Blueprint for Building Veteran Talent Pipelines

Veteran Talent Pipelines
Blueprint for building & maintaining veteran talent pipelines
and hiring the best candidates to fill open positions
Point of Contact
Mark Rome
(602) 358-9586
mark_rome@hotmail.com
90% of approximately 11 million working-age veterans
are interested in hearing about new opportunities, and
79% of those veterans will never see your job postings

Building Veteran Talent Pipelines with the Best Candidates
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Mark Rome (mark_rome@hotmail.com) (602) 358-9586
Table of Contents
1. OVERVIEW ........................................................................................................................ 3
1.1. Veteran Hiring Challenges................................................................................................... 3
1.2. Using Data to Build Veteran Talent Pipelines..................................................................... 4
1.3. Quality of Hire..................................................................................................................... 5
1.4. Applicant Tracking System (ATS) ...................................................................................... 6
1.5. HIRE Vets Medallion Program............................................................................................ 7
2. BENEFITS OF A DATA-DRIVEN RECRUITMENT STRATEGY................................. 9
2.1. Technology – the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) ......................................................... 9
2.2. Data is siloed........................................................................................................................ 9
2.3. Forecasting ability is limited................................................................................................ 9
2.4. What Data-Driven Recruitment Looks Like........................................................................ 9
2.4.1. Increase Quality of Hire..................................................................................................... 10
2.4.2. Predict Speed of Hire......................................................................................................... 10
2.4.3. Improve the Candidate Experience.................................................................................... 10
2.4.4. Embed Diversity into Recruiting Process.......................................................................... 11
2.4.5. Deliver On Recruiting Capacity......................................................................................... 11
2.5. Position the Recruitment Team for Success ...................................................................... 11
3. SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY........................................................................................... 12
3.1. Candidate Data Profiles ..................................................................................................... 12
3.2. Veteran Talent Pipelines.................................................................................................... 12
3.3. Culture-Fit Analytics (data analytics)................................................................................ 13
3.4. Decision-support................................................................................................................ 13
3.5. Talent Hacking................................................................................................................... 13
3.6. Improved candidate experience ......................................................................................... 13
3.7. Seamless integration with employer Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and HRIS ......... 14

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1. OVERVIEW
The Arizona Coalition for Military Families (ACMF) and its partner organizations have a unique
opportunity to make use of innovative technology to help them:
 Build & maintain veteran talent pipelines
 Target & hire the right candidates for open positions
 Spend recruitment advertising dollars wisely
Utilizing a robust, reliable, scalable, community-wide, technology-based data collection,
management and analysis system, employers can build and maintain veteran talent pipelines and
identify the best candidates for open positions utilizing a data-driven strategy rather than sifting
through resumes or LinkedIn profiles.
Using a data-driven strategy to automate and streamline the talent acquisition process, employers
can leverage rich data stores to:
 Build and maintain veteran talent pipelines
 Target the right candidates for open positions
 Roll out veteran mentor programs to attract veterans
 Create meaningful and actionable veteran recruitment plans
 Collect actionable intelligence to define benefits that attract veterans
 Leverage federal, state and local funded apprenticeship programs to offset veteran
training and development costs
 Improve veteran retention and reduce employee turnover
 Reduce the time and cost to hire veterans
 Measure quality of hire
 Improve the candidate’s experience throughout the hiring process
 Strategically focus recruitment marketing and employer branding
 Better target and track recruitment advertising spend
 Readily transition to mobile search functionality
Employers save the time and cost of posting openings to job boards and/or social media sites by
using a data-driven talent acquisition strategy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for
talent discovery to build and maintain their veteran talent pipelines.
1.1. Veteran Hiring Challenges
Unemployed and underemployed veterans, Reserve & Guard members, transitioning active
military personnel and their families face several challenges when seeking employment in the
private sector. Some of the major challenges include:
 Articulating their skills, tools and training to prospective employers
 Providing references that can independently verify skills, tools and training
 Deciding on a career path and location
We are rapidly moving away from a world where veterans
seek a job to one where the job finds the veteran

