With all the events this weekend in remembrance of the 10^th anniversary of September 11, 2001, I couldn’t help but think about not only those who died on that day, but the military members who were subsequently called to respond.

By September 2001 I had completed a transition from active military duty to civilian employment, and elected to continue my service as a member of the Army Reserve. Ironically, one of the reasons I left active duty was because I was feeling burned out from all of the deployments I had been on throughout the 1990’s (Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, and Saudi Arabia at the time of the Khobar Towers bombing).

I had been with my employer just one short year, and in those last few months finally felt as if I was adapting well to the cultural change that came with being a civilian. On the morning of September 11^th I was scheduled to deliver some training to employees in our Birmingham office. I heard about the first plane from the radio station I was listening to as I was entering the parking garage. At that time, there was still much confusion as to what kind of plane and whether this was a freak accident or something else. By the time I made it up to the training room, every TV in the building was turned to CNN and all of the students were following reports on their BlackBerrys and telling me that a second plane had struck. We attempted to start the class, but the continuous updates of increasingly horrifying news made it impossible to continue. The students were distracted by the news, and I was becoming increasingly distracted by the knowledge that my reserve unit was certain to be one of the first called up in response to this tragedy.

At the time, the unit I served with supported a major Army headquarters in Atlanta that had responsibility for planning responses to crises (domestic and international) and for supplying and training the units and individuals who would be the responders. Whatever was going to happen in the weeks, months, possibly years to come, was definitely going to be the main focus of my headquarters. My reserve unit was trained to augment the full time military and civilian staff, so I was not surprised when I received the phone call just a few short hours after dismissing the class. I was sitting in my hotel room, transfixed on the TV and alternating between a sadness I had never felt before and rage. “I was expecting your call,” I spoke into the phone. “When do we start?”

I share this story because it is not an unusual one for those who serve in the National Guard and Reserve. The details may change, but the immediate shift in focus upon receiving that call does not. I want to highlight what my company did when I informed them that I would be taking a leave of absence for an undetermined amount of time. I hope it serves as an example of an employer being truly responsive and supportive of a Guard/Reserve member, and ask that you take a look at your policies and support programs and see if you are as Guard/Reserve “friendly” as you could be.

1. Just before I notified them of my alert, I checked the company’s HR policy on military leave. At the time, it did have a separate leave category just for military duty, but it only reflected the standard two-week annual training commitment. My company also offered differential pay, where the company pays the difference between military base pay and the employee’s salary (if the military base pay is less than the civilian pay). But, again, this was only offered for the standard two week training period. I knew I would be gone for much longer than two weeks; I knew I could possibly be away for a year or more. I brought this to the attention of my HR rep and asked if the company would consider revising the policy on military leave and also consider offering the pay differential for a longer period of time. I provided her with a sample policy letter from the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) website. Amazingly, within three weeks, the company was able to rewrite and gain approval for both policy changes. Ultimately, I was mobilized for a total of 2-1/2 years and the company covered me the entire time. And, before you send me emails about USERRA (Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act), USERRA says employers have to let us go serve and have to place us in a job of equal or greater responsibility upon return. It specifically does not require employers to pay salary differential or benefits while we are gone. The first military leave policy addressed our retention of benefits while absent in a military leave capacity for up to two weeks. The revised policy actually became two policies: one for short term military absence (two weeks) and one for long term military absence (i.e., mobilizations).
2. While I was gone, the company asked for my permission to post my picture and name in a common area where the rest of the employees could see those from the company who had been mobilized/deployed after 9/11. This allowed employees an opportunity to acknowledge our service and to keep us in their thoughts.
3. During my mobilization, the company did not have an employee resource group (ERG) for veterans. By the time I returned to work in 2004, the first fledgling one was standing up. I joined it and took on a leadership role, and we made it our mission to continue to push for more support of our Guard/Reserve employees. Our ERG created a newsletter to inform the group of our efforts and to recognize those who were mobilizing/coming off of mobilization, those that had been promoted in the Guard/Reserve, and those that were doing great work in the community serving veterans and military families.
4. The ERG also convinced our company leaders to send out a letter to all veteran employees and Guard/Reserve employees in advance of Veterans Day, thanking them for their service and sacrifices. This letter was hand signed and mailed to the home address of each employee. It fell to the ERG to find the veterans and military members in the employee base, as HR had no record of who had self-identified as a veteran upon hire. The leaders also acknowledged our service and sacrifice every Memorial Day and Veterans Day thereafter in a statement that was emailed to all employees.
5. The last change I was attempting to enact before I left the company to start The Value Of a Veteran was a change to the short term military leave policy. It covered the standard two weeks of leave for annual training. Our ERG members let us know that they were increasingly being asked to do additional training requirements in the course of a year. We polled the group and the average was 4-5 weeks of military training a year had become the “new normal”. Our members had been taking the 2 week military training absence, and then using vacation time in order to retain pay and benefits or take the remaining 2-4 weeks as unpaid leave.

