>> GABRIELLE NAGLE: Good afternoon, and thank you to everyone who has been able to join us today. So we'll be learning about Getting Hired's sister company TEKsystems Veterans Program. Hopefully the employers listening can walk away with some actions to take in maximizing your own veteran hiring strategy. Before we begin, I'll just run through some logistics. So audio is available through the phone line. During the presentation, everyone should be set to mute. Please use the chat box to the right of your screen if you have any questions during the presentation and we will answer them at the end. If you're not able to access the chat box for any reason, you can also email me questions at gnagle@gettinghired.com. That's gnagle@gettinghired.com. As with all of our webinars, we offer a live captioning service. The link is posted in the chat box for you to click on. We'll be recording this presentation and uploading it on to our YouTube channel early next week. We'll also email all registrants a copy of the presentation and a link to the recorded webinar as well. When you exit the webinar, you'll see some feedback questions will appear on your browser. We'd really love to know your thoughts about the webinar, so please let us know what worked well, what we could improve on, and if there are any other topics you'd like to see covered in our webinar series that could help you in hiring more people with disabilities. So our presenter today is Mike Powers. He is the Veterans and Disabilities Program Manager for TEKsystems. TEKsystems is the largest staffing system in the U.S. and hire between 10% and 12% of veterans for IT contract positions. Mike is responsible for driving hiring and retention of veterans and people with disability for TEKsystems internal positions, this includes compliance for OFCCP outreach, sourcing strategy, determining partnerships and charities, garnering support and growth from executive leadership, and driving change in 110 locations in 47 states. He's worked at TEKsystems for 18 years as a recruiter, national recruiter, account manager, all prior to his current role. And he's been in the Army National Guard for 20 years with three deployments during his tenure with the Army and TEKsystems. So thank you very much, Mike. Thank you for joining us today. >> MIKE POWERS: Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon to everyone. I don't know where you're at in the U.S., but thank you everyone for being on the call and obviously doing what you are doing to try and help serve the veterans and veteran's families out there that obviously I hold near and dear to my heart. So as Gabby said, I've been in the military for 20 years, and I've worked at TEKsystems for a long time during recruiting and sales. So I've been tied to doing this hands on and then how I came to be in the role that I'm at today when we wanted to grow and build a program. To tell you about myself real quick before we get into it. When I was asked to start this role, we were hiring veterans as a company, but we didn't have any formal structure around it and it was just out of necessity of all the positions that we were filling out there that required clearances or were for military integrators and so forth. So we wanted to grow the program internally for us as well as externally. So internally, our company, being an IT service industry, we are primarily made up of sales and recruiting positions and we have some corporate positions in Baltimore and in Phoenix. But the backbone of what we do is recruiting and sales. And we didn't have as many veterans in those roles as what we wanted. So when I began the role, I was trying to figure out how to do the role, and like probably many of you on this phone, you don't know where to begin. It's such a big thing to do. Where do I start? So as I began the role, I quickly realized I can't hire every veteran that applies. I can't reach every veteran that's looking for work out there, but what I can do is try and help a large segment of it, or help those that want to be helped. So, you know, in my mind, I began with, who are the veterans that are working hard to try and get positions? How do we get those veterans out there that have that effervescent smile, who are go-getters, who are just the top of what they do of whatever field they want to be in, whether it's IT, finance, sales, whatever it is. So I began there. And the reason I got so excited about it is being in staffing is a unique position because we have the ability to help veterans with employment, which is their number one concern coming out of the service. So being able to help drive an organization as big as TEKsystems means I'm going to impact a lot of veterans' families and put food on the table and help them and begin their next career. I also realized quickly a lot of clients we're services are trying to do the same thing and don't know how to do it. So I got the opportunity through what we do, already being a staffing company, helping those companies, I got to help all of them find veterans and make all these connections. It's just been incredible to work with large companies and organizations like Vet Jobs, the Wounded Warrior Project, and Tillman Foundation to make those marriages between the companies we served and even ones we don't necessarily serve but need that help. So that's how I began, and that's what wakes me up in the morning. That's what makes me work 60 hours a week. What I do directly impacts people's lives. So I feel very fortunate to be in this role. So she's already told you a bit about my background, but I have a unique perspective on veterans' hiring because I've been in the Army. I am a combat veteran, and I've had to deploy and come back to TEKsystems three times now. And I've had to learn how to deal with that, and TEKsystems has learned to deal with that. It's not easy for companies to have employees that leave for 16 months and come back. You know, they've got to have people that fill the positions. We've got to have a way to reintegrate them when they come back. What do you do with the person that was doing the role while they were gone? So a lot of unique perspectives, and I feel privileged to be able to help my