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The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Department of Defense (DoD) and Office of the
Secretary of Defense (OSD) offer transition programs that help service members transition each
year. Unfortunately, these programs are out of date and they're preparing service members for
the 1990’s job market.
With the talent market becoming more competitive, employers are focusing more on what
veterans need. Personalization is the key to capturing their attention. Data is getting more
precise than ever and can be gathered from every point of contact with a candidate to provide a
more relevant, consistent and personalized experience.
Utilizing a community-wide, technology-based data collection, management & analysis system,
veterans, Reserve & Guard members, transitioning active military personnel and their families
can leverage rich data stores to gain actionable intelligence that help them make informed career
decisions, including:
 Articulate skills, tools and training to prospective employers
 Explore how continued career development through education, training and certification
can expand a veteran’s participation in employer talent pipelines
 Readily identify which employers offer mentor programs or expanded benefits for
veterans, Reserve & Guard members, transitioning active military and their families
 Get the inside track on employers that are hiring veterans and their talent trends
 Learn how to market themselves to be seen by employers that are hiring
 Have questions answered directly by hiring managers
Veterans, Reserve & Guard members, transitioning active military personnel and their families
need a beacon that can guide them towards the right path. All they have to do is get the right
data to the right employers at the right time and they will find the job best suited for them.
1.2. Using Data to Build Veteran Talent Pipelines
A data-driven talent acquisition strategy begins with a Candidate Data Profile that captures
relevant, reliable and sufficient data about the veteran that can be readily shared among
employers. The Candidate Data Profile includes a number of data elements, including:
 Skills (hard & soft), competency level, years of experience
 Roles & Responsibilities, competency level, years of experience
 Tools & technology, competency level, years of experience
 Performance Assessments
 Projects, tasks & job descriptions
 Achievements, Awards & Recognition
 Personality traits
 Culture fit analytics
 Mentor(s)
 Job title(s)
 Desired benefits
 Company size
 Location
 Industry

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The Candidate Data Profile replaces the need to sift through resumes and LinkedIn profiles to
identify the best candidates to build and maintain veteran talent pipelines. Using a Candidate
Data Profile, employers can search on a combination of criteria to identify and target the right
candidates. The Candidate Data Profile is the starting point to automate and streamline the
process of articulating veterans’ skills, tools and training to prospective employers, and becomes
an invaluable tool to assist veterans in making informed decisions on career path and location.
Using collaborative tools along with a Candidate Data Profile, employers can develop
relationships with the veteran to gain further insight into their personality to assess culture fit.
1.3. Quality of Hire
Great employees are what make extraordinary companies possible. The challenge for most
companies is finding the right employees. According to Glassdoor’s 2015 Survey, “48 percent
of hiring decision-makers say they don’t find enough qualified candidates for positions they are
seeking to fill.”
Gallup paints an even scarier picture, saying: “companies fail to choose the candidate with the
right talent for the job 82% of the time.” And yet, 85% of employees feel they don’t live up to
their full potential at work as a result of skill underutilization.
To find the right candidates, talent acquisition professionals must begin using emerging
technologies such as data analytics and artificial intelligence tools to target passive candidates
through hyper-personalization.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 20-24% of Americans change jobs every year (ADP
global research says it’s 27%), which means more than 41 million people are searching for jobs
and being recruited into jobs every single year (in the US alone). Several billions of dollars are
spent on job advertising (Indeed, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, and others compete for this market)
and even after people apply, companies on average spend approximately $4,000 per candidate on
interviewing, scheduling, and assessment to decide if someone is right for a job.
For veterans, the search process can be agonizing, difficult, and frightening. Unlike other
searches on the internet, a job search is a very personal thing. Veterans are looking for a position
that fits their needs, a job with an employer that fits their personality and lifestyle, and an
employer that is physically close enough that they can commute or relocate without impacting
their family and daily life. All of these search “criteria” are important, and almost none of this
information is embedded in the job description.
While companies like Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and others try to give companies branded
pages to promote their company culture and wonderful workplaces, most job descriptions are
“Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right
talent for the job 82% of the time”
“85% of employees feel they don’t live up to their full
potential at work as a result of skill underutilization”

