One Weird Trick for Writing Resumes for Veterans

I’m not a self-help guru. Have I cracked the code for finding a decent job? Lol no. What I am is a veteran who spent years watching service members transition back to the world, only to later flounder. I’m a former recruiter whose heart broke a little bit every time someone with a DD-214 walked into the office because they couldn’t find work. I’m a guy who had to make the transition himself, and saw first-hand how absurdly, ridiculously ill-prepared most transitioning service members are for life on the outside. I’m someone who sent out resume after resume without getting called to interview. I’m someone who hit every possible job fair I could find and spoke to every hiring manager and HR gatekeeper that would give me the time of day. I’m someone who learned the hard way the do’s and don’ts of writing resumes.

I help veterans write resumes and cover letters. It’s what I give back. One day, I figured out that I had figured it out. I immediately set out to share what I had learned. I know what it’s like to get out. I know what it’s like to have your whole life change. I know the anxiety, the uncertainty, the fear of having to leave the safety net of the military.

Even if you hated it, even if you were counting down to your ETS, going back into the world is still scary as shit. I wish someone had told me all of the things I now tell other vets. This is why I do what I do. You, reader, are my brother or sister in arms. I landed on my feet, and want to help you do the same.

The civilian world has none of the camaraderie, unit cohesion, or sense of family that the military does. Even if you were the resident turd in your platoon, you were still their turd, and at the end of the day they were going to look out for you. That is not something you can count on in the world.

Employers aren’t running a charity. They’re trying to make money. They have overhead and payroll and costs and licensing and advertising and a whole bunch of problems that don’t concern you. You have a whole bunch of problems that don’t concern them. Unless you and the employer can do something to help each other, you don’t have much to talk about.

That’s where this blog will (hopefully) come in handy. Once you figure out how to talk to an employer about what they care about, things will turn around for you.

I started recruiting in my 14th year of service. Holy cow I hated recruiting. It was the only job where you could do everything right and still fail, and nothing was ever good enough. I now completely understand why recruiters say they’d rather be deployed. I’d pick Afghanistan over a recruiting station any day.

In spite of this, I did relatively all right. I had (I think) 44 contracts in three years with zero DEP loss (which means nobody I enlisted flaked out before shipping off to basic). I think I was successful because I did things a little differently. I treated applicants like they were already my soldiers. I talked to them about their long-term goals and what career they wanted. Some of them hadn’t given that any thought, so I asked them what their dream jobs were, and tried to pick an MOS (or rate, or career designation, or whatever you call it) that would help get them there. Sometimes we just didn’t have a job that would get them on the path, so I tried to get them a job with plenty of college money.

This approach was only as good as my ability to figure out what someone needed to be a good so-and-so. Then I started researching different professions. My time on recruiting duty afforded me the opportunity to get out into the community and talk to employers, find out how they felt about hiring veterans. They all basically said the same thing, which is critical for you to understand: Employers hire according to their needs.

Their needs. Not yours. I can’t emphasize this enough. On a human level, they might relate to the fact that you’re struggling to find work. You may have mouths to feed, or alimony to shell out, or debt collectors blowing up your phone. The decent ones may lament with you and sympathize, but at the end of the day, none of those things will get you a job. Don’t count on them hiring someone out of the goodness of their heart. They’re going to hire the person whom they think can do them the most good. The whole point of a resume is to show them that you’re that person.