Getting Started

I'll be honest, I haven't written a blog post in years. I hadn't really given it much thought until I had a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. During that conversation, he mentioned that writing a blog is a way for me to say what I really want without worrying about whether or not parent companies of social media sites will slap my hand for what I talk about.

Don't worry, I won't be diving into politics, religion, or many other issues. I know those are all very divisive topics, and I'd much rather talk about what my company, Suiting Green Consulting, does and how it can benefit your company.

By now, I would hope that if you're here, you've read my About Me page on this site, so you know where I'm coming from and why I'm so passionate about companies hiring from the military community. If you haven't, then I'll let you jump over to read that and then come back here.

Welcome back!

There's a lot to be done in the space of bringing companies to a Military Ready standard. It's honestly a lot easier to just be Military Friendly than it is to be Military Ready. Being Military Friendly simply means that someone in your company decided it was a good idea to hire people from the military community and that's what your company is trying to do. Whether or not you're successful in hiring one or 100 veterans or military spouses, if those former military personnel or military spouses you hire stay with you company beyond 12-18 months, or the people you've hired are working in roles that are commensurate with their knowledge, experience, and skills isn't really that important to a lot of Military Friendly companies. More often than not, they're hiring to fill seats and they're not intentional in how they're hiring or running their military hiring initiative.

I'm not saying this is every company, but it is a lot of them. This is really evident when we start looking at bigger companies. They don't take the time to train their hiring managers or recruiters on what the military community can bring to their organization. Most of the time this is simply due to a knowledge gap. Someone somewhere in the company read that hiring veterans was the socially responsible thing to do, and now the company has a military hiring initiative. The other piece of this is that a lot of what these companies know about the military comes from Hollywood.

I'll let you in on a secret here, Hollywood is in the entertainment business, and a lot of what they show you is just to sell tickets, get you to download their product, or tell a compelling story. If you're looking to Hollywood to tell you everything you need to know about the military community, and for it to be accurate, I'm probably not the right person to help your military hiring initiative. However, if you want the truth, if you want to know some of the best ways to approach, recruit, employ, engage, and retain the top talent that exists out there in the military talent stream, you are in the right place and I look forward to working with you.

I think that's a good start, for now. But I look forward to the next installment, and I hope you do too. Be good out there!