Washington Spurs Hiring When It Supports American Businesses

Sal Iannuzzi has been Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer at Monster Worldwide since April 2007 and has been a member of the Board of Directors since July 2006.

Sen­ate Vet­er­ans’ Affairs Com­mit­tee Chair­man, Patty Mur­ray (D-WA) stated that the “high rate of unem­ploy­ment for recently sep­a­rated vet­er­ans is an issue that at first glance defies com­mon sense.” She noted, that despite their train­ing, skills, and desire to achieve, “over 27 per­cent of vet­er­ans age 20–24 were unem­ployed.”

Mur­ray also pointed out that the process of apply­ing for a civil­ian job is brand new to many young vet­er­ans who had likely never applied for civil­ian employ­ment before join­ing the mil­i­tary. Mur­ray believes that pro­grams like the Trans­ac­tion Assis­tance Pro­gram (TAP) “should be the cor­ner­stone to mean­ing­ful employ­ment for young vet­er­ans.” In addi­tion, Mur­ray said that the gov­ern­ment needs to “improve efforts to trans­late skills from the bat­tle­field, onto a resume, and into an inter­view with a prospec­tive employer.”

Back­ground: TAP is a part­ner­ship pro­gram between DoD, DOL VETS, VA, and DHS (for Coast Guard). TAP work­shops are nor­mally offered some­time dur­ing the last few months of ser­vice, and in the case of National Guard and Reserve, it is often offered as part of their out-processing or demo­bi­liza­tion.

The pres­i­dent of Mil​i​tary​.com, Admi­ral T. McCreary, also tes­ti­fied at the hear­ing. Admi­ral McCreary echoed Murray’s state­ment say­ing that “mil­i­tary per­son­nel need more expo­sure to the pri­vate sec­tor before they leave the ser­vice. That expo­sure needs to hap­pen in the form of enhanced Tran­si­tion Assis­tance Pro­grams where the focus needs to be on the vet­eran get­ting ahead rather than just get­ting out.”

In addi­tion, McCreary pointed to sev­eral key fac­tors that could help improve the tran­si­tion process for today’s younger vets. His sug­ges­tions included bet­ter out­reach to help civlian employ­ers and HR man­agers under­stand the mil­i­tary, a greater effort to trans­late mil­i­tary skills and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions into civil­ian jobs and cre­den­tials, and part­ner­ships that can help lever­age pri­vate sec­tor job search­ing, net­work­ing, and resume build­ing exper­tise.

Read Admi­ral McCreary’s Full Tes­ti­mony

Assis­tant Sec­re­tary for Veteran’s Employ­ment and Train­ing (DOL), Ray­mond Jef­fer­son, tes­ti­fied that the VETS pro­gram is work­ing to impact the bleak employ­ment num­bers by pri­or­i­tiz­ing efforts to trans­form TAP, imple­ment a new approach to employer out­reach, and bet­ter serve rural Vet­er­ans. Jef­fer­son sees the Tran­si­tion Assis­tance Pro­gram as the pri­mary pro­gram for assist­ing indi­vid­u­als in their tran­si­tion process.

To Admi­ral McCreary’s point, I think the focus should be on weav­ing tran­si­tion pre­pared­ness into the ser­vice­mem­bers expe­ri­ence long before the exit-counseling. Not many ser­vice­mem­bers can pay full atten­tion in the TAP work­shops when atten­tion is on relo­ca­tion con­cerns like house hunt­ing, movers, util­i­ties, and hous­ing inspec­tions, not to men­tion the anx­i­ety of wor­ry­ing about the next job.

This article was originally published on Military.com, a Monster Company.

As many regional organizations struggle to get jobseekers back to work, using career sites or community boards, they’re finding that large groups of the unemployed adults in their region do not have the skills or education to qualify them for jobs in growing industries, such as healthcare or technology. Many workforce boards (WIBs) are taking a two-pronged approach to solve this problem. To help adults without the skills to compete for jobs in a region’s booming industries, local governments are taking a remedial approach by directing job training funding towards retraining programs that give workers the skills that regional employers seek.

However, many WIBs are also trying to prevent a future talent gap in their city or region by motivating the youth in their area to pursue higher education. San Antonio’s WIB said that they start engaging students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers as early as middle-school in order to direct their career paths toward higher education and in-demand industries.

