Scaling for Growth and Increasing Brand Awareness in the Military Community
Even before Sarah came to the team as a senior talent acquisition leader at Ground Penetrating Radar Systems LLC (GPRS), the company had made many successful military veteran hires . But Sarah and her team knew they wanted to hire more.
“We’re a growing organization. Just over this past year, we’ve hired nearly 150 individuals,” she said. “I lead a team of four talent acquisition specialists and my specific role has been focusing on strategy, process, and scalability.” Shortly accepting the role at GPRS, Sarah evaluated the recruiting assets the company already held. She realized they were not fully utilizing their tools – specifically their subscription to RecruitMilitary Service Solution (RMS²), which provides employer branding and hiring solutions year-long.
“When I was brought in to GPRS, we already had RecruitMilitary Service Solution,” she said. “The biggest challenge for me was determining how to better partner with RecruitMilitary. How do we maximize and utilize the packages and services that RecruitMilitary provides?” Fortunately, RMS² includes access to a RecruitMilitary Client Strategist, who provides guidance for customers seeking to better establish their brand in the niche military job-seeker market. “We needed to be more engaged for RMS² to help us reach talent across the U.S.” Sarah said. “We knew we needed to increase our brand across the veteran community, because we also knew many veterans have great skillsets for our organization. We have veterans working with us and we see those connections.”
Here’s what Thacker said about how her team at GPRS is using RMS² to build a military veteran hiring and retention strategy that will go the distance:
Military & Veteran Job-Seekers Have the Right Skillsets
Sarah:
We’ve hired many veterans now and their leadership traits stick out to me. Being a project manager at GPRS does not mean that you are providing leadership to direct reports, but you are a leader in the field. And that leadership, that grit, that determination, that drive, and that empowerment is something that translates beautifully into the field for us.
In addition to that, every day looks different and we find that that’s often appealing to somebody who’s coming out of service, who may have been doing a lot of different things and doesn’t want to come into an office environment or a job that feels more transactional.
Our project managers get to experience different projects and clients, and they get to work independently, but also sometimes within a team, depending on their market. So teamwork is super important to us at GPRS.
Reaching & Attracting Military Talent is a Long Game
Sarah:
The best way to make sure that we’re leveraging RMS² is through intentionality. We must be intentional about multiple products we use to find talent. GPRS is not a huge brand. We do not get hundreds and hundreds of applicants to our postings. Hopefully someday – but right now we have to be very intentional about going out and finding talent.
For me, the benefits of RMS² are in the long game. The short game is finding a hire and making the connection. But the robust marketing, lead development, and employment branding as part of RMS² helps our long game. I’m focused on growth. Not just the hires for the next couple of months, but how do we seed the garden for what we need in the next couple of years, because we want veteran talent to fill our roles. We know that there’s success with that.
I have experience in midsize, large, and global organizations, so when I found out about RecruitMilitary, I instantly thought about not only the resume database, which is great, but also teaching the team how to use it. It’s important to know how to look at a military resume and translate those skills. Now, when we open a new position, we add it to the RecruitMilitary job board and resume database, and watch the search alerts that have come in.
My team has the alerts set up by markets. Each team member leads a market across the U.S. to hire project managers and they can use those search alerts to find resumes to review, whether it’s for a current hiring need or a future hiring need. That is something we’re really focused on in talent acquisition: How do we prepare for more growth and more hiring, not just the hire in front of us?
RecruitMilitary Service Solution (RMS²) Provides Recruitment Training
Sarah: I think one of the best things about RecruitMilitary is just the strong partnership with RecruitMilitary’s Client Strategist. So not only for me as a leader trying to help to understand the product but being able to have my team reach out to our RecruitMilitary Client Strategist and be able to set up one-on-one time to do that walkthrough.
I recently hired a new team member and we made sure RecruitMilitary training was on their list. That training equips the team to use the RecruitMilitary resume database, know the search alerts, and understand all of the parameters of that product.
When a company like ours is growing, we need to be able to focus on the things we need to do now. The partnership with RecruitMilitary allows us to work through the marketing campaigns, the messaging, and the advertorials and advertisements, which is in a sense is just as critical, and having bi-weekly meetings with my RecruitMilitary Client Strategist keeps it right on top of my to-do list.