The safe way to pass a password to the sqoop import command is to store the password in a file and then pass the file. In the user home directory, create a file with .password as the extension and store the password in this file. Change the permissions of this file as follows:
$ chmod 400 pass.password
And then you can pass the username and password as follows:
$ sqoop import --connect jdbc:mysql://<hostname>/employees \ --username <username> --password-file </home/<user>/pass.password>