Motivating students as early as possible to pursue college is one of the most effective and proactive ways to ensure regions supply the talent needed for their growing industries. Local governments or WIBs should also analyze job data to predict the growing in-demand skills and industries in their state. By encouraging students to follow an in-demand career track, not only are WIBs ensuring that they increase the opportunities available to students in the future, but also attract emergent businesses to their city or region by offering a skilled workforce.

Another effective element is a youth employment program forged with local businesses. Youth employment programs benefit all parties – the community businesses get to know local talent and also train youth in their community, resulting in an easier hiring process in the future. Students have the opportunity to experience different fields of work and form more developed career goals.

Monster PSE created the Making It Count Program to assist WIBs in energizing students about higher education and their future careers. With animated speakers, targeted messaging and engaging content, Making It Count delivers the information to excite students about their futures and spur them to start planning for college and their careers. This encouragement, combined with efforts by WIBs and employers to involve youth in the business community, drives a high-performance workforce.

It’s more important to optimize hiring decisions and recruiting strategies than ever before. The recent economic crisis increased Federal hiring, while hiring plummeted in the private and state and local government sectors. As a result, Federal recruiters have been challenged with a short-term surge in recruitment that is masking a sharp change ahead. Federal budget deficits, delayed budgets, and the demands for government downsizing will place strains on agencies to not just tighten your belts, but to completely re-engineer your recruitment efforts.

The breakfast session examined the application of RLI in helping agencies make smarter recruitment investment decisions and improve their ability to manage their incoming, existing and departing workforce and how to engage and attract top talent.

Monster Government Solutions presented case studies from government agencies and demonstrated their $100M semantic skills matching engine to show new ways that government human capital leaders are preparing for challenges and accelerating the hiring process by easily identifying and recruiting the best candidates.

Under a green jobs training grant, NARC, with Monster and ICF Macro, is helping bring unemployed Americans out of poverty into training designed to help them land employment in the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries. Partnering with Monster in cities including Apache Junction, Ariz., Bisbee, Ariz., Midland, Texas, Odessa, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, NARC is working with local partners to assist workers in high poverty communities train for and find jobs in the emerging energy, building performance and materials reuse fields.

Monster’s expertise comes into the final stage of creating a high-performance workforce: getting employed. Through Monster’s Green Jobs Online Career Community, NARC will be able to offer continued encouragement and support to program participants to increase retention, and assist in the placement of participants through tailored online job boards. Monster is building websites tailored for each region that will function not only as a job board, but as a community forum for all things related to finding or training for a green job in each region. Each website includes feature articles on employers hiring into the green jobs industry training or courses; custom industry subgroups per region, such as HVAC, solar, wind; discussion groups and a calendar of events, such as upcoming career fairs;  videos that feature green stories in the region; and an RSS feed of jobs on Monster.com.

Monster Government Solutions has used their unique ability to tap into extensive job and resume data using Real-Time Labor Intelligence (RLI) to discern the total number of green jobs, leading occupations by area and the skills and education each targeted industry is seeking in a candidate to help NARC tailor and strengthen its approach to turning high-poverty areas into skilled workforces.

Do you think a program to train workers for green jobs would help your community?

Lamar has been combating the high unemployment rate in Macon-Gibb that resulted from major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. Many of these adults do not have the skills or education to be competitive for job openings in other industries, so Lamar and the Macon-Bibb County Workforce Investment Board have been training job seekers in skills that will be attractive to growing industries.

As the NAWB Forum brings private and public sectors together, Lamar expresses hope that the Government and the private sector will continue to build on “a cooperative, collaborative effort to work towards training and educating our workforce.” Take a look at our interview with Lamar and leave your thoughts about his program, or suggestions to help get these people back to work.

The recession hit some industries harder than others, and the latest job openings have been for industries that call for different skills than jobs lost. Industries such as healthcare and IT topped the latest study by Monster on the hottest jobs and markets for job seekers, but many innovative companies looking for candidates with specialized skills discover that it is difficult to find a match.

Fresno has started to get on the right track by running a job training service for local job seekers, but training system struggles to keep up with the constant transformation of job openings, which hinders official’s ability to offer optimal training classes, in order to match people with available jobs.

