hiring

Veterans: A High-Potential Talent Pool

Jamie Costello · 2019-04-16 · 1 Comment

In response to my article Job Descriptions: 4 Tips for Attracting Diverse Candidates, reader Jamie Costello asked to write about the importance of hiring veterans in the private sector. His article appears in its entirety, below.

Any manager or business owner will tell you that trying to get the right talent for their business is difficult. Hours of flicking through CVs and conducting interviews before you’re able to find the right one. It’s a challenge that all businesses have. One solution: hire more veterans.

According to the British Legion, around 120,000 veterans in the UK (Editor’s note: 326,000 in the United States) are currently unemployed after serving the army, with many desperate to find work. If we consider the qualities that veterans gain from the army, they could be the ideal employees to add to your workforce. Especially when you consider that government schemes have also been introduced to encourage taking on veterans at their work.

Business owners still have doubts about whether they should hire veterans. Here are five solid reasons why military veterans could benefit your business:

Veterans Are Goal-Oriented

It’s most likely that your job advertisement will involve achieving some sort of objectives or goals whilst working at your business. It can be difficult to find individuals that are driven by goals and objectives but you can assure Military veterans are encouraged when goals are in place. Their training is constructed around meeting objectives and achievements through cooperation and collaboration and personal development to achieve will occur as a result.

Veterans Are Responsible

Being serious about their role in the military is something that will be drilled into the heads of military personnel. They’re unlikely to make silly mistakes or bad decisions because they know that the consequences can be very serious. Due to how much it’s drilled into them, they’re likely to be rather particular and precise with their work.

Veterans Exhibit Leadership

A great asset for businesses is being able to hire employees that will stay for the long-term. Hiring internally means your company can grow but be cost-effective at the same time. This makes veterans prime candidates to work their way up the ladder through promotions to more serious leadership roles because of the leadership qualities they would have gained through their training.

Veterans Have a Strong Work Ethic

During their military service, veterans would have gained a go hard or go home mentality. Taking work seriously will be a prime goal of veterans so their work ethic to meeting the demands of the business will be apparent. A business owner will always appreciate a hard worker so if it’s what you’re looking for, it may be worth considering hiring a veteran.

Veterans Can Work Independently

The qualities of a good candidate for a job role will include being able to work independently as well as working in a team. Training in the army, there will be several missions that involve cooperating with your teammates to ensure that the goals are achieved, but certain situations will also involve using initiative and making decisive decisions individually. This is where you’ll be able to benefit from hiring military veterans knowing that trusting your employees to get on with work won’t be an issue.

Here are just a few important examples of how hiring a military veteran can be a great asset to your business. They possess many transferable skills that can be beneficial to your workforce and you’ll be sure they’ll make the effort to achieve goals that are in place for the business, especially when you consider they’d prefer to spend less time sorting out their military personal injury claims and more time being productive as an employee.

About the Author

Jamie Costello is an experienced business writer based in the UK. He uses his experience from education and work experience within several industries to help create his articles. His topics range from career advice to resolving disputes in the workplace.

Choose the Best Candidate, Not the Most Obvious One

Amy C. Waninger · 2018-04-17 · 3 Comments

When you make a decision about your own career, you want to consider the most important factors and make the best choice. If you are a hiring manager, you must also make decisions about other people’s careers. Taking on this level of responsibility requires you to understand and guard against your own biases. After all, your objective is to choose the best candidate, not the most obvious one. This article provides some insights into making more informed hiring decisions.

Preparation Is Critical

If you’ve done your homework, you’ve already positioned yourself to make a good hiring decision. By carefully crafting and strategically distributing the job description for your posting, you have ensured that your slate of candidates is as diverse as possible. You’ve followed scoring criteria for evaluating resumes and conducting fair interviews. Now it’s time to for the hard work: making a hiring decision.

Choose the Best Candidate with Predetermined Criteria

You should already have a weighted scoring system for the job’s key qualifications. When all the interviews are complete, compare your scores with those of other interviewers. Be sure to talk about differences in the scores. If someone has reservations about a particular applicant, dig into their concerns to find out why. Do those concerns reflect the limitations of the candidate or the biases of the interviewer? Be diligent in uncovering interviewers’ biases.

One way to check your process is to be very transparent with your applicants and with the existing team. If you can clearly state how your “winning” candidate scored relative to other applicants, you’ve probably done a good job. On the other hand, being unable (or afraid) to articulate what drove your decision is a sign that you made a biased hiring decision.

Break Scoring Ties with a Skills Assessment or Work Simulation

Even the best scoring criteria can result in ties or results that are “too close to call.” When you have two or more applicants that seem very similarly qualified, there are a number of ways to break the tie without relying on your gut.

Ask your finalists to complete a skills assessment or aptitude test.
Provide your finalists with a real-life problem that your team or company is facing.
Request a writing sample.
Schedule time for them to deliver a presentation or a similar indicator of how they would perform on the job.

Whichever method you use, ensure once again that your evaluation criteria are determined in advance. Then add the new data together with the original resume and interview scores. In other words, try to make your decision as objective as possible. That way, you can really drive to the best decision, not the candidate that you like the best.

