WASHINGTON (Army News Service, May 6, 2013) -- The "Hiring Our Heroes" job fair at Joint Base Andrews, Md., introduced a new workshop May 3, to assist job seekers with resumes, interview techniques and career transition skills.
Hiring Our Heroes is a nationwide grassroots campaign founded in 2011 to help veterans and military spouses find employment.
The employment workshop for veterans and military spouses will now be a permanent part of the Hiring Our Heroes hiring fairs. They feature professionally trained presenters who conduct best practices in resume-writing skills and instruct candidates on how they should present themselves during the interview process.
"Previously the hiring fairs were just that, but this year we introduced a new layer where professional trainers can assist veterans in translating their skills from military to the civilian side on their resumes," said Matt Giobbi, a Hiring Our Heroes associate. "We're also conducting mock interviews which should really help them tighten their skills when meeting with prospective employers."
One way in which veterans can help themselves is through the online Personal Branding Resume Engine at www.resumeengine.org, which cross-references for all service military occupational specialties and Navy enlisted classification codes. The program was developed with help from Fortune 500 human resource managers.
"The challenge we're finding and part of the whole systematic problem of veteran employment is the difficulty they have in translating their skill set, so that's one of the things we're very focused on with these workshops, to help translate form military speak to civilian," Giobbi added. "It's just getting the veteran to put their skills in a way a private sector employer can understand."
Since the launch of the Hiring Our Heroes program in March 2011 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, more than 18,400 veterans and military spouses have landed jobs with some 1,050 small and large businesses who sought them out at 507 hiring fairs in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Hiring Our Heroes officials expect to have conducted close to 700 hiring fairs by the program's third anniversary in 2014.
In addition to the success in hiring at job fairs, the Hiring Our Heroes campaign in March received a three-year commitment of $4.5 million from Capital One to engage the business community in hiring 500,000 more veterans by year-end 2014.
So far, more than 1,000 public, private, small and large businesses as well as federal agencies and town law enforcement agencies and others pledged to hire 222,000 veterans and military spouses and have actually put to work 180,000 former service members and spouses since March 2012.
More than 60 employers were at the Andrews workshop, representing both public and private firms, small businesses, big businesses, local police departments and companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon and the Department of Homeland Security.
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