A Guide to Hiring a Veteran
If you have a business and are looking to hire, you should consider tapping into the veteran talent pool to find talent that could benefit your business greatly. Post your job listings on Vets Hired to find the best candidates!
Preparatory steps
Before considering bringing a new employee into the fold, you need to think about the type of business structure you want to go with. Once you’ve decided on this, other preliminary steps to take care of to ensure your business is on the right path include applying for an Employer Identification Number (or EIN). Having an EIN is critical for many purposes, such as allowing you to open up a business bank account as well as enabling you to file your payroll taxes much more easily throughout the year or as and when required by the IRS. If your business is an LLC, applying for an EIN is a much simpler task as it is included in the services offered by a formation service when they file your business on your behalf.
Why hire veterans?
If you have looked and looked and haven’t been able to source the talent you need for your business, then hiring a veteran may just be the next logical step for you at this stage. Veterans are often highly experienced individuals in their own right, with a lot of transferable talents they can bring to the table. You’re also far more likely to find a leader in the veteran talent pool if you are looking for quality candidates to help manage your business in the future.
Finding who you need
Veterans usually have a specific skill set; the key is finding how these skills can be applied to your business. Once you’ve got a clear idea of the type of skill set you need, you can start narrowing down your options regarding talents and experience that will suit the vacancy in question.
Where to find a suitable candidate
You might not necessarily find an ex-veteran on your typical job boards. Instead, you may have to extend your search to look at job board sites specifically for veterans seeking access to commercial jobs. Also, you can search for veteran-related terms on the internet to source sites that may assist you in the hiring process, such as VA for vets and military.com. Alternatively, you can advertise your job posting on sites specifically catered to helping veterans source work, such as the National Veterans Foundation and the Hire Veterans website.
Screen potential candidates
Once you find a few suitable candidates for the role, you may need to do some further screening to decipher whether what they are looking for meets your requirements and vice versa.
Incentives for hiring veterans
Apart from gaining access to incredible talent, you can also benefit from certain incentives when hiring veterans. One of these is a tax break known as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Other benefits include training subsidies and salary reimbursements.
How to make your workplace more accommodating
Once you’ve found your ideal hire, you may need to make certain adjustments to your hiring and work policy to allow for flexible and remote work, as well as provide access to counseling and training programs to employees who may need this.
Other things you can do to ensure that the communication process is more streamlined can include creating a handbook for employees to refer back to if they need a refresher on company policies. This is where using a PDF conversion tool can come in handy if your PDF handbook has many pages that require edits from time to time. With this tool, you can convert your PDF document into Word format and make the necessary changes more easily than if you were to edit the PDF documents themselves. Once done with the edits, all you need to do is save it back into PDF format and go from there.
These are just a few of the steps you may want to consider if hiring a veteran has sparked your interest. Furthermore, it may end up being one of the best decisions you ever made simply because you chose to look outside the conventional hiring process.
Special thanks to Lexie Dy
Contributing Writer