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limited, out of date, and often poorly written – making search engines a problematic way of
finding a good job. Google has been studying this problem and found that for any given job (e.g.,
Marketing Manager) there are hundreds of different job titles (“Marketing Manager,” “Digital
Marketing Manager,” “Marketing Specialist Level 2 ,” and on and on), often making searches
inaccurate or misleading.
With a data-driven talent acquisition strategy, employers can trim the hiring process much
shorter than the average 52 working days, and improve the quality of hire. Employers can hire
the right candidate for the long term as candidates join the team knowing exactly what to expect.
According to the US Department of Labor and Statistics, “the average cost of a bad hiring
decision can equal 30% of the individual’s first-year potential earnings.”
A data-driven talent acquisition strategy can not only improve the quality of hire, but also reduce
employee turnover, the cost of hire, and the time to hire.
1.4. Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
The Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that use keyword-searching algorithms to screen
resumes are ancient technology deployed in a slow and expensive way. Employers are
challenged to find the best hires by sifting through resumes with keywords. Top recruiters and
employers are beginning to experiment with non-ATS recruiting using talent pools, recruiting
pipelines and social networks.
The technology is not designed to evaluate candidate’s qualifications. It’s designed to track
keywords: job titles, company names, skills, software, etc. Many ATS are old and their search
and scoring engines are fairly rudimentary, so non-standard jobs on the internet are not only hard
for people to search, they are hard to match to the best candidates. Just as candidates often
randomly apply for jobs that aren’t a great fit, the ATS has a very difficult time scoring resumes
to decide who to call back.
Many of the best candidates end up in the wastebasket. An ATS can inadvertently weed out
independent thinkers that can deliver desired outcomes, increase the time to fill open positions,
lead to excess employee turnover, have a negative impact on operating results, and could lead to
a negative review of the employer on Glassdoor.
The average open position receives more than 150 resumes, more than 45% of candidates never
hear anything back from the employer, 83% of candidates rate their job search experience poor,
and employers still tell us anecdotally that 20-25% of their candidates don’t turn out to be a good
long term fit.
If you look at the data collected by the Talent Board on the candidate experience, you find that
more than 1/3 of all job seekers spend 2 or more hours researching a single job, it often then
takes them an hour to complete the job application, and more than half rate the search process
“The average cost of a bad hiring decision can equal 30%
of the individual’s first year potential earnings”

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poor or mediocre. Current talent acquisition strategies are creating a lot of pain, effort, and
complexity for job seekers everywhere.
Finding the right employee is one of the most important tasks in business (one might argue it is
the most important thing managers do). Yet 61% of top executives surveyed in the Deloitte
Human Capital Trends survey said their companies do not do it well.
There are approximately 11 million working-age veterans in the U.S., (reference: 2015 U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs). According to LinkedIn's 2016 Global Talent Trends, 90% of
global professionals are interested in hearing about new job opportunities. On average, 79% of
candidates will never see an employer’s job postings.
A data-driven talent acquisition strategy solves these problems by making the candidate search
process more accurate, and provides employers better data to build talent pipelines with the best
candidates. A data-driven strategy takes the guess work out of hiring.
Research from Burning-Glass Technologies shows that the jobs of today are shifting away from
static “jobs” to “roles,” with much more of a hybrid nature. These new “hybrid jobs” (i.e., IoT
engineer, digital marketing experience manager, etc.) do not lend themselves to static job
descriptions and simple job titles. They are jobs that require technical, industry, managerial, and
integrated thinking skills; they often require skills in communication, persuasion, and teamwork.
More than 2/3 of companies now use job-based assessments (particular games or tests which
simulate the job itself) and culture assessments to find the best candidates.
 Imagine if veterans could find jobs faster with a better fit.
 Imagine if employers got fewer, more appropriate candidates.
 Imagine if data about the best job candidates was easy to find.
 Imagine if data about what jobs are “most in demand” was easy to find.
A data-driven talent acquisition strategy has the potential to drive economic growth, personal
career growth, and business productivity for almost everyone.
1.5. HIRE Vets Medallion Program
The HIRE Vets Medallion Program will recognize employers who recruit, retain, and employ
veterans, and who offer charitable services in support of the veteran community. The U.S.
Department of Labor is establishing the program under the Honoring Investments in Recruiting
and Employing American Military Veterans Act, or HIRE Vets Act. President Donald J. Trump
signed the act into law May 5, 2017.
90% of approximately 11 million working-age veterans
are interested in hearing about new opportunities, and
79% of those veterans will never see your job postings

