Military Recruiting Programs: 3 Ways to Profile the Candidates You Need to Hire

The U.S. military requires many different jobs, from medical and IT personnel to finance and logistics folks. These military job profiles and positions dovetail nicely into the civilian job sector. These include IT, with its list of certifications that benchmark candidates to jobs in industry, as well as logistics and finance positions, where skillsets and training from the military mirror those needed in the commercial sector.

As a Talent Acquisition or HR professional how do you profile the candidates you need to fill management, technical, and sales positions, enabling your recruiters and hiring managers to find the right people?

* Discuss profiles with managers who have hired military candidates and discuss what candidates were successful in the interview process. Managers that have hired military talent can explain who they want and where to find them. In many cases they will demand it.

* Talk to your current employees who are veterans and ask them their story. They will tell you why they were hired and why they fit in with your company. Find out if they were a referral, a career conference candidate, or a placement. Good candidates know other good candidates.

* Consult or hire someone with military recruiting experience to help you assess profiles quickly and develop your recruiting program. These professionals have been recruiting military and veteran candidates across all services for many years and can save you much time and money.

What about hiring a veteran with no recruiting experience and asking them to build your military program for you? I’ve seen companies do this, fumble for 6-12 months and have to start over. You wouldn’t hire a finance director from an engineering company to run your engineering department just because they know how an engineering company looks - you still need the right skill sets to get the job done. Being able to get on a military installation doesn’t translate into knowing how to build one of the most important talent pipelines for your company.

Spend the time up front to profile the right military candidates for your company – small successes lead to a great talent pool down the road.