company, other companies, veterans, have synergy with that instead of being on one side or the other. So that's my background, and if any of you ever would like to talk to me offline or reach out to me after this, feel free. I mean, this is what I live for. This is what I like to do. So I know on these calls, a lot of people don't necessarily ask question, so I will, you know, get my information out and make sure that everybody can reach me at any time after this to talk about anything at all. But to get to what we're going to speak about today, Getting Hired talked to me about covering a few things, not everything, but a few topics that a lot of you had asked about. And those are in particular, composing job descriptions, which we'll talk about today, to attract more veterans. And translating their military skills and background to the positions in the company is always a struggle. And then accommodations that we've made for vets and disabled vets that we've had to do over the years and learn about. Tips on branding your own company and your own programs, and talk about some of our common challenges that we came across and some of the success stories that we've had in this fall window of four to five years of having focus. So I'll talk about that today, but I'll start with this slide right here. As far as the program, if you're starting out and you're not sure where to go, this would apply to you. If you're already underway, then you can skip through it. But I thought it would be worth throwing this in to mention where we were and how we began. So for me, a big part of it was I had to determine where we were at, some of the things that I did that helped us internally as well as what we've done externally in the IT world. And when I say internally, I mean our internal corporate positions to drive our company. And then when I say external, we hire about 33,000 IT professionals a year and place them at different company sites, so we work with those companies. But internally, it's all on us for what we're looking for. But so we weren't even sure how many, you know, veterans we had internally. We weren't sure of where we stood, what some of the things were that were gaps. So we started being looking at different things. Some of the things we looked at was we have a lot more veterans than we knew. A lot of our paperwork was old, our HR software was around for a while. Even myself, I wasn't listed as a veteran in the system because I began back in 1988 and the paperwork had me check marked as a veteran but the paperwork didn't transpose to the PeopleSoft. There were some data entry gaps and entry gaps. And then did a reassessment and sent out a survey and found out how many veterans we got and allowed them to go in and self-ID through PeopleSoft direct so there weren't data entry errors. We moved up several hundred veterans doing that quickly. We also realized that our applicant tracking system did not allow for a lot of features that we needed to attract veterans, so when we posted job, it was just a static job out there on the job site. And we'll talk about that today, you know, both the ability to push that through social media sites, have that go out to the veterans and disabilities jobs boards was not there. So there was a lot of broadcasting that we weren't doing. So those are some of the things that we started with. Where are we at, what are our gaps, and what do we need to do? And then from there, we had to talk about the business regions for building the program to garner buy-in and support from above. When we started talking about the program, the great thing about this was TEKsystems, like I say, being staffing, we've got a unique opportunity to be able to help the very thing that is the number one problem, that's employment with veterans. And there is 200,000 a year getting out right now, being released, most unexpectedly because of the roll-back. So that's what we do as a company. We're a staffing agency. So if we cannot help veterans find job, then we're not good at our job. So our business case for that was, we need to help the veterans. You know, it's the right thing to do. It's in our wheelhouse of what we do as a company. And the byproduct of that was for ourselves, being able to grow our workforce by tapping into that talent pool of 200,000 veterans a year that are getting out. Grow the workforce of our clients and help them connect with those veterans through us, and basically a force multiplier for them in their own buildings. We've also improved our workplace by having different experiences and walks of life and viewpoints that came into our offices. We've got 110 offices across the U.S., so it's improved our workforce, our workplace, and then also helped us connect to the community and the clients that we have in each one of those locations. So for us, those were the business reasons. But you got to determine your own vision with what you want that program to be and what steps to get there, so I would start with why do we want to do it, and then that will lead to how and then what steps need to be taken. You need to start with, why. That's going to look different to every one of you on the phone call. Everybody has their own setups and different vision, but you have to be able to start with that to be able to work backwards. Otherwise, what I learned is you'll get so busy trying to do things that you get lost in the noise. You're running 20 directions, but you're not sure if it's going toward the place you want it to go. And then the fourth step there, determining the champions of the program. So for me, internally and externally, I just started with the veterans that we have. I reached out and talked to a lot of them about their experiences and how they came to our company and how they learned about us and what they envisioned. And got a lot out of that. Then I picked our highest producers, our strongest personalities from that group, to talk to our leadership. So you want to get buy-in from your leadership to be able to drive a program, but the most impactful part was having our veterans talk to the leaders. Our leaders respected them what they do, but even more so it helped drive it home because they were some of the