Open sesame: ASIO’s largest tech spy recruitment drive in years

‘We won’t give you a licence to kill, but we can give you a licence to do things with a keyboard you can’t do legally anywhere else.’

ASIO has opened its largest tech recruitment round in several years as it looks to nab talent amid the labour shortage.

“We won’t give you a licence to kill, but we can give you a licence to do things with a keyboard you can’t do legally anywhere else.”

That’s the pitch of the director-general of Australia’s largest intelligence agency to candidates as it opens its biggest recruitment round in several years.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is again on the hunt for new spies with tech skills, moving beyond the grad program it announced earlier this year.

ASIO is looking for technical specialists who will work across the fields of cloud engineering, cyber security, IT governance and architecture, software engineering, development and operations, infrastructure engineering in network and systems administration and data and analytics.

As for the kind of projects the new recruits will work on, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said he couldn’t go into detail.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess. Picture: Sean Davey

An ASIO-supplied illustration of Mr Burges.

“Staying one step ahead of Australia’s adversaries means protecting our capabilities, so I can’t go into specifics. However, I can say that my tech teams are required to do things spies and terrorists think are impossible,” Mr Burgess said.

He said ASIO had ditched the once secretive methods it used to hire staff. When he himself first got involved in the intelligence world, it was via an unnamed job advertised in a local newspaper.

“I rang the number for more information. They answered with ‘hello’, I said ‘hello’, and the response was ‘hello…’. The position was with the Defence Signals Directorate, and it was my entry into the secretive world of intelligence,” he said.

But those methods no longer work. “Today we’re more overt because, to be successful in our mission, we need diversity of thought and diversity of experience,” Mr Burgess said.

The open methods of recruitment arrive as tech talent has been hard to come by in Australia, with a major shortage driving up both the salaries and the domestic spend on recruitment firms over the past 12 months.

On jobs platform Indeed, there were 83 open roles at ASIO which included positions in all the east cost capital cities as well as Hobart, Perth and Darwin. The organisation was hiring workers of all levels, with the roles paying salaries between $81,990 and $141,223, according to its website.

Those salaries are still well below what the tech industry is paying to junior talent amid the current shortage. But Mr Burgess is confident that ASIO’s training and development was still an attractive offer for many.

“Our techs do things they cannot do anywhere else, and they protect Australia while they’re doing it,” he said.

“A job at ASIO means a secure future in more ways than one – secure for Australia and secure for our officers.”

ASIO has ramped up its social media presence this year in a bid to attract potential talent.

During its March intake of graduates, the organisation took to Facebook to advertise and sponsor posts into the feeds of potential candidates. This time it has jumped on Twitter, with Mr Burgess also retweeting a call for applicants on the platform.

#ASIO’s technical capabilities are at the core of our mission to secure Australia. If you’re an expert in #CloudEngineering, #CyberSecurity, #DataScience or #SoftwareEngineering, help us do things our adversaries think are impossible. #JoinTheMission at https://t.co/3nJMoaWPdnpic.twitter.com/Te6MQdBwGj

— ASIO (@ASIOGovAu) July 13, 2023

The organisation has developed a media series called Why I Spy, with working spies talking about how they got started under an alias.

One technical specialist under the alias Rosa said she got her start at ASIO straight out of university 18 years ago after completing a computer science degree.

“I think what would shock most people is we have such a range of specialist skills. We have electronic engineers and mathematics experts. We have people who can support our computer access operations, with a range of digital forensic skills all the way through to software engineering and software development and network engineering,” she said.

“We have breadth and scope within the ASIO environment to try new things and push the boundaries – within the parameters of the law and under stringent oversight. But it can almost be that the world is your oyster from a technology standpoint, which is what I think is so appealing about working at ASIO.”