The Secret to Creating a Successful Veteran Recruiting Strategy

Learn more about best practices in recruiting veteran and military job seekers by joining a Talent Circles sponsored webinar on 2/13/14 at 9:00 PM PST. Click here to register & learn more. 

By Jessica Miller-Merrell  

In doing research for our upcoming webinar on Veteran and Diversity hiring for my site Blogging4Jobs.com in combination with TalentCircles, I’ve done a great deal of research, analyzing and my own personal reflection on how we can hire military veterans more effectively while also helping our exiting military who are entering the job search today. You’ll learn more by registering for the full webinar on February 13, 2014 at 12 AM EST by clicking here.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution, which is what we (recruiters and business leaders) often gravitate towards. This is the foundational challenge with developing a military recruiting strategy. Each individual service member’s experience, training, skills and attitude are different and unique. You can’t lump every service branch or job title into the same category.  Their transitions from military to civilian are all very different. Some do very well in the job search in transitioning from military to civilian life as shown in Marylene’s interview with 24 Hour Fitness CEO, Lance Sapera.

Your recruiting team must include former military.  

As a former military wife, I understand in a small way what it is like for those that are leaving the military and transitioning to the civilian world. He lived it. I watched him struggle and through it all did my best to help. He found work, but he wasn’t fulfilled and encountered many personal struggles including depression, alcoholism and finding his identity outside of the military.

Aside from having personal and relatable stories, having a recruiter who is former military on your team provides you with a constant compass to help your organization moving in the right direction. This individual speaks the language of the military and has his/her own personal experience to draw from. This is extremely powerful on a personal level while providing your team a subject matter expert 24/7.

You must recruit military differently.

The fancy tools and gadgets for recruiting military like the MOS skills translator, they are not enough in effectively recruiting former military.  Without a separate military recruiting program or an organizational focus on these efforts, it is not enough. Military members are extremely networked with one another, and organizations must create a veteran recruiting program where your recruiters talk, teach and engage veterans individually. This means phone calls, job fairs and talking at military events every chance your organization in combination with building a military focused talent network.

You must focus on measuring your success of your military recruiting.

For military and diversity recruiting efforts to be successful, they must be focused on metrics and analytics from the beginning. This means measuring turnover numbers of those that are military and non-military, time in position, and even their performance reviews. We have to look beyond recruiting metrics like cost of hire and go deeper to really understand how a focused recruiting campaign and strategy truly impacts the overall organization.

In my experience, our former military are some of the most loyal employees. It’s one thing for me to just say this. It’s another when I have the metrics and numbers to back up my gut feelings.

HR and recruiting technologies TalentCircles provide a way to continue to engage the job seeker community online especially when you have spent so much time, money and effort working to reach them in real life. The experience within the talent network is customized for your veteran job seekers, STEM candidates, diversity recruiting or other focused recruitment activities that you choose.

You must get creative.

A simple job board advertisement and a couple of press releases while attending a military job fair is not enough to effectively recruit military veterans to your company. The strategies you employ are unique to your organization. You must be focused on the long term. Maybe you find a military internship or training program is best for both your job seekers and your organization allowing them to learn about the civilian working world while both parties take a test drive.

Called “Returnships” companies like Goldman Sacs are offering 8-week career transition programs for exiting military. Programs like this are one of the best ways to successfully recruit while also helping transitioning military. Bottom line is that you have to get creative.

Building a successful recruiting strategy to engage and attract our former military takes research, planning and a lot of effort. It’s evolving and ongoing, but the most important thing is that you take the time to understand your military job seekers so that you can provide resources and conversations that help them through their transition with the goal of filling your organization with the best talent you can find.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a leading voice in HR and workplace technology. She’s an author and founder of  Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.

Photo Credit. 

How to Add Instant ROI to Your Veteran Hiring with VOTC

Learn more about best practices in recruiting veteran and military job seekers by joining a Talent Circles sponsored webinar on 2/13/14 at 9:00 PM PST. Click here to register & learn more.

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Aside from the obvious benefits of hiring military veterans at organizations, companies often forget about a 2011 tax benefit program that encourages them to hire prior service members and military called VOTC. VOTC stands for Veterans Opportunity Tax Credit. Companies complete forms 8850 and 9061 as part of the WOTC or Work Opportunity Tax Credit program to receive tax benefits for veteran hiring.

Working in HR and recruiting, finding quantifiable and direct metrics or ROI can be challenging. This tax credit provides a monetary reward of up to $9,600 per hire for our veteran and military recruiting and hiring efforts that directly impacts our company’s bottom line.

This tax credit is common for companies to receive when they hire job seekers who have received government assistance. In 2012, Obama signed into law a different type of tax credit for Veterans and military what is referred to as the VOTC or the Veterans Opportunity Tax Credit. Also know as the Returning Heroes Tax Credit, it is designed to for companies to receive a tax credit of up to $5,600 per veteran. The Wounded Warriors Tax Credit is another piece of this program. Companies who hire disabled veterans can receive a maximum credit of $9,600 per veteran. These are all pieces of the American Jobs Act , which was signed into law November 21, 2011.

