Amerit Consulting was proud to sponsor and participate in a leadership panel discussing the benefits of hiring veterans on December 10 in San Diego, Calif. Co-sponsored by CareFusion, SDGE, Qualcomm, Life Technologies, and SDHR Forum, Amerit’s President Michael Larkins was one of four executives speaking to his organization’s support of veterans in their transition to civilian life.
Panelists were asked several questions around how to successfully start a Hiring Veterans Program. For Amerit, the key is to get your entire team on board and focus on the metrics.
Is a pilot program always easier to sell than a full scale project?
Yes absolutely! A pilot also allows you to make changes to the program to ensure a more effective roll out across the organization. Minimizes change management and creates internal champions to support the program.
What metrics would be most useful to present as part of the ongoing measurement of the success of the program?
Retention rate for veterans. Unless your company has sophisticated metrics, a very easy quality measurement is looking at the turnover/retention rate for veterans you bring into the organization. Is this better than your civilian population?
What type of program has the best chance for success at your organization? Formal? Informal? Ask for forgiveness, not permission?
Formal. For the program to be successful it has to have not only quantifiable metrics to validate, but also buy in from senior leadership. A formalized program provides a consistency to normalize metrics generally needed to evaluate the success of such programs.
We are often asked to implement programs with little or no additional resources to start: what kind of advice would you give to your HR/Talent Management team to overcome this apparent obstacle?
Identify readily available resources to educate your team. Translation tools that convert a soldier from military roles, to similar functions in the civilian world. There are several sites that have this available at no cost. Also, identifying internal veterans on your team who can assist with resumé writing to help your HR group. Local veterans groups that are focused on the placement of transitioning veterans not only provide a funnel of talent, but education to the situation. Another huge opportunity is to have your HR team volunteer at these groups to assist transitioning veterans in preparing their resumés for civilian hiring companies; and doing mock interviews to prep the candidates. This not only provides tremendous value to the veteran, but through exposure and osmosis, the HR recruiters are compiling IP to help your company identify top talent.
Attendees were able to receive 3.5 PHR credits. Don’t miss an opportunity to attend one of our events for your PHR credits! Check our blog regularly for upcoming event postings.