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The department will establish two levels of awards for large employers: the Gold HIRE Vets
Medallion Award and the Platinum HIRE Vets Medallion Award. The department will establish
similar awards for small and medium-sized employers. Criteria for these awards include:
 Percentage of employees who are veterans;
 Percentage of veteran employees who are retained;
 Establishment of veterans' assistance and training programs;
 Employment of dedicated human resources professionals for veterans; and
 Income and tuition support for veterans.
The department will solicit, verify, and review award applications from employers on an annual
basis, and awards will be presented in celebration of Veterans Day.

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2. BENEFITS OF A DATA-DRIVEN RECRUITMENT STRATEGY
Data-driven recruitment is the key to attracting and keeping the right talent needed to meet
business objectives — and hiring them at the right price.
The recruitment process is a treasure trove of data that — when mined carefully — reveals
important information on whether or not a candidate will deliver the desired outcomes working
within the employer’s work environment and existing team. It’s the difference between making
decisions on gut feeling and making them based on facts.
2.1. Technology – the Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) can be great for sorting through applications, tracking
candidates through the hiring process, and getting data such as time-to-fill and cost-of-hire.
However, as mentioned previously, many are old and their search and scoring engines are fairly
rudimentary, so non-standard jobs on the internet are not only hard for people to search, they are
hard to match to candidates.
Further, their usefulness to recruiters stops at the point of hire. From this point, data on hired
employees are kept in other systems, making it difficult to get a big picture view of the long-term
success of a hire. It also limits the recruiting team’s ability to find candidates who share the
attributes of a high performing employee. In fact, some ATS may even eliminate suitable
candidates from the pipeline if their job experience doesn’t exactly match what’s stated on the
job description.
2.2. Data is siloed
As mentioned above, all the valuable data recruiters need is contained within several different
systems, and it takes a long time to collect and organize all this information. Without this data,
employers won’t be able to tell if their recruiting process is working effectively — or if not, why
not. Any stalls in the process can backfire and cause employers to lose a potentially great
employee.
2.3. Forecasting ability is limited
Recruiters need a clear vision of hiring plans to help them determine when is the right time to
hire talent. In a highly competitive global economy, most employers need to start building their
talent pools 18 to 24 months in advance. In addition, hiring plans should be based on historical
data and optimize the spend on recruiting to ensure they are hiring at the right cost. Without
better technology and all employee data available in a single system, recruiters are hard-pressed
to deliver the optimal headcount needed to deliver on business goals.
2.4. What Data-Driven Recruitment Looks Like
What the recruitment team needs is a seamless way to connect all employee data — from
sourcing to hire and beyond — and also tie this into their strategic workforce planning. This
includes measuring and monitoring employee engagement to predict employee turnover. With
this complete picture at their fingertips, recruiters can more easily and effectively meet the
demands of the organization. A data-driven talent acquisition strategy is the key to success.

