Journey to Creating a Military Program

Thank you to everyone who read the first article and for the positive feedback I received. You never know when you start doing something like this if people will want to read about it. We live in such a headline society now, people often don't go passed that into the meat of the subject (I'm guilty of this too sometimes).

Back to the actual topic. Last time, it was all about me and I know you all couldn't get over how interesting I really am!! This time I would like to get a little more into how I am going about this project. After we checked and got the go ahead to explore a military hiring program, my mind was racing!!! I want to do this, I want to do that! I want a skillbridge program, I want a veteran hiring program, I want a military spouse hiring program, I want all of the things!! Do I want to wait for it to happen slowly and organically? NO!!!! Do I know that it can't happen real fast and it needs to happen slowly and methodically......yes, yes I do. I told you before I know what I want and I go for it, well I'm going for it!!

We set a meeting with Hiring Our Heroes and they were great. Even though we hadn't used HoH on the corporate side of things, Brink's had an existing relationship with them, so the transition was easy. We had a great conversation and they have been super to work with. I ask a question and Aleks is right there with an answer. So, I've got the ok to explore this. I've got the meeting with HoH done, now what? Now......I have to convince people to do this.

Most of the people reading this are probably already in the military recruiting field, so this will be no shock. The toughest part of getting hiring managers on board with this is to convince them of the transferable skills of servicemembers. For those of us who haven't been in the military, haven't lived that life, we don't know what it's really like. We don't know that you have to pivot time after time. We don't know what an MOS is (I do now although I am not expert) and what those mean. We don't all know that you can't call everyone in the military a soldier even!!! BTW, only the Army likes to be called Soldiers! You can get someone mad really quickly by calling them a soldier if they didn't serve in the Army! Here is a quick article about the proper terminology Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, & Sailors – What’s the Difference?

How do you go about convincing people then? As much as I hate it, one person at a time. I knew I would need more ammo to get people to know what I know, that people coming out of the military make excellent employees! They are hard workers, able to learn new things very quickly, are super loyal....among other things. I knew that......many of you know that.....but I have to show people who don't why that is so they will bring people in who on paper may not look like the best candidate, but really are great!! (Side note: you may have noticed that I use a lot of exclamation points. I know this and I'm not gonna stop!!)

I did the thing that I'm sure I'll do a lot throughout this process, I reached out to my LinkedIn network! I know the military community is strong, but so is the military recruiting community!!! I had so many people and organizations reach out to me, meet with me, offer me whatever they could to help me make this work. How would I do this? I assumed the cool Brinks Military logo my amazing wife created may not be enough (shoutout to Stephanie Mercado , hit her up if you have a role for a former teacher who, much like the military, can do so many things!! She really is the best!!) Ok, I could go on an on about how great she is, and she is, but back to the point!! I needed to make a presentation to show hiring managers so I needed information, I needed numbers, I needed things that would convince people and my network responded!!! Special thanks to ??Steven Weston?? from Verizon, Angela Garcia Brooks from Raytheon and Jessica ???? Reynolds (ft. MHRM, MBA) from Echelon Services who were super helpful! I wrote down so much info and used a lot of it for my presentation. Second shoutout to my wife, who got very excited to take my info and make it look pretty on PowerPoint. I am good at a lot of things, making things look good on PowerPoint is not one of them.

Presentation is now done, but I had no one to show it to! We thought about which hiring managers would be good to go to, but it's not easy to get someone to try the unknown. Sometimes life will help you find the way though. By chance, one of our hiring managers had been in contact with someone else at HoH and reached out to us about trying to get a candidate through skillbridge!!!! They came to us!!!! I could not wait to tell my wife, I was so excited!!!! The first and to me hardest part was done, someone was interested. We had the meeting a few days later (I was ready to do then and there, but that was just me, lol). So the following Monday, we met with that HM and someone from his team. I did my presentation, told them why this was great and showed them the info I got from my fantastic network. They........were in!!!!

Now, as it turns out we weren't going to be able to start right away. We had a candidate that may have worked, but the next cohort was starting too soon (this past Monday) so we just didn't have the time. That's ok though, we have a HM who is interested and we will get a new list of candidates in October and WE WILL BE READY!!!

I have so much more to tell, but in the interest of keeping these articles short and sweet, I'll stop here. Thank you to everyone who takes a few minutes out of their busy days to read the ramblings of this Military Hiring Advocate! You all are the best, so happy to be part of this community!!!!