1. 34 March 2015 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org
Insanity, as famously defined by Albert Ein-
stein, is doing the same thing over and over
again while expecting different results.
Analogously, employers that are frustrated
by their inability to attract, hire, retain, and
develop veterans must revisit and revamp
their hiring strategy. What works for recruit-
ing a civilian workforce definitely does not
work for hiring (and then retaining) the
roughly 2.8 million men and women who
have transitioned from military to civilian
life in the last dozen years. Good intentions
are also not enough. Surveys1
show that
employers – particularly federal contractors
who now must meet an annual Office of Fed-
eral Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)
benchmark of 7.2 percent for protected vet-
erans – want to hire more veterans for many
reasons, including their transferable skills,
work ethic and training. The problem is that
they don’t know how.
Why is hiring veterans so challenging?
According to numerous studies, the big-
gest challenge for many organizations is
translating military skills into civilian career
opportunities. As employers look beyond
the fundamental critical issue of match-
ing candidates to opportunities and seek to
identify and implement solutions, they must
ask themselves the following questions to
establish a high-touch candidate experience
throughout the hiring process:
Does your job posting/résumé review
process work for veterans? Veteran
experiences and specialized skills generally
don’t neatly fit into all the boxes on the online
job posting “must have” requirements list.
A supply sergeant’s skills, for instance, are
comparable to that of a purchasing manager,
but that individual may be overlooked either
because keywords won’t surface from his or
her résumé in a search, or if the skills are lost
in translation. Corporate recruiters and hiring
managers need to reassess and rewrite jobs to
highlight their needs for specific competencies
and transferable skills, e.g., “demonstrated
leadership and team management skills,”
“able to make accurate and timely decisions in
crisis situations,” and “aptitude for numbers
and data analytics,” etc.
Are your hiring managers trained?
It’s critical that your entire teams, including
hiring managers, not only understand what
roles are best suited for veterans, but also
are educated in how to review and assess
the résumés, career interests, and potential
transferable or developmental skills and
abilities in order to better match veterans
to job opportunities. A common pitfall is to
limit training to frontline recruiters and/or
HR professionals, only to have ill-informed
hiring managers reject candidates because
they mistakenly perceive that he or she lacks
specialized skills or industry experience.
Is your outreach as targeted as possi-
ble? Every recruiter knows that you need to
look for candidates on their home turf using
optimum employment branding, messaging,
and an outreach strategy to reach candidates
with the desired skills. So, go high-touch and
look to the hundreds of veteran employment
service organizations (VSO), employment/
career coaching programs that are avail-
able and ready to help. Doing so will yield
pre-screened and career “transition-ready”
veteran referrals, which is key to improving
your hiring ratios and, for federal contrac-
High-Touch Solutions for Hiring Vets
Hiring Veterans?
Rethink Your Recruitment Strategy
Put high-touch back into your high-tech recruiting practices – or you will fail!
By Carl Kutsmode, talentRISE
Additional Resources
for Employers
For more information, check
into hiring initiatives at both the
state and national level. Many
not-for-profit organizations also
provide invaluable information.
ConnectVETS.org, for instance, is
committed to removing barriers
to employment for veterans and
employers and is partnering with
talentRISE to provide turn-key
consulting, training and recruiting
solutions to address the employer
military recruiting challenges
highlighted in this article.

2. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • March 2015 35
tors, meeting requirements for demonstrated
outreach. In fact, federal contractors face
increased scrutiny under the new OFCCP
requirements when those contractors source
high volumes of veteran résumés, but only a
few of those candidates proceed through the
hiring pipeline. Quality and fit, over quan-
tity is most important as the government
compares the ratio of job applicants to those
moving forward in the recruiting process. If
your recruiters or hiring managers screen
out a high number of veteran applicants,
you could be at risk of an OFCCP audit!
It’s important that outreach is strategic
and targeted so employment opportunities
are promoted where you have the greatest
likelihood of attracting “right-fit” talent with
a greater chance of moving through your
process and be hired.
Are you leveraging the veterans already
in your organization? Career coaching
and peer mentoring programs can have a
very positive impact on transitioning mili-
tary job candidates to guide them on a civil-
ian career path. Coaching is a valuable first
step before they can effectively search and
apply for a job that best matches their skills
and abilities. In-house veteran employee
resource groups can play an especially
important role by partnering with corporate
HR and recruiters to assist in candidate
career coaching, job matching, and new
hire cultural assimilation/onboarding and/
or employee career development coaching,
which will assist in retention of this group.
Are you maximizing the use of technol-
ogy? For veterans, mobile-enabled technol-
ogy, which allows them to search for jobs
while on the go, is a must. Many employers
are also seeing great success using videos
featuring veterans they have hired to speak
about their journey into a civilian career.
These individual and personal testimoni-
als offer views into daily job activities and
workplace culture. Videos can effectively tell
the story about the company, the jobs, and
what it’s like for a veteran to work there.
They are great tools for “selling” your com-
pany and also for providing veteran job can-
didates with career exploration information.
Lastly, be sure your online applica-
tion is updated to enable veterans
to bypass required information that
may not be relevant to them.
Finally, does your onboarding
program fill the needs of this
group? According to study by Pru-
dential,2
three out of five veterans
report challenges with cultural
assimilation into civilian corporate cultures.
So, once you’ve hired veterans, make certain
that your cultural assimilation process
takes this into account and does not assume
that veterans will be familiar with office
practices, politics or culture. For instance,
many corporate cultures value debate as a
required part of the decision-making pro-
cess – which is not how the military chain
of command generally works! By instituting
an onboarding process that addresses the
specific and unique needs of veterans, you
will minimize new hire turnover.
Summary
For employers looking to add veterans to
their ranks (pun intended), the problem is
fairly simple: current traditional recruiting
and hiring models don’t typically
work well for veterans. The solu-
tions are not as simple, but asking
the questions above and using the
answers as a guide to creating a
robust, high-touch process that gets
great talent hired – and helps to
retain them – is a great way to en-
sure that your veteran recruitment
strategy yields results and is fully
OFCCP compliant.
About the Author
Carl Kutsmode is managing
partner at talentRISE, a talent
management consulting and
recruiting services firm that helps
companies address recruiting and
retention challenges to enable employers to best
support ever-changing business needs for talent.
He has more than 20 years of experience working
with employers ranging from startups to global
organizations helping them transition from manual
to automated,“high touch” recruiting practices by
optimizing their processes, technologies, and
strategies related to talent acquisition,
performance management and retention. He
volunteers with the Staffing Management
Association of Chicago and serves as the Chicago
Leadership Advisory Board member for www.
UpwardlyGlobal.org helping immigrant
professionals navigate job searches. He graduated
from Loyola University in Chicago and can be
reached at carlkutsmode@talentrise.com.
Endnotes
1 A CareerBuilder survey from 2012 shows that
29 percent of employers are actively recruiting
veterans to work for their organizations and 65
percent said they would be more likely to hire a
veteran over another equally qualified candidate.
2 For a link to the study, go here: link to http://
www.prudential.com/documents/public/Veteran-
sEmploymentChallenges.pdf.