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We mentioned that awards honoree AT&T had added a military skills translator to its career site. The latest to do so is Ryder, which today is launching a website section for hiring veterans that also includes a translator feature.

On the Ryder site, service members enter what’s called a “military occupation code” or a “military occupational specialty code” to see what open jobs might match what they’ve done in the military.

Ryder has said it’ll hire 1,000 veterans by 2013. It has 670 jobs open, and about 8 percent of its current workforce is made up of veterans.

Moving “Troops to Tech” is the goal of one new careers site, linking military veterans with IT careers.

It was made by a trade association called CompTIA and includes information for veterans on how to get IT certifications at community colleges and private training providers, as well as for employers on how to get on a “registry.” The registry, whose current participants are listed, allows employers access to these veteran job-seekers, and gives them exposure as a company that prioritizes veteran hiring.

CompTIA bills itself as “the world’s largest provider of vendor-neutral certifications for IT professionals” in areas such as networking, security, Linux, health IT, and cloud computing.

Dear Corporate America,

This letter is intended to ask for your help and to open your mind, perhaps a little bit. I have recently completed my tour of duty serving our country and now it is time for the next opportunity in my career. The past several years have been tough for me; numerous deployments, time away from my family and loved ones, the missing of birthdays and holidays and tough financial times as well.

I initially joined the military due to my sense of commitment and wanting to be part of something greater like service to my community and country. Now that I have accomplished that, I am ready for my next challenge and will be entering the civilian world, hungry for an opportunity where I can demonstrate my talents and knowledge.

While in the military, I learned such traits like leadership, commitment, accountability, dedication, team work, sacrifice, and courage. I learned my job in the military through schooling and classroom education. What takes civilian world technical schools and colleges months and even years to teach, I learned and successfully passed in weeks and months. I then applied those acquired classroom skills and theories in real world applications and career fields such as aviation, logistics, security, administration, healthcare, supply, legal, nuclear power, IT, and many other fields.

I performed my job in the military to a high degree and in places around the world that your average worker in Corporate America has never seen and will never know of: keep reading…

The Australian defense department has started a new campaign with a “Superman” motif to recruit reservists, the first big effort like this in seven years.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

You’ll see how many people are looking for jobs; how the Swedish military is advertising; and who beat out Booz Allen in a Best-place-to-work list, all in today’s roundup.  keep reading…

With every good intention, American employers are honoring the nation’s military veterans today with promises of jobs and redoubled recruiting efforts.

From Washington, where Michelle Obama announced yesterday that corporate leaders will hire 100,000 vets and military spouses in the next two years, to a Phoenix job fair today where Chase Bank is encouraging veterans to attend its job fair, the focus has been on addressing veteran hiring. Late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a veterans jobs bill.

Without a doubt, it is a worthy effort. But it is also one that faces challenges very much like those plaguing the civilian employment situation. The fact of the matter is that unemployed veterans look a whole lot like unemployed civilians: young and undereducated.

A second, smaller, but still substantial problem, is the one facing Reservists and the National Guard: multiple call-ups and the legal obligation to rehire them when they return from duty, makes many employers reluctant to hire them in the first place. keep reading…

When interviewing a former service member, your goal is to understand the various roles, responsibilities, skills, and experience the candidate has accumulated over the course of his or her military career. To do this, you may need to look well beyond the most recent position, going back 10 years.

Cpl. Todd Green, left, and Pfc. Kevin Adams on the South China Sea

Unlike a civilian resume that often culminates in the highest level of responsibility to date, the military resume is often a collection of seemingly unrelated experiences and must, therefore, be considered together as a whole.

Below is a list of questions (reprinted from my new book) you can select from, to assist you in understanding the candidate’s background and convey your interest in the world from which they are coming.

General opening questions can build rapport and sense where the individual is in his or her transition from military service to civilian employment. Begin with “I know leaving the military can be a big transition . . .”

