5 Innovative Recruitment and Retention

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is dedicated to caring for our country’s veterans in recognition of the immense sacrifices they have made for our country. With the economy struggling, many veterans face major challenges transitioning to civilian life. To help address this issue, VA launched an innovative program called VA for Vets, which officially began on Veterans Day 11/11/11. The original announcement from Eric K. Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, noted that “VA for Vets is a high-tech and high-touch approach to recruiting, hiring, and reintegrating veterans into the VA workforce.”

VA for Vets is managed by the newly created Veteran Employment Services Office (VESO). The program introduces a suite of tools and services designed to aid VA in expanding its recruitment and hiring of veterans and improving its success in retaining veterans and transitioning them into productive employment. After its initial successes, VA is now expanding the scope of the program beyond VA to promote employment of veterans across the federal government and in the nonprofit sector. Many of the strategies and tools used by VA for Vets have also proven their value as broadly applicable human capital practices transferrable to any organization seeking to improve employee recruitment and retention results. VA for Vets represents a best practice with the potential to help both federal and private organizations meet their human capital goals.

The Veteran Employment Challenge

In recent years, with the influx of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan and a lagging economy, the veteran population has been struggling with unemployment and underemployment. A presidential mandate (Executive Order 13518) was issued to increase federal hiring of veterans and actively support their recruitment and preparation for civil service. The VA secretary created VESO and the VA for Vets program to address recruitment, retention, and reintegration of veterans into the workforce. In 2009, veterans made up 29 percent of VA’s workforce; the secretary set a goal of 40 percent.

To achieve the secretary’s goals, VA recognized that a transformation was needed in the way it recruited and hired veterans and reintegrated them into the civilian workforce. VA for Vets is helping transform veteran recruitment and placement. The key themes driving the transformation are advocacy, empowerment, and making veterans career-ready. With these principles in mind, VESO reviewed and addressed key issues and barriers in the areas of recruitment and outreach, retention, hiring-process improvement, and reintegration. The result is a comprehensive website, with supporting services, that reaches veterans in the job market, helps them understand how their military experience relates to the market, supports them in seeking employment opportunities, and aids hiring managers in drawing on the immense talent pool of veterans to fill their vacancies.

VA for Vets includes several innovative, high-impact components:

• Virtual job fairs

• Career coaching

• Training

• Hiring process reforms

• Civilian credentialing.

Virtual Job Fairs: VA for Vets Career Center

While traditional “brick and mortar” job fairs have proven very successful, they require substantial resources to plan and operate. VESO has developed a parallel option to supplement and even replace costly job fairs. The VA for Vets career center, located on the VA for Vets website, provides an efficient, automated way to register veterans. The suite of online tools at the VA for Vets online career center website includes an advanced integrated military skills translator and career assessment tool, a resume builder, and a job search engine. Career counselors are available online or in person to assist veterans with every aspect of recruitment and reintegration into the civilian workforce.

In the first two weeks, more than 31,000 veterans visited the website, more than 3,700 registered accounts, and more than 1,900 saved resumes to the site. The coaches, veteran representatives, and help desk technicians work from two veteran coaching call centers in Dumfries, Virginia, and Edensberg, Pennsylvania, as well as a help desk facility in New Orleans, Louisiana. The website and centers provide an efficient way for veterans to register for jobs and receive the tools and counseling they need to become more marketable in the civilian sector. This comprehensive approach has made VESO’s VA for Vets website the backbone of VA’s hiring effort.

The following are the key components of the site (Figure 5-1):

• Military skills translator. A major challenge of the recruitment process, in any environment, is effectively communicating the candidate’s skills and abilities to the potential employer. For veterans, this can be especially challenging, as they sometimes have difficulty translating military experience and terminology into civilian workplace terms. To address this challenge, VESO developed a robust military skills translator, which uses military terminology such as service, rank, and military occupational specialty to identify skills relevant to the civilian labor market. With further assistance from VESO staff or career coaches, the veteran candidate is automatically directed to potential civilian employment opportunities based on military experience.

  FIGURE 5-1 Keys Components of VA for Vets

  

• Assessment center. The assessment center includes a suite of online tools to aid veterans in assessing their personal interests, job-related skills, work activities, and general aptitude to help find matches with occupations available in VA and across government. The assessment center includes lengthy inventories of skills and work activities required by a broad spectrum of occupations. These, along with specially developed interest and aptitude assessment instruments, support veterans in understanding their strengths and figuring out where to target their employment search. The results of the assessment flow directly into the resume builder so they are accurately and prominently represented to hiring managers.

