Helping Military Veterans Make the Leap to Civilian Careers

BY Sheila Flynn | July 21, 2021

Employers across the U.S. have made tremendous strides in recent years when it comes to launching  programs to attract veterans. They’re casting a wider net and honing their hiring and training practices. But the transition from military life to the civilian workforce often remains difficult. Much of the challenge of easing that process lies with recruiters and HR managers, who need to be educated about the skills and life experience of transitioning veterans, said participants in From Day One’s recent webinar, “Matching Military Veterans With Your Need For Skilled Talent.”

“There’s a big difference between military-friendly and military-ready,” said Dave Harrison, executive director of national apprenticeships for Fastport, a software-development company that builds products to help military-community members find meaningful employment. Harrison himself is an Army veteran who served with the 82ndAirborne.

One of the biggest issues for military veterans transitioning to a business environment is adapting to a completely new organizational culture. “The danger point for everyone, and I can’t stress this enough, [is] in transitions, in the first six months,” said Harrison. “The higher-ranking they are, the more danger that is, because the more disenfranchised they’re going to be in that first transition. They’re used to being able to manage things at a whim; that they will not be able to do. So you need to create a culture that helps them assimilate to your culture.”

“Once they understand the landscape,” he continued, “you will be amazed at what those folks will do for you and how they will create a culture of problem-solving that you may not have had in certain areas–and how other people will follow them to you if you give them that kind of platform.”

Getting Managers up to Speed

That’s where training for hiring managers comes in, said Jacqueline Jarl, also a veteran and a military recruiting program manager at Stryker, a medical-technologies corporation. “In 2019, we decided that it was necessary for us to build what we call a military-talent familiarization curriculum” for recruiters, she said. “Given my Army background, I started building what we call Military 101,” which she describes as a “foundational” course for “somebody who has never really heard of anything in the military other than what they see on TV and movies.”

“It’s just the basics, the rank structure, the different services, the different components, what’s the difference between active and reserve and guard. So we started building these curriculums that are housed in our online-learning management system, so anybody has access to them.” That includes “your recruiters, your HR, business partners, your hiring managers, anybody who sits in an interview.” She added: “Every single new recruiter that comes into Stryker, it’s mandatory for them to go through that training.”

Employers must also come to understand the time frame associated with military transition, participants said, reaching out and keeping contact with candidates long before they leave the service. “Folks are going to start looking as many as 24 months in advance of their transition date,” said Greg Rivera, the military recruiting lead at Booz Allen Hamilton, the management consulting firm. “And they’re going to be doing various different things, whether they’re upskilling, getting a resume together, fine-tuning their interviewing skills, learning about business and how they can fit in and where they can fit in.”

“As we are engaging with those individuals,” Rivera said, “we’re making sure that we’re keeping them fully engaged on what’s going on within the firm, giving them that pulse check.”

Speaking on hiring military veterans, top row from left: Jacqueline Jarl of Stryker and Chris Cortez of Microsoft. Middle row: Dave Harrison of Fastport, moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, and Chuck Kluball of The Home Depot. Bottom: Greg Rivera of Booz Allen Hamilton (Image by From Day One)

The Need for a Sustained Focus

Harrison agreed with the need for prospective employers to take a long-term approach. “Anyone in the business of hiring, or trying to sell a military-ready program, you have to get the hierarchy to understand that this is not [the case that] the fish are going to jump in the boat in the next 10 minutes. You’re not going to get 7,000 hires tomorrow, especially developing a program. If you are talking to people who are 20, up to 24 months out from the transition, this is a long play,” he said.

Training and timeframe education for HR managers must also reinforce the fact that the military transition is far different from regular job switches, said Chuck Kluball, senior manager of military relations at The Home Depot.

“It is a strong culture shock,” said Kluball, also a veteran. “For many of the veterans getting out, this would be the first time they do job interviews. It would be the first time they will write a resume. It’ll be the first time they sit through an actual onboarding with a company where they don’t show up and have their entire day or their entire onboarding process planned out for them.”