highest producing and strongest workers that we have in our company. So and then the next step from there was, once we get that buy-in from up top, we started working downward toward your own recruitment and outreach. The big steps that we took there, was we have an internal recruiting team of about 30 people and a college recruiting team of 10 to go out and find people for us internally, and then we've got about 100 IT recruiters that recruit people for IT. So I began basically educating them. I educated all the college and internal recruiters on military culture, how to read resume, how to translate that, how to look for traits as well as experience, understanding culture, and that drove a lot more candidates into the pipelines because, you know, you can't -- one person can't look at all the applicants coming into the company. Then we began with inclusionary tension. We looked over policies for Guard and Reserve. Our own workplace, what things would be a barrier for veterans to come here and what would attract them. Then we began implementing those. And then internal and external messaging and awareness, which we'll get into when I talk about branding a little bit. For us internally, we had to start small. What are some entities that we can impact and engrain with at a deep level to start driving more veterans and disabled veterans to our company? What you normally want to do, as a company, you want to cast a wide net. You want to engage every entity out there, and it just becomes too much because whoever is in your talent acquisition teams or leadership, you might get inundated with trying to connect 400,000 organizations and you just don't have the time to do it. We started small with Wounded Warrior Project and with the Guard and Reserve and dug in deep there, and it worked outward from there and I got a lot of educations from my peers and people in other companies about what avenues they took or what veteran's support organizations they engaged. What worked and what did not work, and which saved me a lot of time as well. Lastly, we defined our goals. You know, we weren't -- externally we were at 10% and we grew it up to 12% and 13% in IT over the years. So we hire around 2,000 veterans to work in IT positions. Internally, where the number is lower, we were not at the double digit number. It was not a certain percentage. It was year-over-year growth for us. How do we improve the program each year? So that's what we defined as our goal, is year-over-year improvement. And then at the end of each year, we assess things. We're doing a lot of work with making sure we know how people came to us. If they come in electronically via job boards, we're able to backwards track that through the new applicant tracking system we got, which we use ICIMS. We used to use HRsmart. Whatever avenue they come to our web page from, we can track that now, which helps us a lot with knowing where to go. Then number nine, always evaluating our partnerships. So we've had a few things we've tried that just didn't work, not because the entity wasn't a good entity, but when we're trying to find sales, recruiting, employee relation, some of those avenues just weren't reaching our targeting that group. So we've had to make some changes over time. And then some of the ones that we've looked at have led to a lot of hires and a lot of attraction, so we've kept them. So you want to constantly assess that and not just assume that it's always working and not just do it because you don't know of another avenue. So those are some of the steps to get us beginning. But so I'll get into it. As far as the first thing to talk about today, and if anybody has any questions, just shoot them to me in the chat and I'll try to talk about them as we go. Again, you can call me afterwards if you like, but when composing job descriptions to attract more veterans, there is a few different things to it. But as a veteran, and as someone that hires veterans, before you even get into that, I think one of the most important steps you got to have is having a landing page or having a site that veterans can go to that speaks to them. Because if not, there is so much noise about companies want to hire veterans that it doesn't seem as sincere when you can't envision yourself in that company. And I don't know who all is on the call, but I know a few of the companies, and you have so many positions and it's so large that navigating that can become so cumbersome that the veteran will just stop and move on to another company. So I think your landing page or having a way to funnel a veteran into an area that speaks to them specifically does a lot. It does as much, if not more, than the actual job description. So for us, one of the most successful things I had, if you can see the screen here, is our landing page. And down on the right, you'll see that video. And I'll try to pull it up for you here real quick. We made a video. We took time to send a video team around. We talked to all the veterans at TEKsystems. Not all of them, but most of the veterans in different roles. And me, I've been here 18 years. We've got some that have been here 19 and 20. We've got some new hires. We've got different veterans from the different branches of services talking about what their role is now they came to TEK. And in the last, I don't know at least 50 or 60 veterans that I spoke to, that was the number one reason they applied and came to TEK. Seeing veterans at TEKsystems talking about what they do at TEKsystems had more impact than the job descriptions or just the, you know, content of the page as far as wording and verbiage. So that's an idea, you know, you can do. But if you want to look at it, it's there on that web page. You can go to TEKsystems careers/veterans and take a look at that yourself. Getting into the job descriptions, like I say, if you can get the veteran to envision themselves at your company, the job description doesn't have to be as in tune with them because they will be able to envision themselves there and they will apply to positions that they may or may not think they're a fit for, which is what you want to do. You want to drive the number of applicants that you got. So one of the steps that