that might actually help you get a job is LinkedIn.  Becoming actively involved in LinkedIn's various groups and taking advantage of its tools for building a professional network are things most students simply do not know how to do.  The mind map, available for download from this site, does a good job of organizing and outlining many of the tasks you can accomplish with LinkedIn.

The Monster List Of Freelance Job Sites.  One of the big problems with a career as an intelligence analyst is waiting for the clearance process to be completed.  While the wait time for this has gone down over the last several years, it is still an unfortunate fact of life.  Rather than working at Wendy's, recent grads often have skills they can use in the freelance world.  This list of sites is essential for these kinds of short term job searches.

Make Money In Your Spare Time Doing Simple Online Tasks.  Another way to help fill some empty months with a little bit of cash flow.

Any other sites I have missed?  Leave them in the comments!