The qualities that make great soldiers are the same ones prized by hiring managers across all industries: Punctuality. Reliability. Respect. Versatility. Dedication.

Military veterans comprise a rich talent pool for civilian employers, but the path from military service to jobs with civilian employers often has bumps and misconceptions. Employers don’t necessarily know where to find potential recruits, how to attract and retain them, or how to equate their military experience with civilian job demands. Veterans, for their part, sometimes don’t know where to look for opportunities, how to promote themselves, or how to explain the ways in which their skills can translate.

Those gaps were addressed in From Day One’s recent webinar, “American Military Veterans: Tapping a Rich Talent Pool,” with veterans themselves and other experts offering insights into how to train, recruit, encourage and develop workers from the armed forces.

Key for companies is to recognize that the worker shortages in many industries today aren’t because potential hires lack credentials or education, said Dave Harrison, executive director of national apprenticeships for Fastport, a software company that build products to help job seekers, particularly military-community members, find meaningful employment and apprenticeship training.

The challenge for many employers today, he said, is in “finding people–to be rather direct–who can show up on time, pass a drug screen, can work in a changing environment and stay focused, can work as part of a team, and can overcome obstacles. That’s the hardest thing to find in today’s modern era. Those soft skills [are] what every industry is wrestling over right now.”

Delaney Rea, driver services manager for Melton Truck Lines, whose apprenticeship program and recruitment has a particular focus on veterans, said that members of the military “fit very well into our culture,” especially because of “the pride they take in their work.”

“They have this culture of representing us well and being part of a larger team,” Rea said, adding: “We can find people with Class A [truck-driving] licenses. But if they don’t take that pride in their work, they’re actually being more than just not representing us well. They’re also being unsafe.” Veterans, in contrast, “are just the most outstanding employees that we’ve been able to have–and [they have] that understanding of hierarchy, as well."

Julie De La Mora, a regional recruiting director for Allied Universal, a security-services company with more than 250,000 employees, made similar observations, colored by her own military experience and firsthand perspective.

“We thrive on being proud and doing what we do best,” she said of veterans, adding: “We have the values that were instilled in us when we first joined the military, and also the sense of belonging and urgency and not leaving anyone else behind.”

All of those qualities resonate with businesses and other employers, participants said. “I would say every employer that I’ve worked with, they’ll of course cite veterans’ core values of discipline and accountability, understanding chain of command,” said Katie Adams, CEO of Apprenticeship Services Group. But the less straightforward aspect is getting veterans in the door in the first place.

“What we’re seeing now is that employers are really having to break away from traditional methods of recruiting, hiring, evaluating talent,” Adams said. “And so they’re really having to look more broadly at, what are the skills, credentials, certifications? What [do] those credentials and certifications mean? The employers that are going to succeed are the ones that do their homework to figure out what those military ratings equate to. If someone was in artillery in the army, don’t write them off. There’s a lot of logistical, technical work that they’ve done. And they have the capacity to turn around pretty quickly and do that in a different environment.”

Much of the onus lies on hiring managers to identify and gauge veterans’ capabilities as well as transferable skills, said Nick Curry, a veteran who heads military recruiting and apprenticeships at Amazon Web Services.

“Veterans have a certain determination and grit that we all look for in Corporate America,” Curry said. “But to drill down a little bit deeper, I think what separates veterans is that the core values that most of the veterans are exposed to, in their branches of services, really closely align to Amazon’s 14 leadership principles, so much so that we actually prefer to hire people that are cultural fits almost more than we need their technical skills, because working at Amazon and the culture of Amazon is so important to us. That’s why it’s so easy for us to hire from the military community.”

“But you know, to specifically call out something,” continued Curry, “it’s because veterans have the ability to learn a lot of new skills very quickly, which is important in our technical, fast-paced world. And they don’t give up when the going gets tough. And that’s something we see a lot from other types of hires. But the military community really can persevere."

Translating Military Skills Into Civilian

Many veterans come to the job market with relevant technical skills for specialized jobs, as Adams mentioned, but the transferability of those skills to the civilian workplace needs to be highlighted. “There may be someone that comes out of the army that had worked in cryptography [and] they have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in computer science–you just don’t know it,” Curry said. “And so it’s up to the hiring manager. Again, the traditional methods of recruiting, evaluating and hiring talent aren’t working. And so these folks have to get innovative and be able to speak the veterans’ language.”

An integral part of doing that means engaging veterans already employed by other organizations, whether it’s through recruitment or mentorship, participants said. “The best advertising any employer can have is to take care of someone in transition [from the military], because that word of mouth to the next people that they served with will mean much more than a million-dollars’ worth of advertising,” Fastport’s Harrison said.