you can take, you know, if you have a lot of different job descriptions or if you've got evergreen job descriptions where you're always looking for the same position and you keep that position posted for the most part. One quick thing you can do that doesn't require as much work, is you can take the same job description, but either in the body or phrase or in the job description, use the word veteran or military. So instead of rewriting the whole job description, if you don't have that kind of time or you need to get moving quickly, you can change that. So for me, one of our number one positions that we fill internally every year is recruiters. So we have a standard job description out there for recruiters, and that job description is posted with the city location of where it's open. And like I said earlier, we have about 110 offices. So I went into some of those job descriptions in particular, in high veteran's areas like Phoenix, Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida. I took the job description, pulled it up, and put the word veteran recruiter in the title. Then went into the body and put a few words if you've recruited for the military in the past, those are skill sets we seek, and put that into the job description and put it back out there. That didn't require a whole rewrite of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and that alone quickly led to a lot of activity. And the reason for that was, veterans are like anybody else, they're out there on Google or some other search engine and they're strictly typing in jobs for veterans, jobs for military. And if in the title of the job description the word military or veteran is in there, from an SEO standpoint, that will bring it to the top more quickly. If it's in the body, that helps as well. But if it's in the title, it's going to bring it up to the top of the list even quicker. So that's one quick thing can you do. Clearly, you can put into the job description that we're actively seeking veterans, veteran's spouses, or members of, you know, the military in your job description. So you can put that in there. Veterans, me, myself, like to see in the job description more than just what the required experience is. What are some of the traits you're looking for? What are some of the abstract things that you look for, whether it's leadership or organization, conflict resolution among people? So if you can put traits in there, as opposed to just the experience you want, that too will drive more applicants and more veterans coming to your job board. Another very popular thing to do for most companies out there is -- and you can get this through different sites, but an MOS translator. If you don't know what an MOS is, that's a military term for what your job title is. It stands for Military Occupational Skill. So no matter what branch, you have an MOS. Helicopter mechanic, your MOS is 15T. They call it 15 Tango. If you're a human resource generalist, which is what I started looking toward because we hire a lot of recruiters, and that ties over to our job as well being in human resources. The MOS for that, for example, in the Army is 42 Alpha. So you can put on your web page or veterans landing page a MOS translator where people can type in their MOS and it will regurgitate jobs in your company that most closely align up with that. That does require a little bit of work to put that in there. Your IT department or your marketing team will have to get that on there. If you can't do that, you can take a step back and at least do the research of what positions are we hiring for and then use a veteran in your company or someone in HR to research it. But you can go out to the MOS translators, like the one I have listed here, and find the MOS that matches the one you're looking for and just put that on your web page as well. We, at TEKsystems, commonly hire 42 Alpha as well as 32 Bravo and 15 Charlies. That doesn't mean to be a dynamic MOS translator, it can just be static information, but it will as well attract any veteran looking for jobs. They may type in the job search that says, jobs for military with 42 Alpha MOS, and you will come up at that point because it's on your web page. So that's another big avenue that you can take. As far as some of the other things you can do with job description, one of the big things you got to do is start getting it into the branding as well for your job descriptions. So when we made the -- the first year that we applied for G.I. Jobs Military Friendly was last year, and we made the list the first year we applied which obviously was a pleasant surprise. But in doing so, the traffic uptick in December once that came out to our website was about 400%. (phone ringing). So what I've learned, and what you'll learn too is if you can get your branding war going and start getting your name out there as being synonymous with veterans, again, your job descriptions will be less pinnacle because they'll be coming to your website. A lot of veterans will read those military friendly lists and then go to the websites of those companies right away and start looking for jobs, so that's another thing you can do as far as composing your job descriptions as where you place them. If you've got a description on your website, word it, put the MOS translator, or put military in the title, you also have to understand where they're going. Are they going to the veterans’ job boards? Are you just advertising with one or two, Vetsjobs or G.I. Jobs? So you want to have your job descriptions getting scraped and posted to all the veteran's job boards. And each state in the U.S. has its own particular veteran's job board, and I'll come back to that in a minute, but we struggle with staying on top of it. Just me as a veteran in Kentucky, little Kentucky where I reside, the State of Kentucky changed what that job site was two or three times over the course of four years, so it was hard for us as a company to keep up with it. And from an OFCC standpoint you're supposed to be broadcasting jobs to those state job boards as well. So to stay on board of which job board for Kentucky, Tennessee, Utah, California, was a task. So it's hard to do, but there is an option I'll