Vets wanted p1 - Military Transition - Military Times EDGE

Finding a job can be hard. Finding a job with a company that doesn’t understand your military service can be a lot harder.

It’s up to veterans to bridge the gap between their experience and civilian recruiters with a well-prepared résumé and interview. But building that bridge is easier with companies — such as the employers on our “Best for Vets: Employers” list — that try to meet you at least halfway.

Best for Vets: Employers ranking

Here’s what our Best for Vets employers do to hire veterans and keep them happy — and what they’d like see from you.

What employers are doing

• Training recruiters to work with you.

Human resources managers say that translating military skills to civilian job experience is a challenge: “In some sense, it’s like speaking two different languages,” said Carlos Echalar, executive vice president of human resources at ManTech International.

Companies that want to hire vets tackle this problem head-on.

Eighty-six percent of the employers on our list train their recruiters to work with the military. Some, like Southern Co., get other veteran employees involved in recruiting and interviewing applicants. At General Electric, military résumés go through service-specific screeners who can recognize the significance of each turn in a veteran’s career path.

Recruiters with military experience or training “look at a résumé differently,” said Kathy Madaleno, senior vice president of human resources at Alion Science and Technology. It’s not just that they can decipher military jargon: “They can see things that maybe the veteran didn’t put in.”

• Offering training, mentoring and networking opportunities.

Forty percent of Best for Vets employers have networking or mentoring programs that connect veterans on staff, or pair new veteran employees with other veterans for mentoring.

A handful of companies take it a step further with training programs primarily or exclusively for veterans: At BNSF Railroad, vets have filled about 80 percent of the slots in the company’s Experienced First-Line Supervisors program in recent years. Waste Management Corp. targets junior military officers and noncommissioned officers with bachelor’s degrees for its Operations Management Training Program.

General Electric’s Junior Officer Leadership Program sends 40-50 junior officers on three eight-month rotations in different parts of the company.

Jonathan Hesener, a former Marine infantry officer now in JOLP, said the program gave him a chance to get to know his own interests better. He thought project management was the most logical application for his skills, but his rotation in business development convinced him to go into sales and marketing.

“The real challenge is you have so many options,” he said.

• Treating reservists well.

Ninety-two percent of Best for Vets employers pay their reservists when they are activated or deployed. The duration varies, but the most common policy is differential, or “make-whole,” pay to cover the difference between your civilian and military salary for the full length of a deployment.

Some companies go beyond that. Bank of America, for example, pays its activated reservists their full salaries for 90 days for each “military leave” period, and then differential pay for the rest of the period — up to a cumulative total of five years.

Best for Vets: Employers ranking

What vets should be doing

Don’t think that these efforts mean you’re off the hook. Here’s what employees and hiring managers at our Best for Vets employers would like to see from you:

• Take advantage of the military’s programs and your military contacts.

The military Transition Assistance Program gets high marks from retired Air Force Col. John DiPiero and retired Army Staff Sgt. Brian Neuman, military recruiters at USAA: “We can tell the difference in the résumé,” Neuman said.

Many employers are involved in the program, so it’s a good place to meet recruiters in a more intimate setting than a job fair.

And don’t forget to tap into your existing network for help. Tiffany Martin, a former Army intelligence officer now working for the Logistics Management Institute, a government consulting firm, turned to her battalion commander for advice.

“He helped me out a ton. ... He prepared me for interviews, looked at my résumé,” she said. “He also talked to me about the monetary aspect — what I should expect, what I should ask for.”

• Be ready to move.

Many service members leave the military because they’re ready to stop moving. But you’ll have much better job prospects if you’re prepared to pack up again.

“Sometimes the military is too localized,” Echalar said. “It’s a struggle sometimes to attract people to make bold moves to some place where they don’t currently work or live,” especially if they have maneuvered their last assignments to a certain area.

“A lot of veterans want to go home — where they grew up,” DiPiero said. “But if their home is in small-town America, they might not have a lot of opportunities.”

• Think broadly — about potential employers and about yourself.

Veterans tend to pigeonhole companies, said Larry Clifton, senior vice president of recruiting at CACI. For example, they might think everyone at an information technology company works in IT. Not so, Clifton said: “We hire nurses, we hire construction workers, truck drivers, logistics.”

Veterans also pigeonhole themselves.

“A lot of time, [veterans] don’t think of their skills as a whole,” said John Hancock, military communications manager at USAA and an Air Force vet. “They narrow the search to what they’ve been defined by the military.”

If Tracey Lloyd had thought that way, she probably would not have ended up where she did. Lloyd was a signal officer in the Army for six years; retail wasn’t on her radar until a recruiting firm pointed her toward Walmart’s Junior Military Officer Program, which targets junior officers and senior noncommissioned officers for store management training. Now she manages a Supercenter in Palm Coast, Fla.

The transition was easy, she said — partly because Wal-Mart has a robust training regimen and partly because she didn’t leave her leadership skills behind when she left the Army.

“In the military, when I would go into a different position, I would learn from my soldiers,” she says. “I took that same equation and brought it to Walmart.”

When Steve Buckwalter, a retired Air Force operations officer, applied for a job at Boeing South Carolina, he kept an open mind — and so did the hiring manager.

“They could teach me the airplane side of things,” he said. “They wanted my leadership experience.” He is now manager of the mid-body core engineering department.

“Don’t have a preconceived idea of what the job is,” Buckwalter recommends. He would never have thought to pursue the job he ended up in, he said. "It wasn’t in my model.”

Corey Franks didn’t have a model. He didn’t know what he wanted to do after leaving the Army in 2008, but he did know where he wanted to work. The former sniper set his sight on the military insurance giant USAA and began firing off his résumé. After months applying to different positions, he landed a job as an insurance adjuster in February.

“Don’t be picky,” he said. “It was good that I was going for the big jobs, but there were more experienced people out there. Accept that you’re going to start at the bottom, but there’s room to grow.”

His new job is a foot in the door at a company where he can see himself working for a long time.

“It’s still a way for me to be in the military,” said Franks, who was medically discharged for injuries suffered in Iraq. “I feel like I’m still serving.”

Best for Vets: Employers ranking