• How is it going, separating from military service?
• How has the adjustment been?
• What has been the biggest surprise about the civilian workplace?
• What opportunities are you looking forward to taking advantage of as a civilian employee?
• What challenges do you foresee as a new civilian employee?

For each job over the past 10 years, ask: keep reading…

As America prepares to honor its military veterans, a new survey says  recent and soon-to-be vets are concerned about finding a job and many feel unprepared for the transition back to civilian life.

The survey was released this morning by Monster Worldwide, which, in addition to its flagship job board, also operates Military.com, the largest career and information site for veterans, transitioning military and their families. The survey introduced Monster’s new Veteran Talent Index. Separate indices score veterans’ confidence in their career opportunities, their job search activity level, and an employer measure of how they perceive the veterans they’ve hired measure up to other workers.

On the latter score, employers are much more gung-ho about hiring veterans than are the vets themselves. Almost every employer who has hired a vet (99 percent) would hire another. That’s due in large measure to their performance. Sixty nine percent of employers say the veterans they’ve hired do their job “much better” than their non-vet workers. keep reading…

Amidst high unemployment rates among military veterans, Kelly Snell, who works for a government hiring office in Washington state, says he’s finding success in preparing military men and women for civilian jobs.

In the podcast below of about 10 minutes, Snell talks about his work teaching career skills to veterans, what veterans fail to realize about their experience, and how many phone calls he receives daily letting him know he has made a match. keep reading…

You’ve read, I’m sure, about the troubles many veterans arriving home from Iraq and Afghanistan are having in getting jobs. Navsea, among others, has done great work to try to change this.

Among the many other folks trying to do something about it is Ken Seville.

photo from the defense dept in Canada

Seville’s startup called “GuaranteedInterview” can be summed up briefly: get American and Canadian companies to agree to interview one qualified veteran each time they have a job open.

Seville — dialing in from Santiago, Chile — and I talk more about it in the podcast at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, some more information on the topic:

• Recruitment marketing to attract military veterans (webinar with Lisa Rosser)
• Translating military service to the civilian world
• Getting good at military skills translation keep reading…

Two proposals from the Federal Office of Contract Compliance Programs, now open for public comment, seek to require federal contractors and their subs to do more to hire veterans and to provide more information and data in the event of a compliance audit.

So far, neither of the proposals seems to have caused much of a stir, despite nearly unanimous mentions in the various analyses of the additional paperwork and increased obligations on federal contractors.

Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment law firms in the country, says the OFFCCP focus on veterans “significantly expands the obligations of federal contractors and subcontractors.”

Another firm, McGuireWoods, referred to the proposal for additional data as both “burdensome” and “stealthy.” The firm notes in its analysis, “The agency (OFCCP) does not understand the private sector or have any apparent concern about the burdens and confidentiality issues these proposals place on contractors.”

The OFCCP itself estimated it would take 103.2 hours and cost $135,000 to collect and provide all the data that could be requested in the so-called “Scheduling Letter” — the notice of compliance audit — should the changes it wants be adopted. (The OFCCP has to get permission from the Office of Management and Budget for changes to the document and data provisions.)

Complying with the veterans rules is estimated to cost each contractor $396 a year and take 10.7 hours a year. keep reading…

This week’s webinar with Lisa Rosser covered proven techniques for attracting military veterans.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

This was the seventh year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, but it was the military talent category, added for the first time, that was mentioned by more judges than any other category, as employers searched for creative ways to attract the many returnees coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

keep reading…

Several Mondays ago, I watched a National Geographic documentary called Restrepo. Restrepo is a feature-length documentary from National Geographic that chronicles the one-year deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the most dangerous and remote locations on earth, the Korengal Valley. Named “Restrepo” after PFC Juan Restrepo, who died on a hillside 7,000 miles from home on July 22, 2007 the Korengal Valley was a Taliban-infested death trap where nearly 50 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in five years of conflict, according to the Miami Herald.