come to on it, but you want to be posting to those state job boards because the veteran employment officers, the local employment veterans reps, as well as the disabled veterans employment reps are driving the people they meet each week to those job boards. So we used direct employers and Getting Hired to help us do that. Getting Hired has a great footprint for the disabled veterans out there, and our jobs that we post on TEKsystems are also copied and thrown out there through DirectEmployers Association and Getting Hired. So DirectEmployers Association helps us meet OCC compliance as well, but assuring that every job is posted to the state job board of every state, they can pull that -- if there wasn't, they can pull that job description and pull that proof. But more importantly, we now know that our jobs are getting scraped a put on 50 different state veterans' job boards as well as 610 others that they broadcast to. So G.I. Jobs, Vetsjobs, USA Jobs, Disabled Veterans of America jobs, those are all being pushed to those sites just by putting it on our own website. If you're a client of ours, and we're posting an IT position for you to help you find someone, that is as well as is it being scraped and put out to all of those hundreds of veterans' job boards. By putting it on the veterans' job boards it gets their attention and they don't have to circumnavigate back to your site and land on it. It will drive them back to it. If you don't know much about DirectEmployers or Getting Hired, obviously you can look into it, but you should look into both of them. Veterans are trying to get away from some of the noise and get to more simple systems, and there are new changes coming. Most of the state job boards should go to ebenefits.com as being a job board as well as the one-stop-shop for them for their healthcare needs, pay needs, whatever it is. That's the trend moving forward if you aren't aware, but there is some uniqueness in the disabled veteran’s world. They are, you know, from everyone I talk to, they feel like the regular job boards are just hard for them. They've got a greater struggle. There is a lot of barriers, a lot of things that prevent them from getting in front of the companies, so they're always looking for very friendly companies to disabled people. So again, that gets back to your branding. You're going to want to brand through some of those organizations, Getting Hired, Disabled Veterans of America, Wounded Warrior Project. They know those companies work with companies out there that are looking to hire disabled people. That's a niche that you want to tie into as well. We got a couple questions here. Yeah. I covered those. Moving on to translating military resume skills within your company, it is a whole other language listening to the military language or trying to read a military resume, and many of us on this call know that. And the military and services have become aware of that over the years, and they are working toward changing how they advise the service members on their way out as well. They're helping and advising them with getting away with writing the resume with acronyms, titles, and bullet points, and advising them to put action verbs into their job descriptions and their resumes and what they do day-to-day. Don't make it a bullet point. Make it so someone in the military, who has never under been in the military, will understand what you do on the front of it. The good news is the military transition services, the Yellow Ribbon Program, they're all making great strides in having the soldiers come out with a better written resume. So hopefully in a year or two, the MOS and skills translation will not be such a barrier, but in the meantime, until we'll get there. Some of the steps you can take that we've used -- so we've got 104 veterans in our employee resource group internally, and we've got 40 spouses, and we meet on a regular basis. We talk once a month and meet. What they are doing, is they are being force multipliers to educate the offices. So every spouse and every veteran that's in the 110 offices we have, has educated and helped that director that hires for that office understand military resumes. That director, when a veteran or service member applies or gets to them, if it's not through us or our internal recruiting, they are leaning on the employee resource group, the veterans and employees that we have already in the company, to do the preliminary interview, to read the resume, to help them understand not only what they did between 8:00 and 5:00, but based on their rank and their branch of service, what are some of the traits and values and skills that they bring to the table based on that. That's the first step you can take. If you don't have a large resource of veterans in your company, then obviously, that wouldn't be an avenue for you. But what can you do at that point is, you can set up training. You can utilize the few veterans that you got to have a mass training through either a webinar or something like that. And then, of course, there is outside sources, such as Getting Hired, Vet Success, The Value of a Veteran. There is a lot of resources to help you understanding that military backgrounds. There is plenty of for-profits, but there are enough resources that you shouldn't struggle to find one. If you do, give me a call. I'd be glad to help you out with that. Another thing we did, we have around 30 recruiters. Every recruiter that recruits for TEKsystems has to -- once they get hired and are starting the role, they have to spend time with me. So I spend a day with them, or I'll do a mass group and train them on military rank, what the different branches of service are, what the different skill sets are that come out of the military, and then the abstract stuff, little things like if you're an E6 or E7, they don't know what that means. So if you're a Sergeant or Sergeant First Class, that is a middle-level manager. They understand that they manage somewhere between 10 and 20 people if they're at that rank. If they're an E5, they're managing a group of 4 to 8 people, so that's the kind of education that we give our internal and college recruiting teams. And they also reach out to me