Posted on Apr 5, 2022
4 Reasons Why Organizations Struggle to Hire Veterans
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Numerous academic studies have documented the advantages to initiating programs that successfully assimilate veteran talent. Why aren’t more organizations taking advantage of this plentiful, productive talent source?
1. Shrinking percentage of corporate leadership. As the veteran population relative to the population of the nation has decreased, so has their presence and leadership in civilian institutions. Veteran presence among corporate leaders is at an all-time low. The Wall Street Journal reports that the percentage of large publicly held corporations whose CEOs had a military background to be 2.6 percent! Even if you expand that group to include all S&P 500 board members, the percentage with a military background is still less than 5 percent.
2. Negative biases. Research confirms that hiring managers maintain negative biases when confronting veterans due to this growing civil-military gap. Those biases tend to result in the under-employment of veterans. Underemployment occurs when a person engages in work that doesn’t make full use of their skills and abilities. A recent survey by LinkedIn found that 76 percent of the top industries hire veterans at a lower rate than their civilian peers and that veterans are more than 30 percent more likely to be underemployed than their civilian peers.
3. Veterans’ struggle with transition. Most veterans do not easily transition from the military to the civilian world. While there are many government support systems attempting to support that transition, they are collectively insufficient. And while many well-intentioned non-government support systems attempt to close this gap, the critical “last mile” of support – focused hiring efforts, onboarding support, affinity groups, mentoring programs, etc. - tends to rest at the feet of their prospective employers.
4. Lack of dedicated corporate veteran hiring programs. Most civilian organizations are not organized to successfully hire veterans. A Korn Ferry study documented that fully 80 percent of organizations do not have veteran-specific recruiting programs. The study also documented that 71 percent of organizations do not provide training to hiring managers or recruiters on veteran hiring, and 52 percent do not provide onboarding or transition support to veteran hires. Even worse, the US Chamber of Commerce recently documented that 90 percent of small businesses do not intentionally hire veterans. And so, in spite of the enormous potential upside that this talent pool offers, few organizations are taking advantage. It is a missed opportunity.
Matthew J. Louis is the President of Purepost, Inc. and the author of the HarperCollins book Mission Transition: Navigating the Opportunities and Obstacles of Your Post-Military Career, a practical guide for veterans and service members in career transition. Louis holds an MBA in operations and finance from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and a BS in mechanical engineering from West Point. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College. Louis served in the Southwest Asia combat theater and on the staff of the US Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel.
Bibliography:
Aaron Kay, “Research Shows Military Service Can Hurt Some Job Seekers’ Prospects,” Duke Fuqua School of Business, September 23, 2019, accessed October 16, 2019, https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/how-military-service-can-hurt-some-job-seekers’-prospects. See also: Steven Shepherd, Aaron C. Kay, Kurt Gray, “Military veterans are morally typecast as agentic but unfeeling: Implications for veteran employment,” ScienceDirect, Volume 153, July 2019, Pages 75-88.
Melissa Boatwright and Sarah Roberts, “Veteran Opportunity Report: Understanding an untapped talent pool,” LinkedIn, accessed December 7, 2019, https://socialimpact.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/linkedinforgood/en-us/resources/veterans/LinkedIn-Veteran-Opportunity-Report.pdf.
Roy Maurer, “8 in 10 Employers Lack Recruitment Programs for Veterans,” Society of Human Resource Management, May 25, 2015, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Recruitment-Programs-Veterans.aspx.
“Small Business Index: The Voice of Small Business Owners,” Metlife & US Chamber of Commerce, Q3 2019, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.uschamber.com/sbindex/pdf/sbi_reports/SBI_2019_Q3.pdf.
1. Shrinking percentage of corporate leadership. As the veteran population relative to the population of the nation has decreased, so has their presence and leadership in civilian institutions. Veteran presence among corporate leaders is at an all-time low. The Wall Street Journal reports that the percentage of large publicly held corporations whose CEOs had a military background to be 2.6 percent! Even if you expand that group to include all S&P 500 board members, the percentage with a military background is still less than 5 percent.
