5 Recruitment Tips for Attracting Veterans

According to the Department of Labor, approximately 200,000 men and women leave U.S. military service and return to life as civilians each year. For these transitioning service members, it can be difficult to know where to start looking for jobs when they leave their career in the military. Oftentimes, this is due to a large discrepancy between their acquired military skills and the required skills listed in job descriptions.

However, organizations can increase their response rate and attract veterans by making slight changes to their strategy. Following these tips will help you the war against generic job descriptions and recruitment tactics and successfully market your open positions to service members.

The online tool, O*NET, is an easy website to use for writing job descriptions to match the talent.  It allows searching by military occupational code (MOC) or job title and cross-referencing MOCs to civilian equivalents, or vice versa.

You can also look up and label jobs with the United States military occupation specialty codes (MOS) to make it easy for Army and Marine Corps veterans to match their previous military experience with a civilian career. The Navy and the Air Force use their own codes as well to classify jobs. Using military language is useful in attracting transitioning military service members and veterans because it is familiar. This encourages more veteran applicants and signals that your organization is actively recruiting veterans.

Soft skills, such as leadership and teamwork, are easily transferrable from the military to the civilian workplace. Problem-solving, performing under pressure, global perspectives, detail-focused, and countless other skills are important to highlight in the job description. As an organization, including general skills that military members possess, can help increase their engagement rates.

Veterans will feel encouraged to apply to a job if they know the organization they are applying to, values them, and their experiences. It can be daunting to transition skills from one area to another. If you are a company that has transitional roles for military members, highlight those, as well as statistics on how many veterans you have in your workforce,

Additionally, make sure to include veterans and military organizations you partner with. This can open opportunities to increase military hiring rates and connect you with a larger network and community, while also showing your company’s dedication to helping our heroes.

Consider posting on veteran job boards and social media platforms to spread awareness to your audience of your company’s partnership with veterans.

Transitioning military and veteran Facebook and LinkedIn groups can be important in reaching out to the military community online. Posting open positions will attract more interest in veteran groups and increase your company’s brand recognition.

The U.S Department of Veterans Affairs has a Veterans Employment Toolkit that has an extensive list of links to outside resources for managers, recruiters, and employers to use. Utilizing veteran organizations for hiring sources will help your company find new opportunities to affiliate with organizations.

If your company is just starting to explore veteran coordination and partnerships, you can use the Regional Veterans’ Employment Coordinator that connects employers to resources to facilitate employment. See how you can develop relationships in the veteran’s employment market. The resource can help engage your company with veterans who are searching for local and regional as well as national employers.

At SkillStorm, we pride ourselves on serving the men and women who have sacrificed for our country by hiring, training, and deploying hundreds of military veterans and transitioning service members each year, both with and without prior technology experience.

If you’re committed to hiring a veteran or transitioning military members and would like to learn how SkillStorm can assist in your efforts, email us at hire@skillstorm.com. Our team of experts is waiting to hear from you!