The head of Australia's foreign intelligence agency has used a rare public appearance to shed light on the types of people it recruits as spies.

And it's more likely to be a retired business executive, dissatisfied lawyer or tradesman than the James Bond you might expect.

In his wide-ranging first public interview on the Australia in the World podcast, Paul Symon, the director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) shed some light on an organisation that, by necessity, operates outside the scope of the wider public.

So what does ASIS look for in a spy?

Mr Symon said the organisation's recruitment strategy is "wider and broader than you might think".

The interview was Paul Symon's first time speaking publicly since taking the job. ( Supplied: ASIS )

"The mantra for us is you should never be able to look at someone and say 'I reckon they're an ASIS officer', as the most unlikely people in the crowd quite possibly are ASIS officers," he said.

And that means drawing people from a wide range of backgrounds and age groups.

"A number of our officers have run businesses, they've made a lot of money in business and then they've got to a point in their life where they go, 'Well I actually want to do more than just make money, I know how to do that, tick. I actually want to do something really interesting for the nation'," he said.

And ASIS does not just recruit people out of universities.

"We have a grad program, that's true, but it's quite a small component. We have technologists, data scientists, data engineers, we have sparkies, we have chippies, locksmiths — that's hardly surprising," he said.

"Lots of lawyers, people who have attained brilliant results, found themselves in a brilliant law practice and then they look ahead at life's journey and then they go 'actually, that's not what I want to do'."

They also looked for those who did not need to talk about their workplace achievements.

"The ones that you went through school with who achieved but who never beat their chest about it, there was a certain self-contentment about what they'd achieved," Mr Symon said.

What does ASIS do?

The typical Australian spy might not be the James Bond we have come to expect. ( file photo )

While there are many descriptions of the organisation, Mr Symon said it basically boiled down to "foreign espionage".

He said the five general responsibilities of ASIS were: helping Australians who had been kidnapped overseas, liaising with global intelligence groups, diplomacy on sensitive issues, helping Australia's regional partners improve their intelligence services, and carrying out specific policies for the government (for example: disrupting people-smuggling businesses).

Mr Symon said there were "skill sets and training" required to carry out helping kidnap victims but a lot of the job involved acquiring information about the intent of foreign governments.

"We very much look to build relationships with … well-placed individuals who can help us understand what the thinking is behind closed doors," he said.

While the organisation is not often able to celebrate its successes publicly, Mr Symon said the actions of ASIS officers after the downing of MH17 over Ukraine, in which 38 Australians were killed, was a point of pride in difficult and dangerous circumstances.

"In the public domain, countries are still arguing about who did what and what happened," he said.

"Organisations like the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the secret intelligence service, the moment something like that happens, it swings immediately into gear and organisations go onto very much a 24/7 footing.

"We, like all Australians with an incidence like that, feel it very deeply and take very seriously our responsibilities to try and inform the government of exactly what has gone on."

Intelligence officers sprang into action after 38 Australians were killed in the downing of MH17. ( Reuters: Maxim Zmeyev )

Why is the spy chief speaking up now?

Public utterances by the head of the nation's intelligence organisations are incredibly rare.

Nick Warner, Mr Symon's predecessor at ASIS, became the first director-general of the organisation to speak in public in 60 years with an address in 2012, and he also gave an interview after leaving the agency about the biggest security threats facing Australia.

Despite not having spoken publicly, a public Twitter profile revealed Mr Symon's interests in poetry, the music of Adele and Carlton Football Club.

"We're not a publicity-hungry organisation, I think you would appreciate that, in fact quite the opposite, but no media and no profile presents its own problems," he said.

The spy chief said it was sometimes necessary to come out of the shadows to discuss its work so the public could have faith it was acting in line with Australian democratic values and laws.

"I think one of the reasons agencies should take the opportunity once in a while to talk to the public about values, about legality, about propriety, about internal culture is it does give the public some sense of the type of people we are and the type of organisations we run," he said.