James Joyner explains how you get a government security clearance, and why the process is broken.
There really is a premium placed on potential employees who are already cleared. One of the reasons for the premium is the cost to the sponsoring company – $10,000 to $20,000 per clearance. Faced with a choice of hiring a new employee and then sponsoring them for a clearance (that they may not obtain) vs. poaching someone else’s cleared employee, it’s hardly surprising that Beltway Bandits raid each other…
And that number is only for a Secret clearance. MUCH higher number for Top Secret and above.
As an independant consultant after retiring with a TS/SCI clearance I was valued… When the clearance expired, so did I. It would have cost me 2-300K to update it and to certify a facility to store and work with the classified material… it would have cost any employer a 6 figure amount to update me….
The clearances are gold while you have them. You can’t blame any business for mining those people with the gold.
I work with an IT staffing and consulting firm in Atlanta and we are currently in search of PeopleSoft candidates that have a top-secret clearance with a polygraph. Do you know where I might be able to locate these type of people? Where would be the best place for me to get information on this?
Thanks for your help!!
Melany Goulding
EnJOY the journey!
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This is to inform you readers, who are interested in the subject of security clearances, that there is now available a new psychological testing instrument. This instrument, the Personnel Security Standards Psychological Questionnaire (PSSPQ), was developed to accurately predict whether an individual would be successful or not in being eventually granted his/her high-level (i.e., TS-SCI)security clearance status if processed for same. The developer of this instrument is a highly credentialed and experienced psychologist who retired in 1997 from the USA’s largest intelligence agency when he was that agency’s Chief Research Psychologist. In general, a good deal of validation (and cross-validation) research has shown that the PSSPQ generally produces prediction accuracy of about 95+%. Costs for being administered the PSSPQ and receiving a large amount of resulting interpretive information are modest. More information regarding the PSSPQ can be found at:
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lastone2/psspq.html