By embedding values deep into an organization’s culture, maintaining a keen attention to detail, and shifting to skills-based hiring, HR and talent leaders can effectively engage military and veteran talent.
By Maggie Mancini
In an uncertain labor market, HR and TA leaders are facing increased pressure to manage costs, improve time-to-hire, and increase candidate quality. Staying agile and thinking differently about how to attract and engage talent is crucial to hitting key metrics and improving the talent pool. Leveraging employer brand to become a military-friendly employer is an often-overlooked, but high-impact strategy for scaling hiring and building a values-driven workforce.
To attract and engage with this cohort of workers, it’s important for HR and talent leaders to first understand what industries and companies military and veteran workers often join after service. The most attractive ones serve a broader defense mission, says Jericho Urmenita, military talent insights advisor at Orion Talent. The logic is easy to follow: If a company can tie itself to the Department of Defense, it’s easier to engage with military talent.
“Military members joined to defend, and if they can still help support that mission, they are highly attracted to it,” Urmenita says. “As a recruiter, I have dug into a client’s downstream partners and customers in order to find that tie.”
In cases where this connection isn’t feasible, leaders should lean on the mission of the business, as veterans thrive on values that are bigger than themselves.
“Veterans endure what they have endured in the military because they place the values of their service branch above their own comfort and even their own life plan,” he says. “A company with a strong statement of values can stand out to a veteran.”
Whatever those values are, Urmenita adds, they must be truly engrained at every level of the business. One of the worst things a company can do—in hiring veterans or civilians—is embedding core values high up in the leadership chain without engraining it across all levels of the organization.
“Too many times, we have seen something like ‘safety first’ listed as a company’s core value, only to have one of our candidates look up the company and find a dozen or so safety complaints from former employees or a news article about an EPA violation,” Urmenita says. “Values can attract a veteran but only if those values are lifestyle, not just a motto on the lobby wall.”
Veterans also thrive in workplaces with other veterans. For HR leaders, this means taking the time to figure out who has served within the organization and making sure to inform prospective veteran hires.
“From day one, veterans are trained to make things look and feel a certain way, from living quarters, to weapons cleaning, and even how they dress outside of uniform,” Urmenita says. “Veterans are attracted to a company with the same attention to detail.”
Reshaping the Hiring Experience
“To hire a veteran, the paradigm must shift from probing for gaps in a candidate’s qualifications to looking for ways the veteran candidate might fit in the role,” Urmenita says. “One mindset seeks to disqualify, the other seeks to qualify.”
A skills-based hiring approach will lend itself to success when hiring veterans. “Instead of focusing on where someone worked, ask questions about what someone has worked on,” Urmenita says.
When it comes to hiring and interviewing, veterans prefer a tight and clear process. This is because everything they have done in their career is pipelined, meaning one thing leads to the next, Urmenita says. A prospective recruit’s entrance requirements and subsequent career progression are spelled out very clearly and, in most cases, is written in a manual somewhere.
“It may not be entirely possible to set the whole hiring process in stone, but clear position descriptions, specific milestones in the interview process, and defined process owners will go a long way in keeping veterans engaged and hired,” Urmenita says. “Decentralized leadership executing a unified strategy is key to speed and efficiency.”
