Journey to Create a Military Recruiting Program

This is my first attempt at writing a LinkedIn Article, so please bear with me as I am not a writer by any means. I was thinking about how often I see other military recruiters post here and I know it's a big part of the job, which got me thinking......what will I post about???

I thought about it and maybe writing about the journey to creating a military recruiting program could be interesting or useful to people. Maybe it will be another place where some of my peers can comment and provide any advice from their experiences. Maybe nobody will care and it's just for me......either way here we go.

First thing is first: I've never been in the military! I don't know this for sure, but I feel like it's probably rare for someone to start a military recruiting program who has never been in the military themselves. That being said, I thought it might be a good place to start with how I found myself going along this path. My "origin story" if you will, lol.

Growing up, I always though I wanted to be a lawyer. I knew I was going to be a lawyer, it's all I ever thought of as far as career paths go. Going into college at George Mason University, that was still the goal. After I graduated, I took the LSATs (hardest test I ever took BTW) and did get into law school. Huge accomplishment, not everyone even gets there so I was doing great! I decided to take a class in the summer session to ease myself into it and get a taste of law school before going through a full schedule in the fall. Two weeks into that......I didn't want to be a lawyer anymore haha. Law school wasn't a shock, I went in with eyes wide open, I knew what it would be, but I decided that it wasn't what I wanted for the next few years of my life, so I left before I accumulated a huge amount of debt.

So now what???? I never wanted to do anything else, I never thought of doing anything else. I ended up in auto insurance claims because someone who was in the law firm I worked in part time had a spouse in the industry. That started me on a 20+ year path of customer service roles in many different industries. I worked at a number of different companies, some of them are the biggest companies in the country and the world! I was good at customer service.....really good. When Covid hit, I was working in the educational travel industry. Well, there was no school and no travel, so that was not a role that would continue through the pandemic, understandably. I was unemployed and looking for where my path would lead me next.

It lead me to Capital One. As I was writing this, I thought should I name the companies as I write, but it's LinkedIn right? Anyone can click on my profile and see where I worked, so why not??? I have nothing bad to say about the places I worked, so back to the story. As I went through the process, I was contacted by a recruiter. I had never worked with a recruiter before. The only recruiting I ever knew was related to sports. I enjoyed the interaction with him, found out we both played hockey and had really good and helpful conversations.

When you go into a large company like Capital One with an entry level role like I did, you always think about where you want to go next within the company. I'd been doing customer service for a long time and as I was before, at Cap One, I was really good at it. I was at the top of my group, I was training new employees, helping my teammates meet their KPI numbers, but I didn't want to be on the phones 8 hours a day forever. I thought......my customer service skills would really translate to recruiting and I enjoyed that process, so maybe I could help bring in new people to the company.

I did everything I could to make that happen. I continued to excel in my role, I hooked up with a mentor in recruiting and kept in touch with my recruiter. I tried and I tried, but I couldn't make it happen. I didn't have the recruiting experience so I couldn't even get an interview. It's here that I should probably mention, I am not someone that waivers with decisions. Once I decide on something, that's what I want, I don't often second guess things like that. So I wanted to be a recruiter. I was realistic that I wouldn't be able to go straight to being a recruiter, but I knew I could be a recruiting coordinator. I could learn about the process and then one day be a recruiter. As I said, it wasn't happening at Capital One. I don't blame them, it's a field that people want to be in and I didn't have experience. I was good enough to get passed the initial screens of resumes, but never enough to get interviewed for the role. It was time to take this into my own hands.

Like I said, it's what I wanted, I was not going to give up. I didn't want to look at other companies, but I wanted to be a recruiter so I started looking. I found a role as a recruiting coordinator. It was through a contracting firm, but the work was with Accenture Federal Services. I picked things up very quickly. I knew my customer service skills would translate and they did. Very soon, I was doing tasks above and beyond the job description of a coordinator. I was sourcing candidates for the recruiters, which at AFS was not typically done by coordinators. A little over six months into my time there, my lead asked me if I had any bandwidth to help another team out as well. I'm a team player and I wanted to prove myself to AFS, so of course I'll help.

The team that needed help was the Military Recruiting Team! As with corporate recruiting, I didn't know this was a thing. I knew the military had recruiters to bring people in, but I had no idea that companies had recruiters for when people came out of the military. I had no idea what a skillbridge program was, but I soon found out. THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO!!!

I was helping the military team for less than a week when I knew this felt different, this was where I wanted to be. Soon, I was spending about 50% of my time helping the military team. I took on the added job description of Military Recruiting Liaison and I loved it. I had a great teammate and a great lead who helped me to learn more about the military and how the program worked. I was helping on info sessions each Friday, even did a few of them solo. I often said to the candidates, I was happy to be there and help those who helped us.

Going back a little, I said that I have never been in the military and that's true. I do have some connections to it though. I had family members who were in the military. My father retired from the Department of Defense where he served as a civilian employee for over 30 years. We moved from New Jersey to Virginia when I was 13 years old because the Naval base in New York where he worked was being shut down and he was transferred to Virginia. I know it's not the moving around that military families do, but I did get a taste of that. Leaving everything I'd ever known right before I started high school, certainly not ideal.

Being in Virginia Beach, a huge military community, it was everywhere around me. The fighter jets were flying over our house and my school daily. A lot of my friends went the military route as you'd expect in that area. So my connections to the military were pretty deep. Of course, I have an appreciation for what they do regardless of any connections I had. People who willingly risk their lives for the protection of others will always have my full respect!

So, I knew I wanted to do military recruiting, but could that actually happen? During this time I was working with that team, I was progressing with my original team. I was now taking on full recruiter duties and even transferred my coordinator work to another coordinator. I was still being paid through the contracting company as a coordinator even though I wasn't doing that anymore, but that's another story!!! I wanted to do military recruiting full time, that team wanted me, but with the state of the recruiting field having much publicized cuts not only was that not going to happen since AFS wasn't going to expand the team at that time, but it also meant that after a year and a half, I wasn't going to be brought on full time any time soon either. A lot of people like the contract role life......I did not. I was doing a job I wasn't being appropriately compensated for and that wasn't going to change as long as I was a contractor. So, once again I was left to find another role that would accomplish the goal I had set for myself.

Military recruiting roles are not ones you see posted often, if at all. It's a smaller part of the recruiting world, so I couldn't look for that specifically, especially without a military past. I was lucky to find a role with The Brink's Company. I was coming in again as a Recruiting Coordinator, but in a full time role with a clear vision that I would move into a full Recruiter role after a short time. My time there so far has been fantastic, the people are great, the team is great, it's a amazing company to work for. I started talking to my supervisor about the military stuff I had done and was shocked that a company like Brinks did not have a military recruiting team or a skillbridge program. The company was founded in 1859, there are lots of roles available, it seemed like a natural place this should go. We did some checking and were given the go to explore this further. We met with Hiring Our Heroes, we are meeting with hiring managers.......it's starting to happen! AND I AM HERE FOR IT!!!

I'll try to update this as often as I can and go through the actual journey to getting this program off it's feet, but I think this was an important first article. Now you know how I got here and why I am pushing for this program to succeed!! Hope to see you all follow me on this awesome journey!