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At the May 23, 2012 recruitDC, the closing keynote presentation focused on military hiring. The basic premise being that each recruiter can take an active role in hiring veterans for their company’s by making a time investment in establishing and maintaining key relationships with the military community.

On the panel were three recruiters who come from different perspectives to military hiring: one a veteran, one from a large company who stood up a full program and one from a small company who did all the aspects of the program herself.

Here are the full interviews of each of the panel members.

Chrissa Dockendorf

Talent Specialist, ICS, inc.

Chrissa’s LinkedIn Profile

Key Points:

• Being committed to the program – understanding what it is like in their shoes, and how to leverage their skills

• Leveraging Free Resources • Personal connection and commitment to the veteran community

How did you train yourself on helping veterans?

Chrissa felt she needed to familiarize her with what transition was like for the military personnel. She took the time, and recommends that others do so as well, to truly understand what the transition is like for military personnel. What they do and what they need from you, not what you need from them.

She knew she needed to learn military speak, so she took a took a veteran’s resume to internal colleagues and asked them to walk her through the steps of what the resume meant and what it took the veteran to get there. The veterans within her company were able to provide a foundation to what military speak was and the transition for many veterans, but most had transitioned out 10 years prior and she needed to get a more up to date ground intel so she contacted and got to know many of the TAP managers in the area.

She also looked at key big positions that she knew that she would be recruiting for and went to one of the many military skills translators and vetted out what these jobs were all about. She also took the military jobs and converted them into civilian jobs to better familiarize herself with the job descriptions and skill sets. She wanted to take this a step farther and enrolled in the Wounded Warrior Mentor Program at Fort Meade. Her mentor is a Jim Dittbrenner.

How do you maintain your veteran talent pipeline?

Chrissa uses a lot of free resources to maintain her veteran talent pipeline such as LinkedIn groups. In the LinkedIn groups does a lot more than just post her jobs. She asks questions in the groups of the veterans such as what are their needs during transition and providing answers about job search. She also finds and connects with people who are doing military hiring, and learning from them. By developing key connections, other people committed to veteran hiring will help you with referrals and sharing your postings.

Chrissa does participate in the TAP programs, but like many feel that the system is broken You need to build the relationships with the TAP managers and ask them what they need. Chrissa has made sure that she has met with many of the TAP managers and ask how you can help them.

There are also many free veteran hiring events from organizations around the country as well as hiring events for Military Spouses. For many of these events you have to exchange resume review or career coaching for being part of the event. Others are just free events. Some groups are MOAA, Corporate Gray. The key to these events is providing face to face connection with the veterans so that you can help them and it also supports your talent pipeline as they will remember you and your company.

Chrissa set up a Skype account when faced with sourcing and recruiting veterans for an overseas assignment. She now keeps the account to allow her to chat with veterans who are overseas but have questions for her.

Chrissa knows that she needs to keep the face to face as part of her talent acquisition as she competes with many of the larger companies and they are known to the veterans. By having the personal touch, they remember her and her company and that she helped her. This is how she can stay competitive and maintains her talent pipeline. This is also part of her employer branding because many of the folks she has helped bring her referrals. Word of mouth is very valuable in the veteran community.

Onboarding

Chrissa firmly believes in onboarding or some kind of mentoring program but her company didn’t this, so she did much of it herself. In addition she became the veteran and military advocate within the company by doing care packages from her company and asked veterans if they wanted to pitch in as well as sending thank you notes to the veterans on Veterans Day.

Mike Bruni

Staffing Manager ( Capture Staffing, Sourcing & Veteran Outreach) ISR

SAIC

Mike Bruni’s LinkedIn Profile

Keypoints:

• Making the “time” or commitment to hire veterans • Building a network of organizations you work with • Onboarding and mentoring

What is the time to hire?

In the defense contract community, the time to hire is typically 30- 90 days but the networking should start earlier. Some of the candidates are ready to be in the talent pipeline right away at their separation but others need work on the resume etc.

Do you have to do education upstream?

Yes there is a lot of education that needs to be done upstream to upper management on the value of hiring a veteran, or to the hiring managers who are not familiar with interviewing a veteran. The main point of the education is to understand that this is a very valuable pipeline of talent that once we invest in it, it will provide us with high quality candidates.

What are the military skills translators that you use?

For the defense contract community this is an easy translation because we hire for so many of the same jobs that the military personnel are currently doing. In the commercial world, the translation of skills goes to the more intrinsic skills such as leadership, management, program management, getting the job done.

It is part of the recruiter’s jobs to educate the military candidates on how to translate their resume to the position that they are hiring for; this is part of being proactive. There are online tools available at VA or DOL.

