The 2020 Census Field Infrastructure operation (FLDI) provided the administrative infrastructure for data collection operations covering the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Administrative infrastructure included but was not limited to the following: recruiting; training; hiring and onboarding; personnel and payroll administration; management and supervision; clerical support; investigative support/background checks; and staff modeling and analysis.
This operational assessment report documents FLDI’s recruiting, onboarding, and training programs for the 2020 Census. FLDI has created a companion operational assessment report for Field Office Administration and Payroll.
For the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau accepted 3,086,000 applications, forming a significant talent pool to support 2020 Census operations. The Census Bureau fingerprinted, hired, trained, and onboarded temporary census workers from that pool to fill open positions for the 2020 Census. As in previous censuses, one person could fill multiple positions over time. The Census Bureau hired people who worked in their own neighborhoods and communities, with the ability to work flexible hours each day to reach residents when they were at home. They had to be geographically distributed across all areas where people live or could live.
The census recruiting website was established to attract potential applicants and to host the online job application and assessment. A new online job application and applicant assessment was implemented for the 2020 Census (the job application process was completely paper-based for the 2010 Census). The Census Bureau leveraged established partnerships with many local community-based organizations and used free and paid media to promote jobs. A technical help desk for job applicants assisted online applicants, and a toll-free jobs line routed callers either to the technical help desk or to the area census office that covered the area where the applicant lived to answer recruiting questions.
The Census Bureau hired upwards of 523,260 employees to complete the 2020 Census. This included temporary personnel (recruiting assistants, census field supervisors, clerks, office operations supervisors, listers/enumerators, enumerator trainees) brought onboard to support the 2020 Census.
The Census Bureau used a combination of computer-based and classroom training to prepare those hired to support the 2020 Census. Additional computer-based training, job aids, and DVDs were available to managers throughout the 2020 Census.
The results of this operational assessment found that management training, field office procedures, and training manuals enabled the field office administration to effectively hire and manage the temporary workforce, which ensured that the 2020 Census operational requirements were met. The recruiting, onboarding, and training programs were implemented in accordance with program directives and timelines.
Some recommendations from this operational assessment report for the 2030 Census recruiting, onboarding, and training activities are as follows: create an all-inclusive recruiting, selecting, fingerprinting, hiring, and payroll/personnel system; consolidate hiring and pay solutions; and provide Census Investigative Services with staffing and resources earlier in the decade to improve the background check processing time and to reduce the possibility of backlogs.