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GREENSBORO — If you like people, then Uncle Sam wants you.

Local census offices are gearing up for the big day — April 1. That’s when the government will conduct the 2010 Census. The decennial head count is used to direct more than $400 billion in funding as well as representation at the state and federal levels of government.

But it takes a lot of people to count all the people.

The Greensboro census office, which covers Guilford, Alamance and Caswell counties, will hire 1,500 to 2,000 people, said Kim Loyd, assistant manager of recruiting.

“Basically, we just need to let everybody be aware that the census count is coming in 2010, to cooperate and to let them know why our people are out there,” Loyd said.

The 2010 Census will be a short-form questionnaire, asking only questions such as name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, relationship and housing tenure. It is expected to take less than 10 minutes to complete.

By law, individual information collected for the census is private. The aggregated data is used to funnel money to programs, to monitor the effectiveness of some programs and often is used by researchers for a variety of projects.

But some census forms won’t get turned in, so census employees will go out into the community to collect the information.

“We need people to live where they work because they know that area,” Loyd said about the census takers.

Some hiring has already taken place, but the big push will come early in the year, in February and March, Loyd said. Guilford will pay $13.50 an hour, plus 55 cents per mile, she said.

About that same time, census forms will be mailed to every home in the country. And from May to July, census takers will be sent door-to-door to collect information from anyone who did not fill out the form.

Anyone interested in the job of census taker — there are also posts for crew leaders and assistants who oversee the census takers — must pass a basic skills test and a background check, Loyd said.

Practice tests are online at www.2010censusjobs.gov.

The Greensboro office, which opened in October 2008, will stay open through the end of 2010, Loyd said. A new office just opened in Winston-Salem earlier this month and another in Asheboro last month.

The last census, in 2000, counted more than 281 million people. It’s estimated that nearly 3.4 million people were not counted.

North Carolina’s population tally likely missed about 110,980 people, costing millions in funding, according to the U.S. Census Monitoring Board.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com