What is the most effective way you have found to recruit veterans? It is from Military Networking and this takes time, but I don’t want to hear that you don’t have time. As recruiters you need to step away and look at the big pictures. This is a commitment and investment that will reap rewards in your qualified talent pipeline. Be proactive to be successful.

How do you find veterans for your talent pipeline?

Mike is proactive in getting into the pipeline that works for him – TAP, job fairs, events.

Why Stand Up a Military Hiring Program? (Why did SAIC do it?)

There was a need for one external message, one coordination of events, and campaigns with the external facing, one conduit with the military community and this is still a program in process. It is also important to look at partnering with your competitors and organizations to get the word out and to remember that this is about the veterans.

Do you have to do onboarding?

You can have a mentor or buddy program and you should always ask the candidate if they would like this. Your program should connect with a vet inside the company and if you don’t have this, it should be the recruiter. If you are standing up a wounded warrior program be sure that there is the commitment of both your HR and management to handle the extras like loud noises, scheduling for therapy, affects of medications.

Brenden Wright

Director of Information Technology Recruiting, Laureate International

Brenden Wright’s LinkedIn Profile

Keypoints:

• Company commitment to military hiring • Understanding the value of the military veteran in terms of maturity, leadership, management

capabilities rather than the comparison to college educated civilians • Onboarding

Company Commitment to Military Hiring

There needs to be a commitment by the company from the top down that hiring military personnel is going to add value to the company. The company needs to embrace people with military experience and that they have value beyond just their skill set that they bring. Veterans bring experience, dedication, loyalty and these are not going to translate on a resume per se.

Many recruiters and human resource managers are ignorant of what military personnel are capable of doing. Many military personnel are dismissed because they don’t’ have a college education and yet much of the skills that they bring make them far more experienced than those with a college education. Most 24 year olds coming out of college don’t have the same leadership and management skills as someone the same age coming out of the military. The years of experience for those in the military don’t translate well to the civilian world when you realize that they average military work week is 80 hours rather than 40. When Brenden was 18 he was responsible for 3 guys; not just the work load but their whole life. Many managers do not understand the type of work commitment and responsibility that military personnel are accustomed to. For a veteran, it is not about the money but to be part of something, a community that values them and that they can return this value.

Many organizations do not have the bandwidth to handle a military hiring program because they don’t have the commitment from senior management or the willingness to invest in training and mentoring. This has to start with the recruiter believing in the process and advocate why are you not hiring the veteran.

Translating Resumes to the Civilian World

Whose responsibility is it to translate the resume? Recruiter? Candidate? It is actually both. To bridge the gap both the recruiters and the candidate need to be able to understand the skills and how they apply to both worlds. For the recruiter this means using the wide variety of resources out there. Most recruiters and hiring managers are not veterans so they don’t know that most of what a military resume means. Most won’t take the time to educate themselves and to translate what these skills will mean in

the commercial world. The recruiter needs to meet the military candidate half way. The organization needs to embrace the entire concept of military hiring not just the recruiter.

As it is a responsibility to educate the internal staff and the hiring managers on the value the veteran brings to the company’s positions. Be the advocate and articulate how the skills the veteran brings can apply to the position because many times the hiring manager does not know what they are looking at.

Onboarding

Brenden’s own experience of a very bad onboarding experience drives home for him that onboarding and continuous mentoring is very important to the success of a military hiring program. A company should at least match an incoming veteran up with another veteran in the company or at least someone to ask questions during the first year of employment. The military provides this for the veteran, so should the commercial community. This is important not only for understanding the new work responsibilities but also the culture as the veteran is very institutionalized in the military community and the nuances of social interaction within your company needed to be explained.

Every company deals with retention risks. If you embark on a military hiring program, you need to make sure you at least have a buddy system, if you can’t do that, then you the recruiter has a responsibility to check in with your candidate in their new position; to not expect challenges in naïve.

How do you find military talent?

Brenden’s company has used services that provide military hiring events for key positions and when they attend these they make sure it is not the human resources people attending but those that actually do the job that they are recruiting for. This provides a real connection for the military candidate.

There are many LinkedIn groups for the different branches of the military as well as key skills set areas. There are many LinkedIn groups that are set up by service members’ themselves. Also be part of the TAP programs and opportunities to speak to military personnel because your average enlisted or E4 Marine is not going to be on LinkedIn.

Identifying internal veterans who can be referrals and sources so that you can leverage your referral programs and working with the veterans that are inside your own company.

Once you get the momentum going, take your military veterans to the job fairs, not the recruiting teams.