Monster has been working with states and cities across the United States to address this problem. Monster’s Public Sector and Education division has partnered with state and local governments and education institutions to match workers with emerging employment opportunities. Monster employs a real-time labor intelligence review of job opportunities, as well as the skills current job seekers have in a city or region, pin-pointing exactly where training dollars should go in order to plan seminars based on giving job seekers skills that will enable them to find an open job.

This past blog post talks more about the role that Monster Government Solutions has played across multiple regions in providing the tools and data needed to match up job seekers with openings in specific communities.

Does your city have a job training program? If so, how do you think it could be more effective?

Monster believes that leveraging job matching technology to get Americans back to work is essential in helping achieve this national and bipartisan goal. Monster uses innovative tools that help match seekers with job opportunities, as well as identify expanding industries that are looking for fresh talent. We also partner with federal, state and local governments to recommend where to direct money for training programs in order to grow a workforces that will be in high demand. We look forward to seeing the results of America’s new focus on innovation pay off for job seekers across the nation.

Do you think President Obama’s pledge to invest in research and technology will help secure more American jobs? Is the race for innovation truly what the President called “our generation’s Sputnik moment?”

The freeze “could be the push” many workers “need to say good-bye to Uncle Sam and take their talents elsewhere,” Davidson writes.   They may “retire earlier than they planned because of the way retirement payments are calculated.  They are based on an employee’s three highest paid years, generally the last three.”

If Davidson is right, the feds will face even bigger challenges in hiring more workers.   Even without significant growth, the Partnership for Public Service estimates that the federal government will hire nearly 273,000 new workers by the fall of 2012.  This is due to replacing retiring baby boomers and those leaving government for other reasons.   More retirements could increase that number further.

This provides all the more reason for agencies to enhance and accelerate the hiring process, key goals of hiring reform.  If and when the economy picks up, there is also going to be a war for talent between the public and private sector.   To compete for the best talent, the government needs the right tools and resources to succeed.  That means taking advantage of next generation technology, like Monster’s 6Sense, which goes through thousands of resumes to make a precision match using contextual search logic instead of Boolean logic.  6Sense presents candidates in rank order so hiring managers can quickly focus on the most relevant candidates and hire the best candidates faster while saving time and money.

So the challenges to replace retiring workers and achieve the goals of hiring reform are real, but there are innovations that can help agencies connect with quality job seekers and find the right candidates with the right skills.

That’s why the story of Jessica Gabriel caught our attention. This weekend, Gabriel, a 22-year-old veteran service representative with the Department of Veteran Affairs, was featured in The Minneapolis Star Tribune in a “How I Got That Job” feature. Surprisingly, Gabriel didn’t go through the usual process that most people go through when applying for a government job.  In fact, she didn’t apply at all.  She obtained the job when the agency contacted her after seeing her résumé on a university jobseekers’ data base.

When asked about the best part of the job, Gabriel said, “There are tangible results from every step that I take. A veteran is getting a letter, getting results that are going to help him get money so that he can pay for medicine or take care of his sick wife. Coming into this job and seeing all of the hard work that our military personnel do is pretty overwhelming. It’s pretty satisfying to know that what I do can help pay them back.”

What about for new graduates who are ready to look for a job in government? Gabriel stresses that time is of the essence, “start looking for a job before you graduate! I would also recommend that people see if their school has something like [job boards]. It got me my job.”

Although Gabriel’s story is encouraging, it is even more positive to see an agency take proactive steps to identify the right candidate for the job.  It demonstrates that the VA is changing the way they are thinking about recruiting.

Here at Monster, we embrace this new way of thinking and can help.  Using Power Resume Search, agencies like the VA and others can reach qualified candidates not only at universities but within all levels of experience, to fill open positions.  Agencies can reach out to candidates whose resumes display the appropriate skills and invite them to apply while still following the standard federal hiring process.

So while the current process still seems cumbersome, there are tools out there designed to alleviate some of the issues and allow agencies to spread the word about new openings to qualified candidates.  We salute the Department of Veterans Affairs being proactive and thank Jessica for her dedication to public service!

Do you have a story to share?  If you have secured a position with the federal government and want to discuss the process or if you are a federal recruiter that has used new methods to find qualified candidates, post a comment below.