What veterans’ hiring problem says about all hiring in a tightening market.
Plus, the Trump Administration freezes more grant money.
Due to travel and some notable funding developments the past few days, this is a special (and late) holiday week edition of JOBS THAT WORK combining my usual Tuesday pieces with a mini edition of THE MONEY for paid subscribers at the end.
The issue.
Veterans can have a harder time getting jobs and getting jobs that actually fit their skills. It’s in part because of a frustrating bug in hiring that could soon have some significant consequences in a tighter employment market.
Explain.
In May, the unemployment rate for veterans ticked up to 4.6 percent for veterans ages 25 to 34. The unemployment rate for women veterans was 1.5 percent higher than the overall population. The total veterans unemployment rate remains lower than the overall figure at 3.8 percent, but it isn’t great to see higher figures among young veterans starting their prime working years considering developments elsewhere.
The biggest employer of veterans—the federal government—is shedding hundreds of thousands of staff. Despite the Trump Administration’s many vocal military appreciators, one of the big downstream effects of its federal workforce cuts—the policy rationale of which remains tenuous—likely will be fewer job opportunities for veterans once they return to civilian life.
The private sector isn’t fantastic at employing vets like the qualified and skilled professionals they are. Veterans have 33 percent underemployment, which, for the uninitiated, means they aren’t in a job that matches their actual skills and skill level, something that often translates to underpayment as well. The skills are definitely there: LinkedIn found that veterans can have three times as much professional experience, they are more likely to stay in their job, and they are 39 percent more likely to get promoted.
So why is it so hard to get veterans into jobs that fit them? Especially when so many business leaders laud hiring veterans?
The reason that gets pointed to an awful lot is a “language barrier” between two bureaucratic entities that don’t have much inclination to accommodate each other: the military classification apparatus and corporate hiring offices. The Defense Department has its own gobbledygook for describing skills, which generally doesn’t mesh well with the sleeker, profit-driven corporate gobbledygook for describing skills.
The Big Net of Gobbledygook is real, and I appreciate the struggle to get talent through it and into the workplace. But that doing so seems insurmountable to some hiring managers speaks to a bigger problem in hiring that I find increasingly frustrating—and potentially calamitous as federal cuts and AI-related job loss means more people in the hiring market who have transferable skills and obsolete work history.
Many employers imagine their jobs are hyperspecial couture arrangements that have to come from a very specific set of experiences. In doing so, they shut out workers with the skills they want because they aren’t a carefully tailored fit that they just happened to find on the open market. These things don’t get better in a tighter employment market, which I can confirm as someone who recalls the phenomenon of “We don’t hire people during this hiring crisis who have had trouble getting hired because of a hiring crisis” during The Great Recession. ADP reported this morning that the private sector lost 33,000 jobs last month, another sign of a tightening market that encourages employers to be even pickier.
It’s an issue that especially worries me about the future employment prospects of both veterans and my other former career colleagues in the federal workforce. A good deal of those federal jobs involve skills that transfer incredibly easily to the private sector—something I can confirm as recent fed who is now a business/person—but it can be very hard to get a company to give someone a chance if they haven’t spent x years in the very specific industry with highly technical requirements that can be learned in a few months. Or, to put it in a hypothetical:
Yes, this worker is quite skilled after having managed budgets for a government agency, and they have shown a ton of technical details on the fly with highly regulated public dollars. But it takes a special kind of person to manage our budgets at Edible Arrangements, and we will not settle for anything less than seven years of progressive experience tracking the expenses of heart-shaped pineapple slices.
It’s an organizational problem presented as a fact, and one that ends without the employer filling the job sooner or the worker getting the job they can excel within. Or worse, it steers an employer into a feedback loop of hiring people who present well enough on paper, then another version of that person when that first person doesn’t work out, and so on, while they pass over excellent workers again and again because of things like gobbledygook, not the talent.
So what do we do about it?
The good news is there is a good answer here: skills-first hiring, also known as skills-based hiring, or, for the uninitiated, hiring based on skills that an employer assesses or verifies during the hiring process instead of just guessing based on 15 seconds of scanning a resume or “vibes” from an interview.
Skills-first hiring has a lot of promise for veterans in particular because of The Big Net of Gobbledygook. It’s a lot harder to say a vet doesn’t have proper management skills to run a Des Moines-area IT office if an assessment shows that she has those skills.
As I wrote earlier this year, skills-first hiring requires deliberate effort to make hiring make sense, as shown by employers who killed their degree requirements not doing all that much hiring of people without degrees. Many employers struggle to know what their job is supposed to do, let alone what skills are needed to do the job. If they do, they have to find an effective and careful way of assessing those skills that is more than just a report built from a resume or answering a few vague survey questions. That can take time and money. Then, if they’re in a bigger enterprise, they also have to squeak their plans through risk-averse general counsels who can read legal issues that may or may not be there into skills-first hiring frameworks.1
Employers also can struggle to stick to the process when making hires due to the siren calls of things like “vibes” and “people who know people.” This, in turn, speaks to ongoing problems with employment discrimination that need to be disarmed in any hiring process. Some employers, for example, are reluctant to hire veterans because they think they will be unreliable due to a misunderstanding of the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and the symptoms of PTSD. There are effective ways of disarming discrimination that can reinforce a skills-first approach to hiring.
I’m a big fan of blind resume evaluations, or when names, schools (or if there was a school), and other key details are obscured from reviewers of written hiring materials and assessment outcomes. Blind review can help isolate skills from how an applicant acquired them, potentially making it easier for veterans to float to the top of a hiring process without getting trapped in The Gobbledygook Net or anti-disability biases that hit veterans harder than others.
RIP Lenita Jacobs-Simmons
I was crushed on Monday morning to learn about the death of my friend and colleague Lenita Jacobs-Simmons. Lenita was a former Job Corps director and deputy assistant secretary at the Employment and Training Administration. She also was an absolute force in this space for decades and a massive influence on my life and how I think about this work.
If there is such a thing as Workforce Valhalla, she is there now and she has thoughts about how things should be.
Behind the paywall:
The July funding freeze and some interesting DOGE things to mind.
A significant SCSEP and workforce grant awards update.
An update on Congress’ work on that bill that says all tremendous Williams have a unique light of their own and that it should be appreciated.