RALEIGH -- It will likely be three months before Annie Judd finds out whether she got the job she applied for Friday - and the competition is intense. So far, more than 2,400 people have applied for 1,500 openings.
The position: door-to-door census taker in Durham. Pay: $16.25 an hour. Length of employment: two months. Medical benefits: none. Employer: U.S. Census Bureau.
The story is similar at 15 Census Bureau offices throughout the state as they gear up for the 2010 Census. The Raleigh office, for example, has received more than 2,800 applications for about 1,600 openings, said Bill Baiocchi, the office manager. Both the Raleigh and Durham offices expect more than 7,000 people to apply in the coming months.
The Census Bureau will begin a $300 million marketing campaign in January to explain the decennial census to the public and launch a mass recruiting campaign. The census numbers tallied street by street will be used to determine the amount of federal grants to the states and to apportion the number of seats in Congress for each state.
In this state, the bureau expects to fill 24,000 openings. Most of the jobs will be for the "enumerator" position that Judd is seeking. They will make up the army of field workers who knock on doors to collect data from people who did not mail in their census questionnaires.
The job would be a financial lifeline Judd, a 47-year-old mother of three who two years ago lost her last job, cleaning cages and feeding animals in a Duke University research lab.
"It's something," Judd said. "This will be paying up to what I was making before."
Traditionally, the temporary census jobs have drawn from the ranks of retirees, students, housewives and others who don't want a long-term commitment. Recent applicants have included Ph.D.s, lawyers and other white-collar workers at loose ends in the nation's worst economic downturn in decades.
Baiocchi, the Raleigh office manager, is a retired MBA and former chief executive officer of a 356-bed hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. Yvonne Sanks, who manages the Durham census office, has an MBA and worked 23 years for Nortel Networks before leaving in January.
"I've had people cry on the phone when we tell them to come test," said Glenda Small, the assistant manager for quality assurance at the Durham office. "They are overwhelmed with the possibility of having a job, even for a short period of time."
It will be months before the new hires receive pay. The first hires will start in March, with a week of paid training, before they hit the streets. Local census offices will hire into May to maintain a surplus of available people to tap, with a goal of lining up five eligible candidates for each opening. Many who qualify will never get to report for work.
"Because people keep dropping out for whatever reason, we have to keep recruiting," Sanks said."So we have to have this huge pool available."
Farms, condos, cabins
The enumerators will fan out across the state, visiting suburban split-levels, urban condos, remote farms and mountain cabins. Given the reality that some people are hostile to unannounced visitors from the federal government, the census workers will be trained to call for help to deal with uncooperative citizens.
Some will be trained to collect data at homeless shelters, rehab centers, prisons and other temporary facilities.
"We want to hire people who live in the community and feel comfortable enumerating in their neighborhoods," said Small of the Durham office. "It's like a big community service project."
Small, who has an MBA, took time out of her job teaching business classes at N.C. Central University and working as a business consultant. Her managerial position with the U.S. government will last about one year.
Small's colleague, Lawrence Alston, is an assistant manager for field operations in Durham. Alston, who's also a pastor at the Tabernacle of Witness and Worship in Henderson, has 20 years of management experience in manufacturing and was laid off four months ago.
The number of census workers who are ultimately hired in North Carolina will depend on the response rate to the questionnaires. In the last Census, about 36 percent of the households in North Carolina did not return the forms and required follow-ups.
Census jobs have been hot for at least a year. The agency last year hired about 5,000 "canvassers" in North Carolina to compile a list of addresses where the questionnaires will be mailed. Nearly 41,000 people applied for those jobs.
One was Steve Foreman, 62, who's back again in another temporary census gig: assistant manager for recruiting in Durham, which pays $20.50 an hour. He has an MBA in health care administration and used to run a health care staffing agency. He's currently a real estate broker.
"I look at this as an opportunity to serve my country one last time," he said. "Making sure everyone gets counted is a civic responsibility."