every time that they get a veteran and help me work with them through that. So by giving the training, they're not overlooking the thousands of applicants we're getting, you know, each week. What they're doing is stopping and reading the resume where it used to just not make sense to them and they would move on. Then even more so through collaborating with me, I can help them pull out some of those abstract skills and traits that they have. Another thing that goes on in the military, they're big into certifications and not degrees. No matter what your skill is, you have to maintain a constant continuing education program through that. So if you're a -- whether you're in aviation, you constantly go to pilot and pilot and control school. You have to go to night vision school, multi-engine school, maintenance manager course, so they get these certifications as they go along the way. And helping your team understand the different certifications out there and learning what those are will help you understand what translates back to your company's positions and your company openings. There is a veteran's recruiting certification course, so if you have an HR or talent acquisition team, this is an avenue they can take this gets them up to speed about everything I talked about. I included two links for that so that you can go out as well. We've talked about most of the other bullet points here, but one example at the bottom. If you're a service member in an intelligence unit, most people just see Sergeant Intelligence Unit. They don't know what that means. What it means is they have to look at pictures, diagrams, they have to figure out what that is, they have to give a percentage on whether or not that is or isn't a target, they have to learn how to interrogate people, how to pull information out of people. So some of the abstract skills of being in the intelligence unit is analytical, paying attention to detail, considering things, viewing all viewpoints. Those are some of the things you can do with helping in translating the skills and very hard-to-understand details on military resumes at times. Another thing we did is trained our leadership on hiring veterans, not just off experience or resume, but what do they bring to the table as far as value, cores, skills, and traits. That's an example of something I show our directors and leaders in each office. On the right is what we look for, on the right is the military, in the middle are the ones that overlap. So some of the accommodations that we've dealt with here at TEKsystems and gone through -- and just before I even get into some of this, there are many avenues to help you with accommodations out there. If you're not sure where to begin or what to do, just know that whatever the accommodation may be, if it's a physical accommodation for a physical disability, most of them are free. At most, it could be $500. And there are so many grants and so many federal options to get that taken care of, that it's never going to be a burden to get it done. It should never be a barrier that blocks you from getting into a position. So but some of the things we've done I've listed here. I don't want to -- we're running short on time, so I don't want to spend too much time on it. But some of the biggest helpful things is our benefits department has a hotline and allows for any of our soldiers suffering from depression, PTSD, or anything like that to be able to immediately find a counselor, not just on the phone, but in-person in the area that they're located that they can go meet with personally. We've had a few that have gone through that, and they've gotten four immediate counseling sessions for free. That's one accommodation our benefits department came up with through our healthcare provider. We've had some veterans that recently come back from deployments and aren't quite used to getting back into the environment of working in the office, and one of the veterans in particular asked, and we accommodated, just simply sitting with his back to the wall where he could see the door and who is coming and going at all times. That put him at ease, and that went on for about nine monthlies, and then he slowly re-acclimated and wanted to make the change himself. Another one that we've gone through is with a desk -- the desk that we have in our offices now allow to raise and lower, so people are allowed to stand up. So if people don't have to sit all day. There are a lot of people with IED issues and things like that that their hips or knees bother them, so they have to be able to move around. Being able to sit and stand helps. Also helps with wheelchair, but so now all of our desks are able to lower and raise to any level you want them at. The usual stuff for a couple guys in Phoenix had vision problems, we have oversized screens for them. The biggest things that we've come up with, when I first started at TEK, we didn't have any of this. Now we have a pay difference. If you're called away on military duty, we have the difference between what you would have made at TEKsystems, and in the military, we will pay that difference for up to 12 weeks each year. So if you're going away, whether it's a school or whether it's an AT or deployment or something like that, we will pay that difference. And if you're a commissioned person, we'll pay your commission in full for up to one year while you're deployed. And then when you come back, we put you at a guaranteed commission level so that if you're gone 16 months and that commission rolls off for 4 months, when you come back to us, you begin back at a commission here to where you're making $600 a week or whatever it was that you were making the last 13 weeks before you left. You're coming back to that comfort level financially, and not having to struggle, and it allows you more access to be able to work and not struggle in that regard. And then the ERG was another one that we came up with. Started an employee resource group that drove a lot of policy changes and suggestions and things like that, so those are just some of the accommodations that we've come up with. Tips on branding, the biggest thing is make things personal when you brand. Don't just put rhetoric out