Census Bureau to hire 10,000 in area in late February

By Leon Stafford

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The U.S. Census Bureau could bring a welcome 10,000 new temporary jobs to metro Atlanta and parts of North Georgia in late February as it gets ready to county everyone in America.

Between 1,000 and 1,200 people will be hired to fill positions in new bureau offices in Alpharetta, Duluth, Atlanta North, Decatur, Douglasville, Stockbridge, Athens and Dalton in the coming month, said Ed Davis, a coordinator for the bureau's Atlanta region, which oversees operations in Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Those jobs include managers, field supervisors and enumerators and will be added to the temporary positions in already established bureau locations in Atlanta South, Marietta and Gainesville. Pay will average about $18.75 an hour for the jobs that will last about 12 weeks.

Potential employees must be U.S. citizens with no felony record.

Law enforcement personnel are barred to prevent sharing information, which is prohibited in the confidential count.

"We'll start hiring in mid- to late-February," Davis said. "We're recruiting now to get people into testing. It's a very general test to make sure people can read and write and follow instructions, those kinds of things."

"Each office will have about 50 full-time people throughout the campaign," he said. The rest are part-time.

The bureau will mail the 10-question census form to every residence in the country in March. The eventual count will be used when distributing $400 billion in federal dollars and specifying congressional representation.

The temporary jobs to perform the count in metro Atlanta and North Georgia come at a time when the state's unemployment has reached 10.2 percent, just above the national average of 10 percent. While the work has been done in the past by stay-at-home parents, students and seniors, the positions could be more competitive this decade.

"Obviously the economy is going to make more people available to us," Davis said.

Dottie Callina, a spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau of metro Atlanta, Athens and northeast Georgia, said the census jobs will offer a respite for the jobless.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for people who are struggling during this very difficult economy to get a little extra financial help with the part-time census job,"  Callina said. "It’s a job that will allow people to work in their own neighborhoods. People need to be aware that this will be a weekend and evening hours job, so consumers need to be flexible.”

One of the greatest needs will be for workers with different language backgrounds, including Spanish, Mandarin, French, Vietnamese, Swahili and Japanese.

"It is important for the census to recruit people that are bilingual, who speak Spanish specifically," said Jerry Gonzalez, chairman of the Georgia Latino Complete Count Committee and executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials. "It is critically important for the census workers to reflect the diversity, particularly in the communities that they will be representing and canvassing."

But the chairwoman of metro Atlanta's Vietnamese Complete Count Committee said the employment test may be a barrier.

Dang Kim Hanh, who has been stressing the importance of the census on Tieng Nuoc Toi radio, a station dedicated to the Vietnamese community,

said she and others in the Asian community have taken the test and found it more complicated than necessary, including lots of memorization, intricate scenarios to process and excessive multiple choice.

"If they take the test, it can be too hard for people whose first language is not English," she said. "I talked to several Vietnamese and they took the test and they had the same experience. To foreigners it can be tough."

Census jobs

For information: 866-861-2010, http://2010.census.gov/2010censusjobs/

Job-seekers will be given an employment test. Sample questions, like the ones below, can be found at  http://2010.census.gov/2010censusjobs/documents/Practice_Test.pdf

Sample employment questions:

1. In the set of numbers below, choose the number that does not follow the pattern.

... 40, 140, 239, 340 ...

a) 40

b) 140

c) 239

d) 340

The correct answer is C: 239.

2. Group Quarters: Any living quarters occupied by
10 or more unrelated persons is called a group
quarters. Examples of a group quarters are worker's
dormitories, boarding houses, halfway houses,
convents, etc. In addition, college dormitories,
fraternity houses, or nurse’s dormitories are always
considered to be a group quarters, regardless of the
number of students who live there.
Which of the following is a group quarters?
(This section is designed to test how well you read. The items test your vocabulary, comprehension, and ability
to apply what you read.)
a) A college dormitory in which six students live
b) A house in which a family of six and three
boarders live
c) A convent occupied by five nuns
d) A medical office building with eleven
doctors’ offices

The correct answer is: A