2. Negative biases. Research confirms that hiring managers maintain negative biases when confronting veterans due to this growing civil-military gap. Those biases tend to result in the under-employment of veterans. Underemployment occurs when a person engages in work that doesn’t make full use of their skills and abilities. A recent survey by LinkedIn found that 76 percent of the top industries hire veterans at a lower rate than their civilian peers and that veterans are more than 30 percent more likely to be underemployed than their civilian peers.
3. Veterans’ struggle with transition. Most veterans do not easily transition from the military to the civilian world. While there are many government support systems attempting to support that transition, they are collectively insufficient. And while many well-intentioned non-government support systems attempt to close this gap, the critical “last mile” of support – focused hiring efforts, onboarding support, affinity groups, mentoring programs, etc. - tends to rest at the feet of their prospective employers.
4. Lack of dedicated corporate veteran hiring programs. Most civilian organizations are not organized to successfully hire veterans. A Korn Ferry study documented that fully 80 percent of organizations do not have veteran-specific recruiting programs. The study also documented that 71 percent of organizations do not provide training to hiring managers or recruiters on veteran hiring, and 52 percent do not provide onboarding or transition support to veteran hires. Even worse, the US Chamber of Commerce recently documented that 90 percent of small businesses do not intentionally hire veterans. And so, in spite of the enormous potential upside that this talent pool offers, few organizations are taking advantage. It is a missed opportunity.
Matthew J. Louis is the President of Purepost, Inc. and the author of the HarperCollins book Mission Transition: Navigating the Opportunities and Obstacles of Your Post-Military Career, a practical guide for veterans and service members in career transition. Louis holds an MBA in operations and finance from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and a BS in mechanical engineering from West Point. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College. Louis served in the Southwest Asia combat theater and on the staff of the US Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel.
Bibliography:
Aaron Kay, “Research Shows Military Service Can Hurt Some Job Seekers’ Prospects,” Duke Fuqua School of Business, September 23, 2019, accessed October 16, 2019, https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/how-military-service-can-hurt-some-job-seekers’-prospects. See also: Steven Shepherd, Aaron C. Kay, Kurt Gray, “Military veterans are morally typecast as agentic but unfeeling: Implications for veteran employment,” ScienceDirect, Volume 153, July 2019, Pages 75-88.
Melissa Boatwright and Sarah Roberts, “Veteran Opportunity Report: Understanding an untapped talent pool,” LinkedIn, accessed December 7, 2019, https://socialimpact.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/linkedinforgood/en-us/resources/veterans/LinkedIn-Veteran-Opportunity-Report.pdf.
Roy Maurer, “8 in 10 Employers Lack Recruitment Programs for Veterans,” Society of Human Resource Management, May 25, 2015, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Recruitment-Programs-Veterans.aspx.
“Small Business Index: The Voice of Small Business Owners,” Metlife & US Chamber of Commerce, Q3 2019, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.uschamber.com/sbindex/pdf/sbi_reports/SBI_2019_Q3.pdf.
Employment
Transition
Civilian Career
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Don't forget the fact that many skills are hard to translate into the civilian world, and civilians often are not wanting to look at anything more than the surface.
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LTC Matt Louis
Agreed SGM. That's why we spent 6 years at Purepost translating roles for the entire economy (military & civilian). Anyone today can go to http://www.purepost.co and complete a Passport for free - FOR LIFE. Service members will have their military roles instantly translated into language civilian hiring managers will understand (and featuring a graduate-level Ivy League resume template). Moreover, once they complete their Passport, they will be instantaneously matched to any of the ~4 million open job requisitions in the National Labor Exchange. Again - all for free, FOR LIFE. Check it out.
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Just left my Job with Dell Technologies because of the lack of opportunity and raise in the 7 year 11 months I work for them I'm changing correars to protective security officer as it pays $4 more an hour then I made with Dell with my Collage degrees in IT Management Networking seem as if I wasted the 7 year of school only to move to a skill set I learn in the Army. Same Corporate American dose not pay competitive wages and look down on those who protected the right for them to conduct business in this country.
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One-time Presidential front-runner Gary Hart suggests additional reasons for the disconnect —> “...the military has become a society unto itself...” —and— “... military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.” Reserve and Guard unit members are fortunate to face those issues to a much lesser extent.
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