there. There are so many companies, and there is such a drive at hiring veterans that a lot of it is becoming noise and veterans think companies are just putting that out there just to put it out there. So some of the things that we've gone to, if you look at this slide, that's me on the left there. That's when we sponsored the Pat Tillman Run in Phoenix and did that. I put my picture on there and direct email address, which was kind of risky. I didn't know how much response I was going to get. But being able to see the person that is in charge of veteran's hiring and that is a veteran, and being able to reach out directly, made a huge impact. I had about 60 people over that weekend email me direct, and I talked to them about the different roles that we have and what their background is to see what matches. So instead of them just applying, I got to talk to them about what maybe they could apply to, which drove several hires out of that where they may not have reached out to us at all if they had to go through the several steps of going online and trying to figure out where to go. The other one there on the right is an advertisement. That's one of our female veterans as well. Again, that allows female veterans to envision themselves at the company instead of it just being rhetoric. It's actually one of our female veterans. So that's one branding touch, if you do advertise or market, use those methods. The other thing on branding is, depending on what your company is or what you do as a company, depends on what avenues you want to take. But for us, there are a lot of Guard Reservists that come back from deployment and that are looking for a new job that are veterans and in local markets, so we began working with the ESGR. There is an employment rep in each state. So instead of trying to engage with like a large organization and create synergy that may take a while, we had a veteran within each office start working with the employment coordinator of that office to find the veterans. And that led to us hiring a lot of people in the Guard and Reserve, of course. And that led to us getting in a lot of Patriot Employer Awards from the different states. So each state in the Guard and Reserve can give a Patriot Award to employers that show support for veterans. We've ended up with around, something like 15 states have recognized us in the last 3 years. So that is an example of starting small and making personal impact and having personal connections to that other side instead of trying to broadcast the 50 different entities like the VA WWP and all these different ones and you can't manage at a time. Start small. Be impactful in that small group and then let it snowball from there. Winning those awards led to other awards, which also led to some of our clients recognizing us as a supplier because we got them veterans through that avenue. Another one was the Wounded Warrior Project, one program is called TTA. They give them IT certifications and came out looking for work. They have several graduates each year trying to employ. They connected to us with our footprint. So just talking to one counselor at WWP led to a few people getting hired, which led us to six different counselors, and now we've got hires from Wounded War TTA in several states. I know it exceeds 20. So those are tips on branding. Start small, and grow it from there. Video testimonies I spoke about, those are big. Have the veterans in your company talk about your company so that they can connect. Veterans connect with veterans more strongly than words or even print does. Find a veteran's entity that ties to your business. So for us, we're an IT company. Vets in Tech is an organization we work with that is a nonprofit that works to try and get veterans employed, and we help in that area because we can give market analytics, advice, connect them to clients. If we were in a different business, such as energy, we would look to those energy related VSOs, or Veteran Supported Organizations. Find one that matches. There is plenty of information out there. If you're not sure who, give me a call after that, I'd be glad to work with you to find an entity that ties into your company brand or company business. Again, do what you can. Strive to make your company military friendly because if you become military friendly, you know, if you have good inclusion, good policies towards veterans, good policies toward Guard and Reserve, veterans talk to veterans and that will be a force multiplier for you as well. Veterans want to go to companies that know that appreciate their service and will work with them. So regardless of what you put in print, it's what others say about you that have a big impact, and that's part of branding as well. These are some of the common challenges we've had as well, being a sales organization, recruiting organization on the inside. Our big struggles, a lot of veterans don't seek to be in sales roles. They don't normally look for that. They look for a lot of the normal stuff that you hear, security, homeland security, management, mid-level management, so that was our struggle. There are 200,000 veterans coming out a year, how do I tap into the ones that want to get into the business. Part of it was educating military transition people. Some of the contacts we have at Wounded Warrior that we talk about IT jobs, we talked about IT sales. I learned real quick that sales is thought of as person-to-person sales or knocks on doors. Many of the veterans I talked to didn't even process business-to-business sales and how much is involved in business-to-business, which is a totally different sale. A lot of them have business degrees and realize that, you know, Microsoft, Apple, they didn't just come about. They came about because salespeople were pushing the product. Once they learned about our pay, our benefits, the fact that we do have salary with commission, how many different fortune 500 companies we work with, that's what started driving them in. That was a big challenge for me internally. Externally, as far as IT, the big struggle was we reach most veterans who are in IT, it's driving the number of veterans and the number of people that are going into that field. So an education