This was one of the most gripping and moving war documentaries I have ever watched. The documentary followed the daily lives of the platoon members assigned to the valley outpost. By now, you are probably asking yourself what in the heck does this have to do with corporate recruiting? The answer is EVERYTHING. U.S. Military recruiters SELL. keep reading…

For those who attended my session at the ERE Fall Expo, you heard first-hand about CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model and were the recipient of a “secret recipe” which when prepared correctly will make you a “talent hero” at your company. CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model is a proactive, forward-looking talent approach driven by this secret recipe which was concocted in the hollows of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia, which I’m proud to say is my home state. The secret recipe for your success is simple and has three key ingredients: keep reading…

Amidst the rah-rah news yesterday about the drop in unemployment claims, little  notice was paid to another one of the data points in the weekly report from the Department of Labor. The number of newly discharged veterans filing for unemployment was down for the third week in a row.

The number of vets receiving unemployment benefits also dropped, by 14,445. That would be reason enough to celebrate today, Veterans Day, were it not such an aberration. The week before the number rose by more than 17,000, the largest increase since the DOL started keeping track in 1986. It would be worth celebrating if the number of vets on unemployment wasn’t 44,500 and rising. A year ago, 33,400 vets were getting unemployment benefits. In 2008, the number was 22,900.

Whether or not there’s an error — the weekly numbers are regularly revised — isn’t important. Instead, it’s the inescapable fact that US service men and women are having a harder time finding jobs than the civilian population.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for veterans who served after 9/11 at 10.6 percent, a full percentage point higher than for the population as a whole. Women vets fare even worse. The unemployment rate for them is 11.9 percent; men are at 10.4 percent.

When you compare recent vets to civilians, the contrast is sharper still. The civilian-only population (people in the workforce who have never served in the military) have an unemployment rate of 8.8 percent. For civilian women it’s 8.4 percent. keep reading…

Want to hire someone who’s led a team, managed a huge project, saved lives, mastered technology, learned to handle pressure, and dealt with adversity, all by age 23?

Navy veteran Ted Daywalt, of the job board VetJobs, suggests you employ a veteran and that you don’t stick them in a menial job way below their worth. keep reading…

Marvin Smith tells me that Microsoft will soon launch a new site based around Microsoft hiring people from the service — to be found at westillserve.com, and planned for launch tonight.

This is the result of a year of work by Scott Pitasky and others on the HR/recruiting team.

Currently in soft launch, the site will include a decoder to translate military skills into actual jobs (a long-standing challenge). It will also feature Friday afternoon chats with veterans and others who can help people with military-to-civilian transition questions, a list of upcoming events, and more.

“This is America … a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” — President George H.W. Bush, August 1988

“… each of us has a role to play, and all of us have something to contribute. He (Bush) didn’t call for one blinding light shining from Washington — he didn’t just call for a few bright lights from the biggest non-profits; but he called for a vast galaxy of people and institutions working together to solve problems in their own backyard.” –President Barack Obama, October 2009

This article is a call to action for recruiters to actively participate in assisting veterans to connect with the support and resources they need to build a career in the civilian workforce — one connection at a time through the 1,000 Recruiters of Light Project. Below is one such story which we hope connects with you and depicts our shared vision and inspires you to become involved. keep reading…

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Video 2.0 for Recruitment blog about the U.S. Army’s $33 million investment in a recruiting video game.

Ernest Feiteira picked up on an item I posted and started a conversation about the value of such recruiting tools. A couple others chimed in about the ROI, something I’m looking into for a future article.

At this point in the discussion, there’s no resolution to the question of how you would calculate the ROI.

However, Down Under, the Aussies must believe that outsourcing their military recruiting pays off because they have been doing it for some years. I know that because I talked with a Manpower spokeswoman about a press release announcing that the Milwaukee  firm just won a $200 million recruiting contract from the Australian  Defence Force.  keep reading…