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Salute Veterans By Hiring Them

By Brendan B. Read,
Senior Contributing Editor

For its Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!” But its “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot —Rudyard Kipling

Anyone who has served or who has had family and friends serve their country through the military can relate to this famous poem. My grandfather was a Tommy: a British soldier who underwent the horrors of The Somme in World War I. My father was in the Royal Air Force, ‘National Service’ or conscription after World War II, maintaining ultramodern jet fighters and bombers in the Cold War.

Because one of the unfortunate facts of being in the military is that it is often very difficult to obtain employment when one is ‘demobbed’ i.e. demobilized. It is as if companies are afraid of veterans: that there is something spooky about hiring someone who has faced and administered death. Yet this is the ultimate insult: turning away who put their lives on the lines for their country so that those who shooed them out the doors did not have to face the suffering and death as they did to protect their freedoms.

As a result many veterans cannot find work, even more so than civilians, especially in tough times. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in September that 11.3 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are jobless compared with 9.7 percent nationwide. An article in the Sept. 9 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that reported the data summed it up accurately: “So much for taking care of the nation's returned heroes, who are finding it harder to land a job than the average American.”

Service-disabled veterans have it the worst, even more so than their civilian counterparts. They face the double-whammy of unease about their disabilities along with that of their military experience. Many cannot find employment or take back their old jobs because their injuries had robbed them of their skills.

Being in the military does change a person, for I’ve been told (I had thought of enlisting in my youth but I have wonky coordination and two flat feet.) There are few substitutes for the mental and physical fitness of knowing how to and surviving under fire, in learning teamwork, leadership, quick thinking, resourcefulness and courage – qualities that employers should welcome, rather than ignore.

Contact centers are in an excellent position to change this deplorable milieu. They provide a wide range of opportunities via customer care, sales, billing, and supervisory positions for vets to demonstrate their skills. The advent and widening availability of home working and accessibility tools such as the JAWS screen readers are enabling disabled ex-service personnel to be employed from anywhere.

For the value of home work just ask Major (Ret.) Jack Heacock, a service-disabled vet who was awarded the Bronze Star in Vietnam when he served with the U.S. Army Signal Corp. He developed and has taken his passion for distributed work to become a leading telework expert. He is co-founder and senior vice president of telework education and advocacy organization The Telework Coalition.

There are many enlightened contact center departments and outsourcers that are employing veterans. That rank includes organizations such as Purple Heart Services (News - Alert) that provides outsourced customer support by recruiting, training, and managing combat-wounded and disabled vets. The unit of vet-supporting employers also encompasses companies such as Amtrak, Citicorp, Comcast (News - Alert), InfoCision, Wells Fargo, and West that participate in the U.S. Army’s Army Partnership for Youth Success program. Army PaYS recruits employers to provide employment to soldiers who are leaving the service; they must sign up for PaYS upon enlisting.

There needs to be many more organizations recruiting veterans and in greater numbers, and more military services branches should have programs like the U.S. Army’s PaYS. There is no more appropriate, effective, productive, and respectful way to honor those who have served with honor by offering them employment opportunities when they rejoin the ranks of those they had put everything on the line to defend.

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