If you are looking for additional ideas as you develop your military recruiting and retention program, please consider downloading a free copy of my employers guide to recruiting and retaining military veterans. Use coupon code HireMilitary before checking out and the cost of the guide will be deducted.

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Filed under: Recruit, Retain

One of my favorite topics to teach recruiters and hiring managers is how to align military skill sets with civilian positions.  And I am always asked, “Why is it so hard for military members to translate their skills into something a civilian recruiter can understand?”  So, allow me to explain why this is such a challenge for them.

81% of military occupations have a direct or very close civilian equivalent.  We have engineers, nurses, lawyers, accountants, store managers, telecommunications technicians, truck drivers, food service managers and more.  And all military members possess, to some degree, intangible skills such as leadership, process improvement, problem identification, trouble shooting, managerial/supervisory administration, and project management.

The military assesses an applicant for attitude and aptitude to learn a skilled trade or to manage skilled labor and then presents the applicant with choices of career fields based on the assessment results. The applicant selects a career field based on factors such as available choices, demand for those occupations, associated financial bonuses for choosing harder-to-fill career fields, timeliness of training school availability, civilian career goals, and personal preferences.

Once an occupation is chosen, the military invests tens of thousands of dollars in the training and professional development of its service members.  The military also communicates defined career paths for officers and enlisted members, and manages their professional development and requires attendance at career development schools at predefined times.

As the years go by, service members are provided assignments into new positions of increased responsibility by a central team of military human resource managers.

And so, after 6 or 26 years, the service member is completing a successful military career having never assembled a resume or applied for a job. Very few have had a need to interview for a position; the few that have did not need to translate their qualifications and experiences into a different language in order to sell themselves to the decision maker.

In the months, even years, leading up to the point of separation or retirement, the military member becomes increasingly aware that there are major transition planning activities in which they should be engaging.   They also experience anxiety as the realization sets in that they are leaving a highly structured, path-driven, centrally-directed environment of military career management to the looser, endless-possibilities, individually-directed environment of civilian career management.

They struggle with trying to explain how very military specific positions such as “Command Sergeant Major” or “Executive Officer” might equate in a civilian work environment.  And, they are just learning about this social networking tool called “LinkedIn”, but they aren’t clear on what it can do for them and how to use it to find a civilian career.

So, while the military services and the Department of Labor are charged to help the service member prepare for transition to civilian life, I like to focus on those civilian recruiters and hiring managers and help them to understand the military better so they can improve their recruitment of veterans.  I find that once the recruiters and hiring managers get clear on what service members have to offer and better understand their levels of responsibility and salary expectations, their military recruiting programs really take off.  They make better choices on where to look for military talent and spend their talent sourcing dollars more effectively.  They have a higher rate of success in making good matches for their open positions, which is one step towards improving retention of veterans.

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Filed under: Recruit

If improving how you are recruiting military veterans is on your list of diversity initiatives for the coming year, you need to know that there are two common mistakes many companies make when trying to attract military veterans to apply through their company web site.

First, let’s start with a definition. The term “bounce rate” is an Internet marketing term that refers to the percentage of single-page visits. In other words, a visit in which a person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Is your company tracking the bounce rate from your main career page? A high bounce rate is an indicator that your entrance page isn’t relevant to your visitors. “I didn’t see what I was looking for, so <bounce> – I’m outta here!”

Presumably, your company has invested a lot of money in the development of its employer brand and its career page. Perhaps your company even has a team that monitors the effectiveness of the branding effort and tracks recruitment metrics for the number of applicants, by type, received through the career site. Are you tracking the number of veterans who apply through your main career page?

If the number of military veterans applying through your career page is very low, it may be that your company is committing one or both of the most common mistakes companies make when trying to attract service members to apply.

Mistake #1: No customized information for military veterans accessible from the career home page. Make it obvious from the home page that you are interested in recruiting military veterans. A simple link or a dramatic graphic calling out for “Military Veterans – Click Here!” will capture a service member’s attention and indicate right from jump street that you understand their information needs are different and that you are making an effort to address that need.

When I get push back from companies on this idea, I ask them if they have a special link for college students/university relations on their career page. The majority of them do. And when I ask why the company has customized information for that demographic, I get explanations such as:

• This is a group that is searching for their first job and they need a lot of additional info on company culture and career paths.
• This is a group that is likely, for the first time, applying for a job online, and they aren’t clear on how to put a proper resume together, how to navigate an applicant tracking system (ATS), and how the application review process works once the resume is uploaded.

At which point I remind them that they just described the same challenges that military members face when transitioning to the civilian sector. The main difference is, of course, the veteran has 4-5 or more years of direct, relevant work experience than the college student. But they’ve never had to put a resume together (we don’t need them in the military), they’ve never had to apply for a job (we are given assignments), and they definitely don’t know what happens after they click “submit”, other than they sometimes get an almost instantaneous automated rejection notice from the ATS with no explanation for why they don’t meet the criteria for the job.

