Veterans are arguably one of the most underrepresented groups in any business workforce. For unbiased employers, this should be cause for some concern. Hiring biases or gaps in the recruitment process for vets (or both) could be costing businesses opportunities to onboard world-class talent. By extension, less biased competing employers tend to not pass up such candidates. Effectively, employers aren’t just impairing their own workforce; they may also be offering competitors the opportunity to strengthen theirs.
Despite increasingly intense competition over talent pools, most veteran workers still struggle to secure meaningful roles in civilian or corporate roles. Find out why below:
Four Reasons Businesses Are Missing Out on Vet Talent
The reasons for this obvious underrepresentation are layered and complex. As with all gaps, overcoming them requires effort on the candidate’s part as well as the employers. From an employer’s perspective, businesses would do well to identify and address key areas. In particular, addressing these four points can help businesses realign their hiring processes to be more veteran-inclusive:
Veteran Candidates Often Struggle to Translate Skills
The biggest and most common issue when hiring veterans is not a lack of skill, but another barrier altogether – specifically, that employers and candidates often struggle to properly identify and translate key skills when in conversation. Veterans have a solid foundation built on desirable work ethics like courage, teamwork, and responsibility, but they also have much more to offer than a range of soft skills.
Many veterans work on complex military equipment. Others could be involved in the development and testing of systems crucial to the military’s needs and some may have experience managing military supply chains and warehousing. In the civilian world, these can translate effectively into technical expertise, development experience, and supply chain management. In short order, such skillsets become an ideal fit for most civilian businesses. The biggest hurdle to be overcome is how recruiters and candidates can translate these skills correctly.
Onboarding Processes May Not Address Veteran Needs
Veterans have extensive experience and a fairly diverse skill set of both soft and hard skills. However, there is an obvious difference between specific business skill requirements and general candidate potential. In other words, veterans aren’t super-candidates that can do well in any role. In many cases, military experience can create a mismatch between candidate ability and employer expectations. An onboarding process that does not accommodate veteran candidate needs can only make matters worse. A more veteran-inclusive approach can help, particularly where it enriches onboarding, orientation, and initial training. Otherwise, businesses and candidates will keep struggling to bridge this critical gap.
Conscious or Unconscious Hiring Bias Can Impact Decisions
Hiring bias remains one of the biggest obstacles that cause businesses to miss out on key talent. In a strictly veteran context, popular culture has overstressed the mental and physical impact of military service. While military veterans routinely encounter dangerous and potentially lethal situations during service, they are not as prone to dysfunction as popular culture seems to suggest. The military takes pride in maintaining the physical and mental health of all service members. And those involved in actual conflict receive specialized attention to address any resulting physical and mental trauma.
Another fairly common hiring bias relates to a veteran candidate’s ability to be anything other than a member of the military. This is a particularly unreasonable bias. Like any other candidate, veteran applicants have intelligence and the ability to adapt. These two components can prove critical when it comes to learning, unlearning, and relearning. Ultimately, the average veteran candidate has as much (or more) potential to offer as a comparable civilian applicant. Foregoing such potential simply because of military experience limits the kind of talent businesses hire.
Civilian Recruiters Are Unequipped for Veteran Candidates
While veteran workers can and do compete effectively with employees with a civilian background, employers should not overlook one key fact: despite their comparable performance, a civilian and a veteran are very different candidates. A general in-house recruiter may have no trouble dealing with the former category of applicants, but veterans may require more specialized attention. This is where partnering with an experienced veteran hiring agency can help. These agencies often have former veterans working as recruiters. The shared experience and camaraderie often make it far easier for recruiters to engage with applicants. This, in turn, may increase the chance of a valuable veteran hire that might otherwise have been overlooked.