campaign on how many jobs go unfilled on IT was a big part of what we were doing through our different symposiums and so forth that we were going to. So there is a lot more veterans coming out looking to get into IT now as opposed to just your normal service work of police or security, so that was a big draw for us. Another was, I already spoke on it, our directors at the hiring level in each office didn't understand that if someone was -- say for a Captain in the Army, that person has a very unique position of having to fight for budget, fight for resources in a very lean time in the military. They've got to go to their superior to get that stuff, but yet they've got to do it in a very tactful way because if a Captain goes to a Major wanting supplies or moneys or needing schools for their troops, they've got to fight to get that, but that major is also the person in charge of their officer evaluation report who can greatly affect their career whether they get advanced or not. So being very tactful and very omniscient of how you look at things as a Captain and how you engage people, that's a soft skill set that doesn't translate on the paper. What I just described is not normally on a resume, but going to the directors of each office and helping them understand things like that, and then also training the recruiting team and the college recruiting team on that, that made a big difference. So people started looking at, you know, branch of service, what MOS is, what the rank is, and learning what some of the skills are, what the traits are that come from that. So those are some of the big challenges that we dealt with. The rest are bulleted pointed in there. We're running out of time, and I don't want to run anyone over. I greatly appreciate everyone's time. So feel free to look over that and reach out to me as well with anything toward the end. But again, these are some of the things, since 2013, that took off for us by starting small. There is the National Guard Awards that led to Direct Employers Awards to state award, military friendly, so forth. But it's a snowball effect. You got to start small and it will work big. If you try to start big, it gets cumbersome and gets pretty hard to manage all of it. So I'll come to the end. If there are any questions, I'd be glad to address them. I've got a few notes here. Chris, I got your note. Yeah. So Chris was saying on here, as a Sargent First Class, anywhere from 30 to 145 people are managed, as a Captain, 80 to 120. It all depends on the branch of service and where you come from. I'm in aviation, so those are much larger units and numbers than what we're used to. So Chris, I appreciate that. That's absolutely correct. Again, that gets to the more exposure and the more you can teach your talent acquisition teams and your HR, whomever that is, military culture and how it read those resume, that's what will help. Because at that point, every applicant that applies, they can read between the lines or they can pull out of that resume things that they may not have before. That way it's not all on the veteran that's applying because there is -- they're going to miss out if you're trying to change the resumes of all the people you don't know that are applying to your jobs. Okay. Well, if there are no questions, I'll let everyone go. And I appreciate the time. The few questions that come in, I can respond to. Please feel free to reach out to me. I believe Gabby is going to get this presentation out to everyone. Is that true, Gabby? >> GABRIELLE NAGLE: Yes. Yep. We've been recording it, so we will send it out with captioning to everyone. Just quickly before you go, Mike, there is -- >> MIKE POWERS: Yeah. One more thing -- I included a bunch of slides on the end that I don't want to go over, but it's just for each one of you on the call for your own use. There are military duties. Here are some slides I'm going to scroll through on rank and branch of service normally, what they make, whether or not they're in your salary range and so forth. But these are things to keep for your own use as well as here is a full list of all these social media and job advertisement avenues. And I put in there whether they were at cost, whether they're not at cost, whether they're free. So there are a few hundred avenues that can you take and use for yourself as well. So anyway, that's it. Go ahead, Gabby, and I appreciate everybody's time. >> GABRIELLE NAGLE: Thank you, Mike. That's really useful. We'll make sure we will include the PDF version of this so everyone will have that list and they can take the time looking through the extra slides as well. We just have a quick question from a vet job seeker -- he is asking, should I brand myself as a disabled veteran, i.e., on LinkedIn or resume or profile, et cetera? >> MIKE POWERS: That's a good question. That's a very good question. I'll give you some background on the business side of it that will help you answer the question. There is not a right or wrong answer, first of all. A lot of people that are disabled veterans don't do that because they're afraid it will be held against them. They're afraid that before they even get a chance to get into the company that that will be held against them, or they're worried that the prospective employer will be worried they have PTSD issues and so forth. That's a very real thing out there. That does happen. My advice to you would be to look at the company that you're applying to. If they are a large company, if they are an entity that does business with the government, an integrator such as Lockheed Martin, you should annotate that it's going to help you. If you're worried about the latter part, if it's a small company, maybe not. But the integrators, anybody tied to the military, any government, any large option, there is a mandate that they've got to hire so many veterans anyway. There is an OFCCP mandate out there to hire 7% of your workforce as disabled. (captioning completed at 11:58 a.m. CST) Services provided by: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 3066 Monument, CO 80132 800-825-5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a realtime format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.