Peter Sursi

Peter Sursi joined the FBI in 1997 as a Japanese Language Analyst at the Washington Field Office, after several years of teaching English and Japanese in middle schools in Fairfax County, VA and in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. During his time as a linguist, he worked multiple economic espionage and white-collar crime investigations, as well as becoming a Speaking Proficiency Tester in English and Translation Test Rater. In 2002, he became a linguist supervisor and in 2004, he moved to the FBI headquarters to serve as a Program Manager, and later a Senior Manager over translation and deployment operations in the National Foreign Language Program, covering Slavic, Indian sub-continent, African and non-Romance European Languages.  

In 2009, he moved to lead national recruiting and hiring for the foreign language program, where he managed the national HR functions for 1,400 foreign language program personnel, including recruitment, applicant processing and hiring, professional development and promotions. He overhauled the recruiting process and selection system based on strategic language needs, established a quarterly strategic review board with other HR business partners to prioritize fill strategy for limited billets, and developed and implemented national promotion and the FBI’s first-ever foreign language incentive pay policies.  

After a short stint as the Special Assistant to the incoming Assistant Director of Human Resources in 2016, he became the FBI’s Head of Talent Acquisition, charged with overseeing all talent acquisition efforts for the FBI’s 37,000 employees. He developed the first ever annual recruiting strategy for the FBI, executed across all 56 FBI Field Offices, and together with his colleagues in workforce analytics, instituted a hiring strategy based for the first-time ever on nine-month forward-looking attrition models. A major task was to overhaul the Special Agent selection and hiring process to increase the overall number, as well as the diversity of applicants. Under his efforts, applications rose from 12,000 to 27,000 per year, minority agent applications went from 36% to 45%, and female applications increased from 19% to 37% (most ever). He managed enterprise-wide university, diversity and technical recruiting and sourcing programs; integrated DEI working groups into hiring programs, included bias training into hiring manager/interviewer training; developed targeted marketing campaigns for Native Americans, female special agent candidates, and STEM positions, among others. He also hired the first ever full-time Disability Programs Recruitment Manager. He also created a training on supervising a distributed workforce for managers moving their teams to the new FBI campus on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL. 

In 2021, he was asked to move to the FBI’s Finance and Facilities Division to oversee accounts payable and finance modernization efforts. In this role, he oversees the six regional finance hubs, commercial payments, travel and transfer payment processing, as well as relocation services.  

Sursi holds a a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the College of William and Mary and a M.B.A. from George Mason University. In 2021, he received his qualification as a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), an industry-wide professional certification. He is very active in the larger HR community and often speaks on talent acquisition strategies, change management, the emotionality of change, creating digital teams, and hybrid work environments. You can find him most easily on LinkedIn.