Your organization has made the commitment to hire military veterans. But where do you start?
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has a solution: HireVets.
The web portal, launched in late 2018, connects SHRM members with the largest database of veteran job seekers.
The HireVets tool includes a nationwide candidate database, a military skills translator and candidate-matching technology to link veterans with positions that best match their skills.
HireVets is not a job board. It's a matching tool to help fill open positions with veterans searching for employment. The platform is adding 24,000 new job seekers each month and currently houses the profiles of over 200,000 veteran candidates seeking work.
"SHRM has done an excellent job creating resources to educate HR professionals and taking organizations from veteran-friendly to veteran-ready," said Andrew Morton, director of certification affairs for SHRM and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. "The challenge we see for employers with veteran hiring programs is how to find the right veterans for their open positions. HireVets is giving SHRM members the access to the veterans they're looking for."
"Being in HR, you know there's a hiring crunch, and it's tough to find talent," said Jack Fanous, the CEO and co-founder of JobPath, an online job training and resource site for veterans based in New York City. JobPath powers the technology behind HireVets.
"HireVets will connect you with incredible talent coming out of the military. But it's more than a list of candidates—the tool will educate you on what types of vets you should be sourcing," Fanous said. "Instead of being confused about military job titles and feeling challenged when asked to hire veterans, HireVets walks you back from the types of skills you are sourcing for to the military occupational specialties (MOS) veteran job seekers had."
Fanous said HireVets will help demystify the challenge of recruiting and hiring veterans. "People in the military wake up every day and go to their jobs just like civilian workers," he said. "They have 9-to-5 jobs, with specific responsibilities just like civilian workers. The alphanumeric MOS codes are what's different and that's what's made it so hard for HR over the years. This tool is designed to uncover veteran talent so you can make good hires."
[SHRM members-only toolkit: Employing Military Veterans]
Veterans and spouses of military servicemembers can register on the HireVets site. To ensure the database is up-to-date, the profiles of users who haven't logged into the site for 90 days are hidden. Employers seeking veteran talent can purchase a 30-day subscription to the site for $249.
Recruiters can then search for an unlimited number of candidates for any position based on criteria like military occupation, civilian experience, education, location and security clearance. The technology also automatically matches candidates to positions based on search criteria in job postings. This can be done for individual jobs or for all of an organization's positions uploaded from an applicant tracking system.
"Over the last 15 years of my life—both in and out of uniform—I've seen how veteran-related job boards work, and HireVets stands out from other veteran sourcing tools because of the breadth of active job seekers in the system," Morton said. JobPath partners with all the military service branches and several military veterans' organizations.
HireVets includes a military skills translator for 7,500 military job titles. "We've all been to military job fairs," Fanous said. "They're very busy and when someone says he or she was an '88 Mike,' we often say, 'Thank you for your service,' take their resume and move on. You don't often have time to ask more about what that means and if they are a fit for your organization."
If you're hiring for truck drivers, you can use the translator to find out that an 88 Mike is exactly what you need.
HireVets will be available for demo at the 2019 Society for Human Resource Management Annual Conference & Exposition in the SHRMStore in Las Vegas Convention Center Halls N1-N2.
You can also view a product demo here.
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