In 2013, the American Tax Payer Relief Act of 2012 was signed into law further extending programs like the Veterans Opportunity Tax Credit as part of WOTC until December 31, 2013.

Congress has yet passed legislation to extend the program into 2014. However, the Department of Labor is directing state workforce agencies as of January 2, 2014 to continue to process WOTC and VOTC applications until further notice is given. What that means for employers, is that we can still submit and receive the tax credit benefiting further from hiring veterans to our companies.

There is no time limit associated to when a veteran leaves their service under VOTC. And recently, qualified tax-exempt organizations can also receive the tax credit incentives. Additionally, there is no benefit to the tax credit. Whether you hire 1 veteran or 25,000, the tax credit program has no boundaries. Here are direct links to the two forms used as part of the tax credit program – Form 9061 and Form 8850v.

Often overlooked, the program and its tax credit apply to all veterans regardless of the year or time in service. If you are hiring any veterans who have been unemployed for four weeks or more, your company can receive the tax credit. The tax credit applies to every and all veteran regardless of if their time in service was 1965 or 2013.

And voila – instant ROI in the form of veteran hiring.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

Veterans Series: Veterans are social and connected: Conversation with Chris Norton

Learn more about best practices in recruiting veteran and military job seekers by joining a Talent Circles sponsored webinar on 2/13/14 at 9:00 PM PST. Click here to register & learn more. 

Conversation with  Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

It's customary to pay tribute to Veterans and thank them for their services. There is far more for civilians to learn, though, from recruiters hiring Veterans. Many of them lead the way in our industry because of their deep understanding of what "candidate experience," "candidate engagement," or "candidate interaction" actually mean — and this because Veterans are just like millennials: they are fundamentally hyper-social and hyper-connected. Here is a my conversation with Chris Norton, a Logistics officer in the Army Reserve (18^th year) with five years of actual duty time accrued since 9/11, formerly known as the AT&T's "Military Guy," who is now Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Defense Mobile Corporation.

A recent report shows that for service members after 9/11, entering the civilian workforce has been somewhat harder than for previous generations.

Chris Norton: That's not an untrue statement at all. It's a numbers game. Historically when you had a large standing military as a representative part of the population, odds were pretty good that you would run into somebody along the way in the hiring process who had also served. You didn't need to jump through the hoops you do now to describe your service. The 9/11 service members account for about one half of one percent of the population. In terms of a minority population, you can't get much smaller than that... So you've got a population out there that has a whole different language, an entirely different culture and has some hurdles when it comes to the transition as a result. So recognizing that factor and also recognizing that the last decade has stretched service members to the point where they have all these capabilities and skills and attributes, employers would be nuts not to want them! For example, AT&T had hired 3,600 veterans as of the end of October and they announced that their goal is 10,000 over the next five years.

So, how do you get Veterans?

Chris Norton: If you are going to launch or grow your Veterans' program, you need to get somebody visible and make it personal and social. Service members do not understand transactional logic, but they understand interaction. The transactional nature of recruiting and staffing won't work, particularly so for the military, because we have a mentor and relationship driven environment. The Military is kind of a bubble society, very close-knit. We all look out for each other. It's our culture.

Chris Norton mentioned to me to a remarkable article written by Mike Stajura for Business Insider: What Vets Miss Most Is What Most Civilians Fear: A Regimented, Cohesive Network That Always Checks On You. In essence, what Veterans need is "a new mission, a new purpose, and a strong, supportive social network in which people [are] actually invested in one another’s well-being and success."

Chris Norton: So if you can inject into the process the ability to connect people on an interactive level even if it's not directly tied to the ATS side of the house, and allow people to develop some sort of relationship, that's a real good thing when it comes to recruiting veterans. When you come across as a robot or won't put your name down on it, then it gets discounted.

You go back to the Greeks and Romans about soldiering and the Military: the same stuff comes up. It's amazing. I am reading a book by Bill Mauldin who was a cartoonist during the WWII. Every other page my arm hair is raising up because something is resonating with me 70 years later: observations about service members interacting with each other.

Where we really made inroads at AT&T is that we had personalized the program. I was just using the office-hour component of TalentCircles because that's all I functionally needed. I would bring about 5 people and tell them what I do. "Dudes, loose the tie, loose the jacket. Just relax. We are going to talk here." I set the playing field. We are like a couple of Joes sitting around a beer. "Let's talk about you... What are the kinds of things you want to do.... What's your background... " And we have a honest talk ... I literally go first in first out and tell them "You can drop when you are done or you can hang out and listen to the other conversations."

And the result of engaging with candidates is committed employees....

Chris Norton: Veterans are great employees especially for the type of work that happens to be the growing part of AT&T's business. They are building the network out like gangbusters. They have entry point positions but people move pretty fast through the food chain. Veterans work independently, can learn new processes, new languages, new cultures, new systems — things that are all part of the basic training in the military. These are people who have already proven they can do it. Retention beyond two years for veterans is considerably higher — high enough to turn heads within any business.

Next post on hiring Veterans: An army recruiter changed my life forever: Conversation with Caleb Fullhart