'Hiring Veterans' packaged with (too much?) information

When you’re looking for new employees, hiring a veteran makes sense. Someone who’s served in the military often has plenty of advanced training that may translate to the private sector. They “assume high levels of trust” and resilience. Teamwork is a given with veterans, but they can also act alone, if needed. Indeed, hiring a veteran is “good business.”

The first step to doing it, says Louis, is to make sure your senior executives are on board with it. There are many things to consider, and they’ll need to be involved.

Get your HR department ready, too; veterans returning to the workforce may need extra help to smoothly assimilate into the workplace. Military hierarchies are different than in most business cultures, as are routines. There are places where you and HR can get guidance and help with the various legalities — especially if you’re planning on hiring Guard and Reserve members, who’ll continue to have military obligations.

Know how to recruit veterans for your business. Offer on-the-job mentorship. Make serious efforts to understand your new employee’s background, and work to ensure that your workplace has no stereotypes to overcome. And finally, remember to reward yourself by applying for recognition for your organization. It will help your business, it’ll make you look like a star, and “good goes around.”

Here’s perhaps the best way to get the most out of “Hiring Veterans”: Buy the book, flip to the end of each chapter and take copious notes on the “Keys to Success” at the very end of each. Then close the book and store it with your Human Resources department, who may need some of what’s in the remaining bulk of the chapters.

Louis, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, knows his stuff, but he’s stuffed too much of it in between two covers.

Indeed, you could try to tackle pages and pages of hard-to-understand flow charts, box charts and bullet points, and sidebars and other assorted insertions, all of which would probably be quite helpful if they weren’t so darn overwhelming. You could attempt to scale a Matterhorn of overgeneralizations that may not inspire confidence in a reader, a prospective hire or a process seemingly created to help facilitate multiple successes. Ignore the sheer number of statistics, Venn diagrams and matrixes and give them a shot here. Just remember that the end-of-chapter synopses, which are succinct and uncluttered, exist for a reason.

Overall, there’s information to be found here, but you might have to dodge some confusion and overload to get it. “Hiring Veterans” could open up a wealth of opportunity for your workplace, or it could just keep you hanging.