Remember that Soft Skills Are “Teachable” Too

Many employers admit to secretly administering a “beer test” in interviews. The “beer test” is a measure of likability and is a direct expression of our affinity biases. If likability is important to you, make it a factor in your criteria. Just don’t make it the only criteria, nor the most important one. Remember that your goal is to choose the best candidate for the job, not the best candidate for you.

Keep in mind that soft skills, including likability, can be taught. Often, managers think that we can only teach technical skills. When we think this way, we’re really missing the boat. We may have people who are very technically capable but who lack some of the soft skills. But none of us was born knowing how to have empathy. We weren’t born knowing how to present to a room of people. And most of us weren’t born good listeners.

We had to learn those skills, too, at some point. Maybe we’ve turned them into strengths, or maybe we just grit our teeth and continue working on them. Regardless, we acquired them somehow. Challenge yourself and your leadership team with questions about how can you help the highest-scoring candidate improve the skills (whether technical or interpersonal) that they lack. That way, you’ll be sure to choose the best candidate from the applicant pool.

Network Like a CHAMP: 5 Critical Connections

Amy C. Waninger · 2017-07-17 · 15 Comments

Professional networking is essential for the longevity of your career and your company. Yet, many people cringe when the subject of networking comes up. If you are new to networking, you may have no idea where to begin. My advice is to start building strong relationships with the people closest to you. In this series, learn the five critical connections you need to maintain for growing your career, your CHAMP network.

CHAMP is an acronym that stands for Customer, Hire, Associate, Mentor, Protege. Your CHAMP network is important because it’s the people you choose to have in your professional life. And if it is true that you are the average of the five people closest to you, then you must be intentional when filling your CHAMP network.

Customers: Your key to first-hand market insights

Regardless of your industry, company / organization, or specific role, you need to understand your customers. Customers will know things about your company and your industry that you do not. The best way to understand your customer is to build a strong, professional relationship with one of them. First, let’s define who counts as a Customer, and who does not.

What is a Customer?

Real Customers have a choice and may (or may not) choose to pay you or your company for the goods and services offered in an open market. If you work for a college, your Customer is any adult who wants to learn. For a bank, your Customer is anyone in your community who has or needs money. If you work for an insurance company, your Customer is anyone who owns a home, automobile, or business.

Your customers’ customers may also be your customers. For example, if you work for a newspaper, you may sell ad space to a local bakery. The bakery is your Customer for the ad space you sell. In turn, the bakery is hoping to reach its Customers through your newspaper. The bakery’s Customers are hungry people in the metropolitan area. Should your newspaper lose sight of the needs of hungry people in the metropolitan area, you may also lose the ad revenue from the local bakery.

Anyone who could be buying your product or service is a Customer. If they are buying from you, learn about their experience working with you or your company. If they are buying from a competitor, find out why. How is your competitor differentiating its products or services? What can you learn from your Customer network about trends in the market, the competitive landscape, and the quality of your products and services?

What about internal customers?

People inside your company are not Customers. They are your business partners, working in collaboration with you, on behalf of the company, for the benefit of its stakeholders. There seems to be a push in business to talk about “internal customers.” I hate this term. “Internal customers” don’t have a choice and don’t give up their money for your goods or services. (More on this in a future post.)

Even if someone working for your company purchases the company’s goods and services, don’t count them as the C in your CHAMP network. They have access to the same insider lingo you do. They likely have the same blind spots and biases that you have. And they do not have the unique “outsider” perspective that you need to see your industry or your company from a fresh point of view.

Hire: Filling your network with talented people

Almost everyone, at some point in their career, needs a little help finding a job. The better poised you are to help them find a good fit, the more goodwill you will create in your network. I am not recommending that you hire your friends to fill your team. Instead, I am suggesting that when you meet other professionals, you should consider whether you to include them in your Hire network.

If you are a manager

If you manage a team of people, you will inevitably find yourself needing to hire someone. Rather than hope for the best when the open position goes online, you should be working now to build a pipeline of people who could join your team. Talk to the people in your industry, as often as possible, about their strengths, recent successes, and career ambitions. When a spot opens up on your team, make sure you get the word out in your Hire network. You’ll be able to fill jobs faster and with better-qualified people.

Also, if you are a manager, you likely work with other managers quite a bit. When those managers are hiring, find out what skills, capabilities, and qualities they are hoping to find. Making connections to talented people in your Hire network will help everyone involved.

If you are not a manager (yet)

Even if you’re not a manager (yet), you need a Hire network. Someone in your network is probably hiring right now. Someone else in your network may be a perfect fit for that open role. Are you positioned to make that connection? If so, provide a “warm transfer” referral by introducing the two individuals to each other. Referrals are as good as — and possibly better than — hires. (No one wants to network like a CRAMP, so the word that started with H won the spot in the acronym.)

In addition to referrals, you can be building your Hire network for the day when you are the one building a team or interviewing for a colleague’s replacement. Many people who are managers today did not set out to become managers. Yet sometimes an opportunity or promotion is just too good to pass up. Those that come into management with a strong Hire network are well ahead of the game!