August 10, 2021
Natalia Rivera & Ramon Torres
What happens to Veterans after they have served their time? Some are not quite ready to transition to civilian life. For some, it might be all they have known for the entirety of their adult life. While most of them receive assistance and training towards the end of their service to assist with the transition, it must be considered that many of them are struggling to do in months what their civilian counterparts have been doing for years.
When you see military experience on a resume, here are some of the implicit hard and soft skills that make a Veteran a competitive (if not better) candidate:
1. Adaptability: Coming from a background where deployments and constant rotations to new duty stations are the norm, Veterans are accustomed to quickly learning new skills and adapting to any given environment.
2. Detailed Oriented: Who else is a better fit for a role that requires attention to detail? How about someone who was instilled with the importance of organization and structure? Veterans are the best choice when it comes to hiring someone that won’t cut corners and will ensure the quality of work.
3. Diversity: Veterans have ample experience working and leading people of different race, gender, and cultural backgrounds. They know how to communicate without barriers or conflict.
4. Leadership Skills: No matter their rank, at one point or another, all Veterans step into a leadership role. They understand how to manage teams, how to plan, and how to execute that plan efficiently.
5. Mentorship/Teamwork: Most Veterans understand the importance of imparting their knowledge unto junior staff, and how these relationships improve the morale, retention, and cohesiveness of the team.
6. Project Management: While they may not realize it themselves, many service members are quickly introduced into project management roles. Throughout their careers, they are often tasked with planning, implementing, and executing projects within an allotted budget and time.
7. Professionalism: When it comes to a professional workforce, Veterans know the importance of appearance and mannerisms. They know how to respect and communicate with coworkers and leadership personnel.
8. Stress Management: This part is all too familiar with fellow Veterans; since day one, they are broken down and built back up to be able to think effectively and diligently during high stress moments. They have also been trained to perceive others who might be under duress, and how to lead them through stressful moments.
9. Technical Prowess: While service members may often use different tools and systems compared to the civilian workforce, many of them come from highly technical backgrounds. Taking adaptability into account, they will be able to quickly learn systems that are completely foreign to them. With that being said; most service members are knowledgeable when it comes to most household software.
10. Values: When joining any military branch, all service members take an oath to bear honesty, allegiance, and obedience. This is why they hold a high standard of pride and integrity in what they do.
As a hiring manager, being able to understand and translate military experience is a boon that is unfortunately too seldom used. The struggle that many military members go through in finding work after their service is not only unnecessary, but also an active detriment to those companies that reject them.
At BLEND360, we have a sense of pride and commitment when it comes to hiring Veterans. They served their time protecting our country, now it’s our time to protect them and ensure their future.
In the past month, our team has added two Veterans to their recruiting team (the writers of this post). We hope that this post sheds light on the implicit skills that military experience on a resume denotes—a Veteran may just be the best hiring decision you and your company make.