“This will be the first time that they have to deal with different type of work environments,” Kluball said. “It’s a lot–and it’s also one of the only times in your life where you’ll go through a job change, potentially a relocation, health care change, education changes, potentially your family’s getting uprooted. It’s an entire life change versus just a job change. So companies that are prepared to provide support for that life-changing event, not just a job-changing event, we’re going to see higher retention. And then, because of the high retention, they’re going to see higher performance out of the veterans they are bringing in.”

Practical Approaches to the Transition

To capitalize on the potential of veterans, companies such as Microsoft have been particularly proactive. In 2013, the software giant began the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA). “Think of it as a 17-week technology boot camp, where you come either through a transition, or you come through our program while you’re participating in the SkillBridge program, which allows you to go through these kinds of programs when you’re within the last six months of your service,” said Chris Cortez, Microsoft’s vice president of military affairs and a retired Marine Corps major general.

He added that “it doesn’t matter what your military specialty was, you could be a truck driver, you could be a cook, a medic­–we take them all. And at the end of this 17 weeks, you have the blocking and tackling that it takes to go to work–no kidding–in a technology company. As a matter of fact, we have over 750 companies that have hired from this program.”

The importance of networking and word of mouth cannot be overestimated when it comes to awareness about such veteran programs, participants said. “People that go through the program have friends,” Cortez said of MSSA. “So we get a lot of interest through referrals. The graduates from the program have their own social network, and they also talk about the program. And like all the companies here, we work with Hiring Our Heroes, the service academies, career conferences and others that reach out and touch our military–and we all talk about our programs.”

Opportunities for Military Families

The impact of such outreach and networking extends to military spouses and veterans’ families as well,  an effort that has actually been aided by the increase in remote working during the pandemic. “There’s an amazing opportunity that’s come out of the Covid transition and remote-working scenarios,” Harrison said. “There are a few companies that, very early on, figured out that there’s a whole population of talent out there that was untapped: active-duty military spouses. If you can find a way to have them work remotely, you will have a dedicated workforce that will stay with you for the long term. And there are companies that are now engaging military spouses stationed in Germany and Italy and Okinawa, etcetera.”

Other companies such as Home Depot work diligently to relocate military spouse employees to accommodate deployments and base transfers, said Kluball. But while many organizations have made great strides in attracting, training, and easing veterans’ transitions, work still needs to be done and more overarching outreach must be offered to the individuals who served the country.

“I believe we’re going to do better, because we’ve made some really radical changes,” said Cortez. “Our goal, always from the very beginning, was to get 100% [of trainees hired]. We’re not quite there. We’re at about 98%. But we want 100% of those that go to this program, to get them employed, get them a good job, get them a career in the technology industry.”

Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based freelance journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Daily Mail, and Irish Times. She is the daughter of Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient John Flynn, who served with the 101st Airborne Division. 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.


RELATED STORIES

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.

Katie Chambers | March 19, 2024

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.