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An approach focused on utilizing workforce intelligence — the combination of talent and
culture-fit analytics and strategic workforce planning — enables employers to answer their most
critical recruiting questions with confidence and improve the team’s business impact. A few of
the major benefits of a data-driven talent acquisition strategy include:
 Increase quality of hire
 Predict speed of hire
 Improve candidate experience
 Embed diversity into recruiting process
 Position the recruitment team for success
Other value-added benefits of a data-driven talent acquisition strategy include:
 Reduce time & cost of hire
 Deliver on recruiting capacity
 Increase employee engagement
 Reduce employee turnover
2.4.1. Increase Quality of Hire
The ability to track new hires across the employee lifecycle helps employers discover what
makes an effective job candidate — and a bad one. This means looking beyond how quickly
someone was hired and if it was at the best price possible. Data-driven recruiters dig deep into
metrics such as:
 Qualified applicants-per-requisition (which indicates whether your sourcing practices are
delivering those effective employees)
 Resignations and involuntary turnover for less than three months of service
 New hire performance by lead source
 Talent characteristics (advanced “in-memory” workforce intelligence applications make
it easy to run tailored algorithms to help identify talent characteristics)
2.4.2. Predict Speed of Hire
Wouldn’t it be great if you could provide more accurate hiring time estimates to stakeholders?
When done properly, building talent pipelines and using workforce analytics enables employers
to know with confidence how long it is likely to take to hire for a certain role, including time in
each stage of the hiring process. With this information, employers can provide more credible
timelines to stakeholders. Likewise, this data-driven approach can reveal the bottlenecks slowing
down hiring and inform employers on the right actions to take to fix them.
2.4.3. Improve the Candidate Experience
Engaging in a conversation is the best way to get to know someone. In a flowing conversation,
hiring managers have an opportunity to see how a person’s mind works. With relevant, reliable
and sufficient data, interviewers can put down the interview script to engage in a conversation of
discovery to learn whether a job candidate can deliver on desired outcomes.
The Talent Board’s 2015 North American Candidate Experience Research Report espouses:
“Organizations are better able to deliver higher quality talent, improve recruitment efficiencies
and align more closely with business objectives when the candidate comes first.”

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While candidate experience has been a hot topic for decades, many employers still struggle to
improve this important part of the hiring process. There are a number of areas recruiters and the
talent acquisition team need to work on. Using a data-driven acquisition strategy helps
employers identify challenges and improve not on the hiring process, but also the candidate
experience. Doing so minimizes the risk of a poor review on Glassdoor.
Analytics bring the factors that impact candidate experience to the forefront, and talent and
workforce analytics help employers quickly measure the effectiveness of each. Whether it’s time
since initial contact, time between stages, interviewer name, etc, employers are able to tell what’s
increasing or decreasing the likelihood of a candidate withdrawing his or her invitation to a talent
pool, and create strategies to decrease the odds of losing strong candidates.
Talent acquisition must use data to relentlessly optimize for human connection. The only way to
truly build a successful candidate experience is to measure how candidates respond to the
recruiting process.
2.4.4. Embed Diversity into Recruiting Process
Traditional recruiting methods make it hard to tell whether an employer will hit its diversity
targets or ensure equity during the process. Instead of guessing, employers can use analytics to
continuously monitor their hiring funnel for important demographic ratios such as gender,
ethnicity, and veteran status. This enables employers to better track diversity and implement the
correct evidence-based programs to increase diversity throughout the pipeline.
2.4.5. Deliver On Recruiting Capacity
Hiring the wrong candidates can create an unnecessary cost burden and reduce productivity
Recruiting is a fine balance: over-hiring can create an unnecessary cost burden while under
hiring can reduce productivity. In order to stay on track, recruiters need fact-based hiring plans
that are continuously updated to reflect the most current state of the company. Data-driven
workforce planning, done in collaboration with Talent Acquisition and Finance, enables
recruiters to create more accurate hiring plans, ones that use forecasts based on accurate data for
factors such as employee turnover, internal movement between departments, and hiring success.
In addition, this type of planning, which incorporates data from talent and workforce analytics,
provides a full picture on spend. Employers know instantly when overspending on recruiting, or
not spending as effectively, because you can easily compare the total costs of activities such as
internal, agency, and RPO recruiting.
2.5. Position the Recruitment Team for Success
Many employers may be using spreadsheets and generating reports from various systems in
order to find the information they need to strengthen their recruiting process. This can be a long
and tedious process. However, if employers want to truly build a sophisticated analytics function
for recruitment, they must consider investing in new technology that will make it faster and
easier to get to the critical data the need.
The Candidate Data Profile is the starting point for using a data-driven recruitment strategy -
building relevant, reliable and sufficient data using normalized data, assessments and
performance evaluations.