Once those veteran employees are trained and supported, their contributions are invaluable and they, too, can help others make the transition. Webinar moderator Lydia Dishman, contributing editor for Fast Company, referred to a LinkedIn study finding that “veterans are 39% more likely to be promoted earlier than non-veterans.”

“The critical time for a veteran in transition is in the first six months,” Harrison said. “If you get them past the first six months, you’ve got a good chance of keeping them a long time. And they will thrive after that first, six-month period.”

That’s where mentorship comes into play, he said. “If you want to engage the situation in that first six-month window, where you avoid miscommunication, try to pair someone with another veteran who’s been in your culture,” he said. “They can communicate with that person much more effectively. A mentor doesn’t have to be 24/7, just somebody to talk to, to resolve any confusion they have. You would be amazed at how big a difference that makes in both retention and just overall productivity.”

Providing Resources to Help With the Transition

Veteran-focused employee resource groups (ERGs) are another helpful buttress, especially when companies and organizations get a more comprehensive sense of the veteran experience, said Curry. “Understanding the community better is really up to us as the employers, and we need to be doing more to help educate the service members on how to prepare for biases and make adjustments,” he said. If employers “don’t have a business resource group or an affinity group for your employees to participate in, you’re going to make them feel isolated when they come into a new environment,” he said.

Other resources to help veterans with transition include tech tools to hone resumes by translating military attributes into civilian speak. Networking and support are also absolutely vital, whether it’s through government agencies, nonprofits, or social media for veterans and their families. “We belong to a lot of social-media platforms where we connect with a lot of the groups for military spouses, so I’ve made sure that each one of my military recruiters, as well as our regional recruiters, join all of those groups,” De La Mora said, later adding: “We are looking at transitioning our veterans who not only have their spouses, but also their kids that are of age to start working. We’ve got entry-level positions for them and we connect with the state resources,” which in many cases offer funding to train young people in the 18-to-24 age bracket.

Veterans and their families tend to have a shared sense of purpose and service, Rea said she learned from experience. Tapping into that spirit helps attract and keep them as employees. “You’re trying to recruit a workforce of people who have raised their hand to serve our country,” she said. “They clearly have a passion beyond themselves and [for] what they can do to continue to serve–and that’s one of the things that we’ve highlighted a lot in trucking. I mean, who impacts our country more than our truck drivers, who touch every single industry and keep the rest of us going? That’s been a huge part of how we’ve attracted talent,” Rea said.

"So yes, we do have some other attractions for them to come here–benefits and stuff. But sometimes that’s the sole reason someone picks it–because they want to do something impactful to continue serving their country.”

Sheila Flynn is an Austin-based freelance journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Daily Mail, Irish Times and Sunday Independent (Ireland). She is the proud daughter of Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient John Flynn, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in the A Shau Valley in 1968-69. Upon his return to the U.S., he spent decades installing phone systems for AT&T and Lucent in New York City before starting his own telecom business.