• Resume builder. Users can integrate their translated skills, assessment results, and employment history into a resume through the VA for Vets career center resume builder. The resume builder enables veterans to create resumes that provide all the information needed by government agencies. It automatically integrates results from the translator and the assessment tools, and it also provides help with resume-writing techniques. Users can maintain several versions of their resume and upload them to the VA for Vets resume database for VA hiring managers and supervisors to view.

Career Coaching

VA for Vets also provides coaching services to veterans in a variety of formats, including face-to-face, by telephone, and virtually through an online collaboration workspace. Coaches focus on providing the following support:

• Guidance on using the career center and other resources

• Application, resume, and cover letter reviews

• Practice interviews

• Follow-up support to keep job seekers on track to reach their career goals.

Virtual collaboration provides a forum for engaging and productive conversations between veterans and their coaches. Using technology that is ideally suited to online collaboration, veterans and deployed military service members can efficiently conduct professional and personal activities and work toward achieving better vocational outcomes. The live, interactive, virtual workspace provides all the benefits of an in-person meeting, yet it allows users to be anywhere in the world. Users can invite coaches, supervisors, and HR professionals to join them in their personalized, virtual room to review and edit documents, work on whiteboards, take web-based training, and more. The space also allows and encourages users to provide a personal touch by creating a personal avatar, posting photos, and sharing hobbies and interests.

Training

VA for Vets has invested in a suite of training and educational resources to help military service members, supervisors, and HR professionals prepare for and manage military deployments, including the transition back to the civilian workfoce. Through the VA for Vets site, users can access webcasts that address the entire deployment lifecycle. The following webcasts are currently available on the site:

• Employment and Readiness. Demonstrates effective communication between a supervisor and a military service member who has just learned of an upcoming deployment. The video includes instructions for supervisors on how to use a letter of agreement and a transition plan to clarify roles during this phase of the deployment lifecycle.

• Predeployment I and 2. Addresses the predeployment phase of the deployment lifecycle, which begins when a military service member receives orders to deploy. The training helps a supervisor use effective communications skills to address the service member’s concerns while planning for the workload transition required for deployment.

• Reintegration 1 and 2. Helps supervisors communicate with and help a military service member transition back into a work setting after deployment. The webcast demonstrates how a supervisor can provide feedback to a military service member who has recently returned from deployment, while respecting privacy and directing the service member to additional resources that can assist with overall well-being in addition to work performance.

• Leading the Way. Demonstrates how supervisors and colleagues can help military service members return from deployment and adjust to the civilian workforce.

Hiring Process Reforms

The process for filling a job in the federal government is notoriously slow. President Obama recently called attention to this issue by launching an end-to-end hiring reform initiative aimed at identifying inefficiencies and obstacles in the current process and speeding up the time to hire. The end-to-end hiring initiative reduced the average time to fill a federal job from 120 days to fewer than 100 days, and a target was set for all agencies to reduce the time further to fewer than 80 days.

By contrast, VESO has demonstrated the consistent ability to fill federal government jobs through its database of veteran candidates in fewer than 25 days. VESO was successful in streamlining the rules governing the hiring of veterans by fully using special appointing authorities that enabled hiring managers to bypass certain competitive requirements when hiring veterans. Hiring managers are able to fill positions quickly with highly qualified veteran applicants.

Civilian Credentialing

One of the barriers to veterans securing civilian employment is often their lack of formally recognized credentials or certifications, despite their having extensive military experience in the fields for which the credentials are required. VESO has supported several new programs to provide job credentialing for service members leaving the military. Once they have secured the proper civilian credentials, veterans are better positioned to find the jobs that fit their skills and experience.

For example, VESO has partnered with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) on a one-year pilot program that offers intermediate care technician (ICT) positions to separating or recently separated medics, medical technicians, and corpsmen. ICTs perform technical health care procedures under the supervision of emergency department physicians. VHA has leveraged VESO’s expertise in special hiring authorities to fill ICT positions in 15 medical centers across the country.

VESO is also working closely with the Departments of Transportation and Labor to enable veterans to convert their military training and job specialty skills to careers in the transportation industry. This effort will help veterans transfer their military certifications directly to the equivalent civilian certifications and licenses.

