When Steve Cundy joined the U.S. Army in 1995, he was a kid straight out of high school.
Four years later, the Army Ranger, conditioned to “jumping out of planes and blowing stuff up,” landed back into a civilian life marked not by adventure, but anonymity.
“I didn’t have a college education. So ultimately, I’m unskilled. What do I do short of killing bad guys and blowing stuff up? There aren’t a lot of jobs out there for that,” Cundy said. “So, I went into the abyss. I lost that sense of purpose.”
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Cundy[/caption]
As Cundy persevered, steering clear of substance abuse and the depths of deep depression that can ensnare veterans of all stripes, he realized that many of the people who served hadn’t been so lucky.
Today, the president and chief executive officer of Sussex-based Tuatara Consulting and founder of Taskforce Uplift – a nonprofit serving children of U.S. veterans – spends what spare time he does have helping large companies recruit military personnel, veterans, and their spouses.
“Between 250,000 and 300,000 folks transition out of the military each year. And then when you add all the military spouses that are transitioning with them, you have a perpetual loop of 300,000 to 400,000 people every year leaving the military that are looking for a soft place to land,” Cundy said. “And a lot of companies don’t know the first thing about how to connect those wires to get after that talent.”
Bridging the skills gap
A major part of Cundy’s work involves connecting his clients – some of the region’s largest employers such as Komatsu Mining, Kohler Co., Kohl’s Corp., Eaton Corp. and Rockwell Automation – with Hiring Our Heroes.
Run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Hiring Our Heroes connects the military community, including service members, military spouses and veterans, with American businesses looking for workers.
One of the ways Hiring Our Heroes helps connect employers with veterans is through the Department of Defense SkillBridge program, which pairs outgoing military personnel who have 100 days left of service with private-sector employers. While still on the DOD payroll, the service men and women are placed in 13-week internships that are free to employers. If the intern is a good fit, then the company is required to hire the service member once the internship is over.
HOH runs a similar program – funded by a grant from Deloitte – that serves miliary spouses. That program can be even more critical to miliary families, as the unemployment rate for military spouses is 21%.
HOH programs often focus on skilled positions, helping Boeing to recruit F-16 mechanics, for instance. But SkillBridge also helps military staff whose skills, educational background or military job, might not have an obvious counterpart in the civilian world.
Milwaukee-based Komatsu Mining, one of the companies Cundy helped connect with HOH, has been recruiting veterans who have worked in motorpools, fixing Humvees and other vehicles.
“They have mechanical aptitude and Komatsu is willing to onboard them in the organization, and pay them $100,000 a year or more, because there’s a shortage of people that can work on their big equipment,” Cundy said.
The whole goal of the program, he said, is to reduce the amount of time a veteran and/or their spouse might have to spend out of work after leaving the service or transferring to a new base.
“I know there’s a direct correlation between getting these folks hired soon after they get out of the military and suicide reduction. Because when you lose that sense of purpose, you start drinking, you start doing drugs, you start those unhealthy behaviors, and I know what that dark place looks like,” Cundy said. “I didn’t do it because I’m wired a little bit different, but for a lot of my friends that I lost along the way, I know why they gave up.”
Getting intentional
Cundy also recommends that companies get intentional with the way they serve and support the veterans already in their organizations.
When he asks companies how many veterans they employ, what their veterans employee resource group is like or if they know what Hiring Our Heroes is, he often gets a lot of bank stares.
“Often times they have veterans inside their organizations, but they don’t have an intentional program to go out there and identify those veterans,” he said. “Some might have a veterans ERG team, but it might not have a strong sense of purpose, or if it does have a strong sense of purpose, it’s not tied to the recruitment pipeline.”
What Cundy recommends in most cases is that the company makes a point to figure out how many veterans they already have in their employee pool. If they don’t have a veterans ERG, he recommends creating one and asking the members to help recruit other veterans.
“Veterans want to work with veterans and, if they’re happy and they’re really proud of where they’re working, that’s going to help you with your recruitment efforts,” he said. “If you have a deficiency, now you can leverage a veteran ERG team to see where you’re deficient, where there’s mental health issues, where they’re being underutilized, where they feel like nobody even cares about the military in (the) company.”
At Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation, Cundy has been helping Matthew Smith, an information technology director, ramp up the company’s veteran recruitment efforts, specifically in the IT space.
“There’s a lot of people coming out of the miliary that have experience in cyberspace, technology, project management, or even just leadership qualities, and why wouldn’t we want to leverage that type of talent?” Smith said. “So that’s something that I’ve been working on … to not only look at connecting in the IT organization, but also the greater Rockwell organization as it relates to more professional roles.”
To that end, Smith has been working with HOH’s military and military spouse program to find job candidates. The company also has a veteran’s ERG group that Smith hopes will be instrumental in those recruitment efforts as well as mentorship later on down the line.
Veterans helping veterans
Enlisting veterans to help with recruitment can aid in translating military experience for human resources staff who may overlook just how qualified some candidates are, said Cundy.
“A lot of companies miss out on so much talent, because they have no idea (how skilled some veterans are),” he said. “It could be a West Point graduate who served for 20 years who’s managed multi-billion-dollar pipelines of supply. And they’re like, ‘I don’t think that person’s a good fit for the VP of supply chain position.’”
Kohler Co. has a small team of veterans on staff who review resumes of veteran applicants.
“Translating a veteran’s experience in the military into open positions for Kohler is no small task,” said Bill DeBoer, senior director for corporate properties and facilities management. But, he said, it’s worth it.
It’s a relatively new process for the company, explained DeBoer, a U.S. Navy veteran. But the hope is it will eventually help boost the number of qualified veteran applicants who get considered for jobs at Kohler.
“It’s a numbers game,” he said. “The more we send on, the higher the probability we will make a match.”
Once more veterans are on staff, it’s key to find ways to support them, Cundy said. He points to Delta Defense in West Bend, which employs lots of veterans and has mental health and wellness coordinators on staff.
Kohler also has a robust veterans business resource group, known as the Kohler Alliance of Veterans & Supporters, which spends time recruiting other veterans and fundraising for veteran-focused nonprofits.
“Veterans specifically are a very community-minded group of people,” said Andrea Havlik, sales executive at Kohler Hospitality and a U.S. Air Force veteran. “They want to take care of other veterans.”