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

It’s never been easier to put skills-based hiring into practice. The tools and the resources are there–and the potential benefits are abundant. And yet, some leaders and hiring managers are skeptical.“One of the major positives about the skills-based approach is that it adds more science and rigor to the hiring process,” said Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent at Mitek. Adding science, Rotolo says, adds objectivity, which can remove some of the bias and “increase the validity of the whole hiring process.”“The fact is that over 60% of people don’t have a college degree. But that hasn’t stopped employers from benchmarking candidates that way,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. Dishman moderated a panel of leaders during From Day One’s recent webinar about Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Uncommon Objections.Unconscious bias can easily creep into the hiring process when looking at a candidate’s resume, which can reveal indicators like elite educational opportunities, prestige, race, and even generational wealth, none of which are necessarily predictors of career success. Hiring almost exclusively on skill can help employers dial into what really matters.Rather than focusing on degrees, says Amanda Richardson, CEO and head of people at CoderPad, “You have to dissect the role into the skills that are needed, working with the hiring manager and people who are currently in the role. The most important part of the conversation is not just ‘What are the skills?’ but ‘What does good look like?’” This approach requires more in-depth conversations between hiring managers and department leaders to get a stronger sense of not only what success looks like, but how previous successes can be communicated during the interview process.“I find that taking a practical approach [means] literally saying, ‘What does a great answer sound like? Does this person really know what they're talking about?’” said Stacey Olive, VP of talent acquisition and employer branding for Medidata, Dassault Systemes.“Because there’s not an empirical objective test for everything, we really have to go based on our conversations with people.” This means hiring managers need to prepare upfront so they can infer if they’re hearing “flowery language” merely alluding to past success, or if a candidate actually has lived experience that will be beneficial to the role.Focusing on skills-based hiring isn’t just a great way to reduce unconscious bias, it can also make the hiring process quicker. “A little bit of upfront work on understanding and aligning on the skills and the level of the skills needed will actually make a much faster hiring experience,” Richardson said.Semoneel Bamboat, VP and global head of diversity, inclusion and talent acquisition at Capri Holdings, shares that while her organization has a rubric within which they score talent competencies on a scale of one to five, her team does not let the skill scoring fully dictate the conversation.“While we have numbers and rigor around it, nothing is set in stone,” she said. “The purpose of that really is so we can cast this wide net. We don’t want to be that specific, because we don’t want to then lose sight of someone that might not fit that exactly.” Skills-forward hiring should be used to identify previously untapped candidates, not a blanket way to eliminate unusual or creative choices that could be an interesting fit.Richardson adds that getting too technical in the taxonomy can overwhelm the conversation, especially as hiring managers try to parse the subtleties between junior and senior versions of the same role. “I've seen the situation where developers start arguing about the nuances of ‘What does it mean to be very proficient versus mildly proficient?’ And I think you can lose the forest for the trees pretty quickly.”Copying and pasting old job descriptions when looking to fill a role is no longer enough. Instead, there should be periodic check-ins to make sure descriptions are up-to-date as the nature of the work, and therefore the role, continues to evolve. Part of this can be solved by shortening and simplifying the job listing. “It tends to be a lengthy laundry list of desires and needs. Instead, employers should aim to distill it into ‘What is the required skill for success?’” Olive said.With an eye toward DEI, Bamboat’s organization uses short external job listings with neutral language, keeping the more elaborate and specific job description for internal use only among the hiring team. “We take a lot of the details out to be able to cast that wide net,” she said.“We never want to post the exact job and be very specific about those requirements, because we feel like we’re decreasing our talent pool.” Bamboat shared the well-known study that showed women tend to only apply for jobs where they feel they will fit every single benchmark. Shortening the list of requirements can make it more inclusive. Once candidates make it to the interview phase, the hiring manager can discuss the specific details from the full listing to gauge if it’s a fit.In conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections” (photo by From Day One)Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at Telus International, hires for a company with more than 3,000 types of job profiles, all of which are changing rapidly as her organization embraces hybrid workplaces and remote opportunities. In turn, she and her team must change how they assess skills. For example, her newer sales development hires may not have been exposed to an in-person environment where they could hone their technique. Therefore, she finds herself hiring more for soft skills or what Dishman prefers to call power skills, especially as the post-pandemic corporate environment has higher than ever expectations. “All of our clients want to go faster. So forget about skills, do you know how to do the job and do it in less time?” Rodas said.Trying to identify those more amorphous qualities, like being a fast learner, in a candidate can be a challenge. Panelists offered two solutions. The first is reviewing case studies. “To identify these characteristics that lead to outstanding performance, you study what those outstanding performers do,” Rotolo said.The second, is conducting actual testing during the hiring process. “Work simulations can be helpful, whether that means programming together for two hours or sitting and doing a sales demo. What are those real-world experiences where you can actually test the proof points?” Richardson said. Just having a great conversation in an interview is not necessarily enough.But the interview process can still be helpful if you are asking the right questions. “The research still says that behaviorally based questions are the most valid. And there’s really two types: ‘Tell me about a time when’’ past experiences, or situational questions,” Rotolo said.Rodas believes it’s also important to have an honest conversation about the nature of the role and pay attention to the applicant’s response. “The recruiter can [now] spend more time with the candidate talking about how they would endure the type of workload we’re going to put on them. In any type of business today, that’s worth 10 times more,” she said.This also means asking the right questions internally too, to ensure there is no unconscious bias at play and that a candidate’s competency is still at the forefront. “We have an opportunity now to ask [hiring managers], ‘What's the basis of your decision?’” Olive said. “You have to understand and politely point out where you think you see bias happening.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond

