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Introduction

“No veteran who fought for our nation should have to fight for a job when they come home,” declared President Barack Obama nearly ten years into the second Gulf War, when young returning veterans faced the highest rates of unemployment in decades.1 In the four years since, a combination of ambitious government action (including tax incentives for hiring veterans), academic and think tank research, and massive private sector recruiting initiatives seem to have made the president’s words come true:2 employment among veterans has risen to near-nonveteran levels, and corporate hiring of veterans is up 11 percent.3 The radical improvement seems almost too good to be true—and perhaps it is.

In 2014, an initial survey conducted by Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) found that nearly half of veterans leave their first postmilitary position within a year—only 16 percent of them were laid off or fired. More frequently, they cited reasons for leaving such as lack of career advancement (31 percent), disappointment with the quality of their work (29 percent), and dissatisfaction with their supervisor (20 percent).4 Plus, recent recruiting efforts have not proven successful across all veteran populations. Most corporate outreach efforts target officers to the exclusion of enlisted veterans, and unemployment remains high among female veterans and veterans of color.5 Most disturbing: we simply don’t know much about how veterans fare after they are hired.

A look at the existing research on the veteran talent pool makes it clear why. In some ways, veterans are the most studied and statistically mapped population in the US. Innumerable organizations and journalists track their progress and reintegration into society as they leave the military. But once they transition to civilian careers, veterans are among the most poorly understood of employee populations. The vast majority of the public—71 percent according to a recent Pew poll—say they have little or no understanding of the challenges facing returning veterans,6 and just 13 percent of organizations that hire veterans are familiar with the few resources available to help veteran candidates.7 Media coverage of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) fuels stereotypes and fear among civilians, impeding the transition of these brave men and women into the workforce and undermining their chances of success once they’re in it.

That lack of understanding may explain companies’ persistent focus on recruitment over transition and engagement: hiring veterans allows employers to check a box and feel they’ve done right by the heroic men and women who have served our nation. Helping them to realize their potential, however, demands that employers understand the challenges veterans contend with, their motives and aspirations, and the way in which they engage and prefer to be engaged. Absent that knowledge, companies that have invested significant sums in sourcing, hiring, and training returning veterans stand to lose their investment—a cost they can ill afford. Corporations like WalMart, Charles Schwab, Ernst & Young (EY), Hilton, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, and General Electric (GE) have poured vast resources—often as much as 30 percent of their considerable recruiting budgets—into bringing in veteran talent.8

Untapped Assets

What talent specialists know about hiring vets comes largely from recruiting entities and consultancies, which help veterans translate their résumés for civilian jobs, and connect them to potential employers. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) points out that veterans come to the workplace with a variety of advanced technical skills and a strong, performance-oriented work ethic as a result of their military occupational training.9 McKinsey and Syracuse University’s IVMF determined that veterans tend to be entrepreneurial, dedicated, resilient, adept at teamwork and team leadership, and comfortable working in dynamic, high-stress environments and in cross-cultural settings—precisely the characteristics corporations prize in new hires.10 Korn Ferry’s report on military experience and CEOs concludes that officer veterans are more likely to charge to the top of the corporate ladder in top companies and stay there.11 A similar study conducted by Efraim Benmelech and Carola Frydman of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determined that CEOs with military experience perform better during periods of industry turmoil and are less likely to be involved in corporate fraud.12

But in addition to its narrow focus on translating the military experiences of veterans to the corporate context—which often overlooks veterans’ potential and ambitions—this research also tends to focus on a veteran profile that HR already ostensibly knows best: an educated white man. Private-sector veteran outreach programs commonly target officers rather than enlisted veterans, leaving out an enormous segment of the veteran population.13 And America’s veterans have never been more diverse: among post-9/11 veterans, 15.4 percent are black, 11.9 percent are Latino, and 11.6 percent are women—numbers that are only expected to rise.14 Yet female veterans and veterans of color are the least likely, studies suggest, to find employment in the civilian workforce. Veterans of color, who experienced some of the highest rates of unemployment in 2011, have seen relatively small change in unemployment as compared to white, male veterans. And the unemployment rate for post-9/11 female veterans has remained stubbornly three percentiles higher than unemployment among female nonveterans for the past three years.15 Female veterans also experience more severe mental health issues, are more likely to go through a divorce, and are more likely to be single parents than their male veteran counterparts.16 Since social support has been found key to successful transition from military to civilian life,17 it is tragic (but perhaps unsurprising) that female veterans ages eighteen to twenty-nine commit suicide at nearly twelve times the rate of women nonveterans in the same age group.18 And although no authoritative studies exist, initial research suggests that depression, PTSD, and sexual assault experienced during military service negatively affect female veterans’ ability to find civilian employment.19 Studies examining the unique experiences of female veterans once they begin their civilian careers remain rare.

The challenges facing black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American/Pacific Islander veterans have also gone almost completely unaddressed. Some researchers have hypothesized that veterans of color may experience more racism in their postmilitary civilian careers than they do during military service, but there have been no conclusive studies.20 Earnings for black and Hispanic veterans are overall higher than peer nonveterans, but still significantly lower than the average earnings of white veterans.21 This difference might go back to training and education disadvantages suffered by veterans of color while serving in the military, but it is hard to say, given the paucity of research on the topic. For example, one study in 2004 found that black military service members were more likely to be employed in administrative or functional roles in the military than white military service members, which require less training and are correlated with lower earnings.22

While such reports provide a starting point for our understanding of veterans, businesses still lack a complete picture of this critical cohort that would enable them to engage veterans more effectively. When veterans fail to move up within their organizations, employers miss out on the innovative potential that a diverse cohort of employees brings—a loss which can impact their prospects for capturing new markets and expanding existing ones, as previous CTI research makes clear.23 Employers also lose out on future corporate leaders who come equipped with global experiences gained through their military service—acquired diversity that CTI research shows increases their likelihood of being inclusive leaders.24

With this report, we begin to complete that picture. Drawing on findings from a survey of 1,022 US veterans, roughly 40 interviews, and several focus groups, CTI lays out veterans’ unique strengths, as well as the tripwires they encounter as they pursue their goals in the corporate environment. We clarify how talent specialists can ensure that the veterans whom they have gone to such lengths to hire become employees who realize their leadership potential and contribute their most innovative ideas. Most importantly, we share tangible strategies that forward-thinking companies are already implementing to become employers of choice for veterans. To tap the strengths of this well-trained and diverse cohort of men and women, employers need more than a robust recruitment strategy. With this portrait, the most complete to date on returning veterans in the civilian workforce, employers might harness this cohort’s extraordinary commitment while providing our military heroes the careers they merit.