The Census Bureau suddenly is finding itself with the most highly skilled, highly educated work force in its 220-year history —in part because a struggling economy has produced millions of jobless people eager to work.

The bureau already has recruited engineers, former corporate vice presidents, college professors and radio disc jockeys to help manage the 2010 census, which will attempt to count everyone in the country beginning in March.

"The horrible recession has benefited us in an indirect way — our applicant pool contains a set of people with experience and background and training that is unprecedentedly rich," said Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau.

"If you visit our local census offices that are being staffed right now, you'll see people with skills and teamwork experience that we will benefit from, the country will benefit from in the decennial census. So the high unemployment rate has helped us."

Take Eleanor Hicks, who's helping the Census Bureau count immigrant communities.

Hicks, 66, of North Avondale, Ohio, has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She speaks French, Arabic, Thai, Spanish, Italian and German.

In her career at the State Department, she was tapped at age 29 to run the American consulate in Nice, France — gaining diplomatic celebrity as she dined with Princess Grace of Monaco and had a side career as a recording artist.

She's a former University of Cincinnati political science professor, and the scholarship that goes to the top female graduate student in arts and sciences bears her name. She ran the Cincinnati office of the Federal Reserve Bank, chaired the region's transit authority and now owns an international multicultural consulting business whose clients have included Procter & Gamble and Delphi Automotive.

Now, she's working as a partnership associate for the U.S. Census Bureau — a temporary, part-time job in which she gets paid by the hour to work with minority groups, immigrant communities and neighborhood leaders to educate them on the importance of the 2010 census.

Is she overqualified?

"I don't think of it in those terms," she said. "If I was looking for a career, that's a separate thing. But it's a temporary job. It serves a civic duty."

The economy, she said, was just one factor.

"It was primarily the flexibility. It was an additional source of income without having to make a choice with my primary source of income," she said.

Advanced degrees

Hicks is not typical, but she does represent what census officials say is a clear trend: More applicants, especially for the office jobs, have advanced degrees, a corporate background and a history of accomplished careers in the private sector.

But hiring overqualified people has its drawbacks, too. Highly skilled applicants for temporary census jobs are more likely to leave if a permanent job comes along.

Still, the turnover so far has been less than the Census Bureau anticipated.

Todd J. Zinser, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Commerce, reported last month that the Census Bureau had an $88 million cost overrun last year in its address canvassing operation — an overrun partly explained, he said, by a lower-than-anticipated employee turnover rate. The Census Bureau expected workers to leave for better jobs — but they didn't.

"We saw things we never saw before," said Wendy Button, the chief of decennial recruiting for the Census Bureau. "The acceptance rate of positions was much higher. The people who showed up for training — that number was way higher than expected."

"We've never had to recruit — or entered into a census — where we've had the record high unemployment rates like we have now," she said.

Younger, jobless

In decades past, the enumerators — field workers whose main job is to follow up with households that haven't mailed back their forms — tended to be older. Many were retired or worked part time and took a census job to supplement their income.

Now, they're more likely to be younger and jobless, increasingly common as the local unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent. Local census officials say they're also seeing stay-at-home moms returning to the workforce, retirees looking to replenish their decimated savings, and college students who need money for rising tuition.

After four days of paid training, they'll work mostly afternoons, evenings and weekends — because that's when people are most likely to be home. Pay depends on the local market, ranging from a starting wage of $12.25 an hour in southeastern Indiana to $16 in Cincinnati.

The qualifications for that job are minimal: Enumerators must have a valid driver's license, have a clean criminal record (generally, no felonies), and pass a 26-question basic skills test demonstrating an ability to read a map and follow procedures.

After that, the most important factor in getting a census job is where you live.

The Census Bureau's philosophy is this: people are more likely to answer questions from someone who lives in their neighborhood. So field workers are assigned to work in the same community — and often the same census tract — where they live.