In the early industrial age, companies had a hierarchy built around manufacturing and machinery. But now workplaces are organized much differently. Their new priority? The talent. We’ve entered an era where the shortage of workers, obsolescence of skills, and new levels of employee agency will present employers with historic challenges. Most companies are not ready.The new Intelligence Age is a time when skills, employee creativity, information and AI will define our companies. In a recent From Day One webinar about “The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond,” speakers explored three strategies for success: rethinking the organization as dynamic rather than static, rethinking management with human-centered leadership, and rethinking HR as no longer an expense center, but rather a function like R&D that must build and invest in the company's people.All told, this means we need to redesign our companies around the person and shift to a new model for work. The time to act is now, experts say.The Changing Power Structure in the Labor MarketThe renowned Josh Bersin, founder & CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says that with Baby Boomers retiring and declining fertility rates, there will be smaller generations coming forward to replace them. Employers will have a high demand for skilled workers but a much smaller talent pool, he says.“If you look at the supply and demand of workers and the labor force, it’s absolutely different from what we’ve seen in the past,” said Sania Khan, chief economist and head of market insights at Eightfold, an AI-driven talent intelligence platform.This could signal tough times ahead, especially in an age where companies are defined more and more by people and ideas than by machinery and products. “Scarcity of talent is one of the biggest challenges out there for companies,” said moderator Steve Koepp, From Day One’s chief content officer and co-Founder.Bersin notes that his company is getting consistent feedback from employers post-pandemic that they are having trouble sourcing new talent and with the retention of what is “a highly empowered workforce. We have employees saying, ‘I'm going to quietly quit. I'm going to work my wage. I'm going to do what I need to do. I don’t care what you say. You don’t like hybrid work? Tough luck, I’ll go find a job where I can work remotely.”Bersin predicts this is a long-term trend, and companies need to get smarter about finding and keeping their people. This is especially true in industries like healthcare, which is facing a major labor shortage despite a recent BLS report predicting 54% of new jobs will be in healthcare due in part to that same aging population that is decreasing the workforce.A Renewed Focus on Employees and ProductivityWith technology changing rapidly and more and more roles relying on it, companies will need to prioritize upskilling and reskilling opportunities to keep their workforce up-to-date and competitive. “Companies will need to focus on their employees,” Khan said, noting that companies that don’t prioritize training are already experiencing higher employee turnover.Another way to curb turnover is to take a hard look at workplace policies and make sure they are serving employees personally to make the organization more attractive, whether that is through flexible hours, hybrid options, and even AI assistance, Khan says.Bersin’s organization just finished a report on the prevalence of the four-day workweek or work time reduction. “This is becoming a big deal because employees want flexibility. We’re finding that this idea creates job productivity, and forces companies to redesign jobs,” Bersin said. “There are things that we’re going to do that seem unnatural now to deal with this labor shortage. In the future they will be commonplace. That’s just one example.”The recent webinar featured Josh Bersin of the Josh Bersin Company and Sania Khan of Eightfold (photo by From Day One)This changing definition of productivity, a focus on “revenue per employee” rather than hours worked, will also serve working parents well, Khan says, as they manage to get more work done in a shorter period.“Hiring more people isn’t necessarily more productive,” Khan said. Companies will start to measure their success by how efficiently they are utilizing their human resources to generate revenue, a focus on output rather than the size of the team. “The companies that are really good at productivity are good at human resources. They’re good at training, facilitating workshops, redesigning jobs, flattening the corporate hierarchy, changing the role of leaders, and democratizing career development,” Bersin said. “These things that might have felt like ‘nice-to-haves’ ten years ago are becoming critical to becoming productive in this new economy.”Reimagining a Skills-based HierarchyIn the information age, employment has been less about job titles and more about the work, Bersin says, with employees taking on tasks and using their skills for objectives far beyond their stated job description in order to accomplish the mission of the day, week, or month. “These rigid job descriptions, titles, and hierarchies are getting in the way of reorganizing and redesigning the company to be more efficient,” Bersin said. He anticipates an existential change in which the titles of managers and corner office perks will be deprioritized in order to get the work done.In turn, companies will be looking less at what skills prospective employees currently have and instead look at adjacent skills that show an employee has the potential to be upskilled to be the right fit, Khan says. A focus on skills, says Bersin, can also pave the way for automation. Employees can be allowed to utilize the top of their skill set if their lower-level, less skilled tasks can be automated.“If you look at the needs of an organization, you can put employees in specific, goal-centric projects,” Khan said. “Instead of just having you siloed to one department, you can now move around to where you’re needed based on your skills.” This would also allow employees to be well-versed in the whole enterprise, rather than just one area, so both the individual and the organization benefit. And tools like Eightfold can use machine learning to help companies analyze what skill areas are lacking and fill those gaps with talent.How Leaders Can Adapt to the New Workforce“Leaders have to understand this labor shortage existentially and operate in a company where transformation and growth isn’t an episodic thing–it's never-ending,” Bersin said. “The new model of leadership is, ‘can you build a company that can move people around, that can develop people, that can hold people accountable, but also give them the opportunity to move when you need them into a new place?’ Those are different kinds of leadership skills.”And with the hierarchy flattening, workers need to be prepared to sometimes be leaders and other times be more subordinate depending on the current project. “We have to democratize the concept of leadership.” Those with flexibility and an appetite for innovation will be most attractive to potential employers, Khan adds.And in a talent-driven company, HR will become more and more essential, and will be called on to understand a wide variety of skills, roles, and changing corporate models to operate within skills-based planning, Bersin says. Gone are the days where HR will be associated with conflict resolution and complaints. Instead, HR is becoming a forward-thinking, technology, and data-driven career path.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Eightfold, for sponsoring this webinar. You can read more from Josh Bersin on the post-industrial age here.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

America's Military Veterans: Tapping a Rich Talent Pool

RELATED STORIES

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond

How Innovative Employers Are Making Their Benefits More Inclusive