Katie Chambers | December 19, 2023

How Innovative Employers Are Making Their Benefits More Inclusive

Company benefits have never been one-size-fits-all, but today the employee landscape is changing even more rapidly than ever. The more varied the workforce, the more varied their benefits needs are going to be.That’s certainly true for Liz Pittinger, head of customer success at Stork Club. In the last three years alone, family planning and fertility benefit needs have drastically changed.Pittinger spoke to this at a From Day One’s webinar along with three other panelists. Lydia Dishman, senior editor of growth and engagement, at Fast Company, moderated.Millennials are further in their careers now and want company benefits to better reflect the changing workforce as well as align with diversity, equity, and inclusion, Pittinger says. That has opened the way for Stork Club to create a more inclusive path for people to start families.“People are waiting later and later to start their families, so you have single women in their 30s and 40s, who are concerned about fertility preservation,” Pittinger said. “Then there are same sex couples who have typically been excluded from a health plan and fertility solution.”Companies now can’t afford not to offer these inclusive benefits. Especially if they want to attract and retain the talent they need.“I think it's really important to ground ourselves on why DEI is important,” she added. The answer: because it’s important to employees who are searching for and staying at jobs for different reasons than previous generations. According to a study by Fortune and the Institute for Corporate Productivity of 1,200 HR professionals around the world, overperforming organizations are those that focus on DEI. “In other words, company culture, even over compensation,” said Pittinger.That is to say, however, not every company needs to offer every type of benefit. Organizations must cater to their workforce, their unique makeup, and their unique needs. “It’s about understanding the company goals and demographics,” she said. “Some industries just traditionally run heavier on single women in their 30s and 40s. You may have a large LGBTQ community.” It goes back to understanding their needs. How? Be in close contact with them, offer surveys, get feedback from the hiring team and managers.Then, once HR managers understand the gaps, they need to make changes, circle back and make sure their people know what’s being offered.Growing Need for Mental Health BenefitsWhen reporters at the Los Angeles Times had to stay out of the office due to Covid, they felt the disconnect. They were doing their jobs, telling the hard stories, but didn’t have that natural way of talking things out with colleagues.Nancy Antoniou, SVP of strategy and CHRO at the Los Angeles Times, recalled how difficult that time was. Rather than expressing and sharing, the reporters were internalizing what they were seeing.“We had a situation where an employee called our EAP (Employee Assistance Program) vendor, and the story that they were sharing about what they were experiencing during one of the protests was so impactful to the EAP counselor, that the counselor themselves started breaking down,” Antoniou said. “It was a role shift for the employee, where they felt like they had to now counsel the counselor.”With that information, they now had the responsibility to do something about it. So they implemented a peer-to-peer support group, and hired clinicians to train employees. It’s really made a difference in how they share and work through the emotional side of the job, Antoniou says. “Having the ability to talk to your peer who has potentially experienced something similar is where that inclusiveness and belonging came in,” she added.The bottom line is you have to listen to your people, and then you must follow through and give them what they need. “There's no greater disservice than taking a survey and asking employees to share their opinions and thoughts about our culture or offerings, and then doing nothing with it,” said Antoniou.Putting On Your Listening EarsOf course, there are benefits that everyone needs. Kristy Lucksinger, head of global benefits at JLL, said that during the pandemic many people were reactively addressing health issues. More recently at JLL, they’re trying to close that gap and help people focus more on preventative care. One tool to accomplish this has been virtual health care.“We truly believe that virtual care is absolutely critical in this environment, ensuring our employees really know and understand how virtual care works; and when it's appropriate to use virtual care versus when it’s not,” she said.In a conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “How Innovative Employers Are Making Their Benefits More Inclusive.”Relaying benefits information to employees is key. One way they do that at JLL is training managers to recognize symptoms or indications among employees so they can help them take the next step.An employee came to Lucksinger with personal issues at home, specifically an adult child with mental health concerns. “They were dealing with their gay son who needed some mental health services provided to them because they were experiencing a couple of their friends who had just committed suicide.”Any parent with stressed children is also stressed themselves, she added. Acknowledging that hardship, and the impact on the employee’s life, were important first steps. Next was to ensure the employee and their child got the help they needed with a professional with experience in the LGBTQ+ space.“Just having had that conversation with this employee, you could just see the relief in that employee,” explained Lucksinger. “We are trying to go that extra mile to ensure that our employee experiences go above and beyond.”Take the Proactive ApproachThe key takeaway from the panel was thinking outside the box. Straying away from the traditional approaches to company benefits and incorporating the values of DEI into offering the benefits people really need. And it all goes back to listening. Sometimes employees will come to you, but you also need to proactively seek them.In the case of Lisa Singh, managing director of global benefits at Silicon Valley Bank, they met with their military and veteran employees to get their specific feedback. The employees gave their thoughts on experience and processes, which Singh said they took into consideration and made adjustments to their policies. Education goes a long way, too, Singh added. At the bank, they hold mental health safety trainings and offer other ways to educate so employees are better equipped to help themselves and others. They hold regular webinars about different aspects of health, which is an opportunity for the company to let employees know about their benefits. One piece of key advice to make sure this kind of change happens? Take matters into your own hands to best serve your employees.“Your healthcare vendor may say, ‘yes, you’re competitive. You have fertility coverage, don't worry about it.’ But we really need to look under the hood at that,” she said. “If we don't ask the questions, if we don’t work with our consultants, even push our consultants, then we’re going to have these gaps that we don't know of, and we’re not going to be meeting the needs of our diverse population.”Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter. 

Carrie Snider | December 04, 2023