Results and Implications

Since VESO was launched on Veterans Day, 11/11/11, it has had a powerful impact on veteran recruitment, retention, and reintegration. Hundreds of thousands of veterans have visited the VA for Vets website. VESO has received positive responses from job seekers and potential employers. The time to hire veterans has consistently been below the governmentwide competitive hiring average, and hundreds of veterans have been hired nationwide. VESO has linked veteran candidates not only to jobs in VA but to positions ranging from border patrol agents in the Customs and Border Protection Bureau to scientists at the National Science Foundation. The overall program, as well as specific components of the program, have been recognized inside and outside government, winning awards across a variety of categories, including the most innovative recruitment program, best recruitment video, and excellence in human resources.

Although VA for Vets was created with a singular focus on veterans, its success has implications that go far beyond veterans and suggests a number of best practices that would benefit any HR organization. Three notable accomplishments could be especially useful in almost any HR or organizational environment:

• Targeted recruitment. VA for Vets is best understood as a soup-to-nuts effort to target a particular segment of the labor market and improve recruitment and retention results for that segment. Many businesses and government organizations are also targeting veterans. In addition, organizations outside VA may also be targeting minority groups, women, people with special technical disciplines, or other labor market segments.
  
  VA for Vets demonstrates how to target effectively—from the sophisticated suite of online tools in the career center that make the employment process easy and exciting for veterans, to the personalized attention applicants receive from coaches, to the understanding of the world of veterans that is conveyed through programs like veterans as mentors, to being fast and responsive with hiring processes that don’t keep applicants waiting interminably for a decision. Any organization seeking to connect with a particular segment of the labor market would do well to study what VA for Vets has accomplished.

• Applicant pools. VESO has achieved great results in shortening the time to hire through the VA for Vets program. The program’s success is largely attributable to the strategy of developing a standing database of qualified applicants and keeping it current and relevant to job vacancies. Although this technique is not new, VA for Vets demonstrates the impact that doing it well can have on hiring process efficiency. VA for Vets is a well-designed website that engages applicants and provides tools to help them develop relevant and valid job qualifications data that provide a solid basis for sound job matches.

• Virtual tools and processes. The HR profession overall has been struggling, through fits and starts, to enter the automated era. VA for Vets represents a live case study in how to make that transition effectively. While the program includes many components, its heart and soul is the website. The website draws veterans in and keeps them there throughout their employment search and even afterwards, as they begin to learn about and adapt to the VA organization. It makes the hiring process easy and efficient for hiring managers and HR professionals. It integrates all the other components of the program and creates the “high-tech, high-touch” feel that Secretary Shinseki originally envisioned when he launched the program. The way VA for Vets applies technology to a broad audience but with an individual focus offers many valuable lessons for any HR organization.

The success of this program can be attributed to several key factors:

• Top leadership commitment. From the start, this program has had the highest level of support, including the secretary of VA, and has benefited from its alignment with the goals and direction of the president. This support has been critical to VESO’s ability to marshal the resources necessary to make the program a success. It has also been instrumental in creating enthusiasm and confidence within VA and among veterans that the federal government has a serious commitment to improved engagement of veterans.

• Commitment at all levels. Top-level support was effectively communicated and translated into support up and down the organization, from the HR community in VA to line hiring managers who were critical users of the program and its processes.

• Effective application of technology. Technology tools have made the program a success. VESO and its extended technology team built a site that worked, was integrated, and “caught on” with the user population.

• High-touch approach. Too often technology diminishes the quality of the customer interaction, creating frustration and resistance as users miss interacting with a real person. VESO was able to strengthen the user interaction through its technology, heightening it through the integration of additional “human” services (coaches, veteran representatives, help desk technicians, and VESO staff). The high-touch vision was successfully realized.

• Systemic focus. Key to the success of this program has been VESO’s relentless focus on the broader issue of hiring and retaining veterans and its determination to find solutions. VESO is now looking beyond VA and even the federal government to create a larger employment market that can serve veterans better. VESO’s eagerness to go wherever necessary to have maximum impact was a critical ingredient in the success of this program.

VESO’s VA for Vets program has provided a comprehensive approach for VA to address employment challenges for veterans within VA, across the federal government, and throughout the nonprofit sector.