Mistake #2: Hiding the customized information for military veterans under the “Diversity” link. Human resources professionals consider “veteran” to be a diversity category for a variety of reasons. However, the military member does not consider him/herself to be a diversity category and as such will not think to look under the diversity link to see if customized information resides there.

If you are looking for more information on recruitment marketing tactics for attracting military veterans, consider signing up for my webinar entitled “Marketing to Attract the Military Applicant”. I not only show you what you can do to attract more veterans to your company, I also explain why certain tactics work.

Otherwise, spend some time researching what companies on the CivilianJobs.com Most Valuable Employers (MVE) for Military and G.I. Jobs Top 100 Military Friendly Employers lists are doing on their career pages.

 

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Filed under: Recruit

CivilianJobs.com, where America’s military connects with civilian careers, recently announced the 2011 Most Valuable Employers (MVE) for Military winners. Congratulations to all the military friendly companies who earned this distinction!

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Filed under: News of Note, Recruit, Regard, Retain

The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) conducted a recent survey of holiday practices and found that three in ten employers (30 percent) will give all or most workers a paid holiday on Monday, January 17^th in observance of Martin Luther King Day.

It got me to wondering how many companies offer their employees a paid or unpaid holiday on Veterans Day, or at least did something of significance to acknowledge the day.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conducted a poll on the 2011 holidays that organizations plan to observe.  SHRM’s numbers reflected higher support for MLK Day than the BNA survey with 38% reporting that their organizations would be closed in observance.  Veterans Day lags behind, with 21 percent indicating they plan to observe the holiday in 2011 (encouragingly, an increase of 5% points over the 2010 reported numbers).

For the last few years I have sent out requests on LinkedIn for HR professionals and veterans to share what their company is doing to recognize and honor the service of its veteran-employees on Veterans Day.

While my method of polling is, admittedly, completely unscientific, the results are still interesting.  As you might expect, very few people reported offering or being offered paid time off.  Those companies that did tended to be small businesses that were owned by veterans, who made it a priority that all their employees have the time off to attend and/or participate in Veterans Day events.  Many veteran-employees reported that they took personal time off (paid and unpaid) to attend events.

Why should your company consider offering Veterans Day as a holiday or at least plan an event acknowledging the day?  Human Resources professionals know that recognizing and valuing the unique contributions of your employees is a critical component in any company’s military recruiting and military retention strategies.   I see many organizations hosting elaborate International Women’s Day events (March 8^th),  coordinating training and education events around National Disability Employment Awareness Month,  and planning food-and-arts centered events around Asian-American / Native American / African American History Months, and promoting them in their recruitment marketing materials and diversity web site pages, but the silence can be deafening when it comes to Veterans Day events.

While some employers have expressed concern to me that it would appear that they were showing support for the ongoing wars in the Middle East, most are just at a loss for ideas on what they could do to show appreciation for veterans in general and their veteran-employees specifically.  So I am going to give you some suggestions that you can work on this year, regardless of whether you offer a paid day off for Veterans Day.

For the organized, high energy types out there, here are some programs to aspire to from companies that have turned this into an art:

• Coca-Cola: Organizes an entire week’s worth of events.  They prepared 10,000 USO care packages, held a Vets VIP Dinner followed by a company-wide Veterans Day main event, participated in the Atlanta Veterans Day Parade and held a Military Ball.
• Accenture: Hosted a military “Dining Out” event and invited civilian employees to partake in the pomp and circumstance (and general silliness) of the event.
• Dell:  Invited several local National Guard units to participate in their event, including an air cavalry unit that provided static displays of a Blackhawk helicopter and a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.  One of the company’s executive leadership team members and an executive VP (who was a retired two-star general) flew in to address the employees.   Each veteran was presented with a certificate of appreciation, an American flag, and an American flag lapel-pin, and was encouraged to wear their military decorations.

Do those events sound too overwhelming to organize this year?  Many other companies and universities reported doing the following, which are things most any company could do with just a few months planning:

• Host a Veterans Day luncheon
• Send out an email or newsletter acknowledging the history of the holiday and profiling the service of a few veteran-employees
• Mail a personal letter signed by the CEO and/or head of Diversity to each self-identified veteran-employee thanking them for their service and sacrifice
• Post profiles of veteran-employees on bulletin boards or make a video for YouTube (click to see an example from Sodexo here.)
• Send a contingent of employees to a local Veterans Day parade with “<Company ABC> supports its veterans” t-shirts or signs
• Organize employee volunteer events at local VA hospitals or Wounded Warrior Transition Centers
• Volunteer with a local Veteran Service Organization, the USO or the American Red Cross, all organizations that have strong ties to the military community
• Arrange with your local schools to have your veteran-employees as speakers

Veterans Day is Friday, November 11^th – How will your company acknowledge the service of your veteran employees this year?

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Filed under: Recruit, Regard, Retain