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3. SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY
A robust, reliable, scalable, community-wide, technology-based data collection, management &
analysis system whose primary function is to help employers build and maintain veteran talent
pipelines and identify the best candidates for open positions utilizing a data-driven strategy
rather than sifting through resumes or LinkedIn profiles.
Summary of Functionality
3.1. Candidate Data Profiles
 Contact information
 Employment history
 Skills (hard & soft), competency level, years of experience
 Roles & Responsibilities, competency level, years of experience
 Training & certifications
 Job titles, tasks & job descriptions
 Projects
 References
o Supervisor
o Professional
o Subordinate (when applicable)
o Co-workers
 Performance measures and assessments
 Work environments
 Team-ability
 Awards & achievements
3.2. Veteran Talent Pipelines
 Dashboard
o Talent acquisition metrics
 Quality of candidates hired
 Average cost of acquisition
o Number of candidates by open position requisitions (current & planned)
 Candidate search criteria
o Skills (hard & soft), competency level, years of experience
o Roles & Responsibilities, competency level, years of experience
o Culture fit
o Job title, tasks & job descriptions
o Location
o Company size
o Industry
 Alert hiring managers of best candidates
 Send invitations to the best candidates to join talent pool

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3.3. Culture-Fit Analytics (data analytics)
 Candidate assessments
o Performance
o Work environment
o Team / Team-ability
 Employer internal assessments
o Core values assessment
o Work environment
o Employee engagement
o Team performance
o Special projects, tasks, work assignments
o Career opportunities
 Candidate – Position matching
3.4. Decision-support
 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
 Machine learning
 Predictive analytics
3.5. Talent Hacking
 Utilize candidate references to expand the employer’s reach to build adequate talent pipelines
3.6. Improved candidate experience
 Candidate dashboard
o Current participation in talent pipelines, listing:
 Employer
 Job opportunity
 Location
 Culture-fit
o Alerts to inform candidates they’ve been added to an employer’s talent pool
o Potential (estimated) participation in talent pipelines, listing
 Additional experience required to participate
 Additional training/certifications required to participate
 Employer
 Job opportunity
 Location
 Culture-fit
 Communicate directly with hiring manager
o Audio and video conferencing
o Text and video messaging
 Access to online employer reviews
 Employer’s overview of the hiring process

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3.7. Seamless integration with employer Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and HRIS
 The talent acquisition platform brings together the tools need to build & maintain talent
pipelines and identify the best candidates
o Recruiter search functionality
o Configurable pipelines and templates
o Interview scheduling
o Candidate feedback
o Open, pending and projected requisitions
o Data analytics (talent/culture-fit analytics) using real-time data
o Consolidation of candidates from job boards and social networks (LinkedIn,
Facebook, Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, StackOverflow, Github, etc.)
o Collaboration tools to build relationships between candidates & hiring managers
o Insights throughout the talent acquisition experience
o Milestones and progress reports
o Full funnel reporting

Blueprint for Building Veteran Talent Pipelines

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