VTRNgroup, LLC

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Strategic Consulting on Veteran, Family Career Initiatives

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VTRNgroup offers strategic consulting on veteran career initiatives for business and industry, universities, and colleges. Federal contractors have relatively new obligations to initiate affirmative action hiring programs for veterans, and one obligation is to establish effective outreach programs. With a target goal of 7% of the workforce, identifying likely hires, and engaging recruiters, hiring mangers, and front-line supervisors is critical to meeting the goals. Retaining veterans, providing significant meaning and opportunity for veteran employees to contribute, and advancing them in the organization requires cultural competency and focus.

jschmeling_1377222128_94James Schmeling has extensive experience advising businesses on the establishment of their career initiatives and assisting in building effective outreach programs. He can engage with your organization on strategic consulting that will take your organization far past compliance and into the realm of competitive advantage through veteran and veteran-family career initiatives and connect you to sources of veteran talent. He can also help establish talent development pipelines for your company, and tap into your existing employee resources. It doesn’t matter whether your organization is large or small, veteran and family-member talent can be leveraged to enhance your business. And done well, these initiatives will promote retention and reduce turnover costs.

Because veterans and family members are also inclusive of other diverse people, Eugenia Hernandez’s experience as a woman, Latina attorney, and her engagement with the Hispanic National Bar Association, the National Association of Women Lawyers, and as a former commissioner of the Iowa Commision on Latino Affairs, is available to ensure your career programs are inclusive of women and minorities.

If you’re building pipelines from higher education STEM programs into career opportunities, then the work of Dr. Elisa Grajales is directly relevant to your needs. She has broad experience with traditionally under-represented populations from higher education recruitment through degree completion and onto careers. She’s an experienced trainer and educator, and holds a PhD in clinical psychology and a master’s in industrial and organizational psychology. Her training curricula can be used independently by HR professionals in your organization.

Veteran Career Initiatives

Many consultants and firms can assist you to comply with guidance from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) for veteran recruitment. VTRNgroup is focused on far more than compliance. We help you connect to top veteran talent, to the programs focused in making them even better, and after you hire, to retain veterans in your teams.  We do that through helping you establish effective veteran outreach programs, demonstrating your commitment to veterans seeking opportunities to join your teams, and understanding the veteran talent opportunity – including their motivations and goals, who are the excellent prospective team members you want to hire, and keep, and more.

Not a federal contractor? Then connecting to top veteran talent through our expertise is even more important for you. Federal contractors are working on meeting their 7% benchmark goal for veterans in their companies, so competition for the best is even more important for your recruiters and hiring managers.

Retaining the most talented veterans is critical – why hire them if you don’t understand what motivates them and keeps them in your company? The best veteran employees have a need to continue to serve – their communities, their colleagues, their companies, as well as non-profits, and others. While money is important, the right opportunity to use their skills, to achieve career growth, to make a difference, are all critical as well.

If you’re a small company with a need for outside assistance to connect to the right prospective employees, and you  don’t have an in-house recruiting and hiring team, we can help. We establish ties to  veterans who are seeking career opportunities across the nation, and help them find your opportunities. Don’t know much about veteran talent? We can share what we know with you quickly, or do in depth training and education.

Are you a big company that wants to learn from the best? We can help connect you to your peers, deliver our expertise, and help you achieve your compliance goals and more importantly your business goals. Bottom line? We’ll help you tie into the most important sources of veteran talent in the nation, and they’ll impact your top and bottom lines, they’ll improve your teams, and they’ll enhance your competitiveness in the marketplace.

Training is available to your business leadership, your HR executives, your diversity and inclusion practitioners, and your employee resource groups. Or, we can design a program of effective outreach, recruitment, and hiring, and then lead into retention and advancement for your veteran team members. Please request an initial 30 minute to one hour consultation through our Contact Us form to assess your needs, and our ability to provide assistance. Rates are available on request for business and industry.

Veteran-Owned Businesses

Need business advising? VTRNgroup does that! We focus on veteran and family-owned firms, particularly small firms that supply goods and services to other firms. We can help you understand how to do business with private sector companies who want to buy from veteran-owned firms. Inquire about how we can help through the Contact Us page. An initial 15 minute consultation can be done at no cost if the information shared in the Contact form isn’t sufficient to determine if we can be of assistance. If we can work with you, then we can set consulting hours, at an hourly rate commensurate with the value we will provide to you. We won’t work with you if we can’t deliver strong value.

Higher Education Careers

Many institutions of higher education can benefit from access to top veteran talent, just like other sectors. But, most institutions of higher education don’t yet think about veterans as employees, even though most have employed veterans, and many veterans became researchers, scientists, and faculty members after their service. Most veterans, as they continue through their careers, are exposed to education and training both as student participants and as instructors. Military members also teach in service academies, in education programs for senior officers, and more, and do this jointly with the most experienced faculty in the nation at institutions of higher education. We help higher education recruiters and HR managers access this talent pool, and can help higher education create career initiatives, employee resource groups, paths to the professoriate and more, that echo other efforts to recruit talented women, minorities, first generation college students and others to careers in higher education.

In addition to faculty roles, veterans often have experience in technical roles that enhance their skills to serve in research, experimental and lab roles. They are administrators and leaders who can transfer those skills into higher education administration. And in roles that require compliance with safety and related standards, veterans are ideally suited to ensure the safety of your critical operations, including reporting and inspections.

Our packages include consultation and training with your university and HR leadership, training and assessment with your HR and diversity and inclusion teams, and engagement with your veteran employee groups. We can provide training sessions varying in length from 90 minutes to eight hours, and at rates inclusive of travel and training time, as well as with materials for use by your teams. Virtual sessions are available when in-person training isn’t an option, though we highly recommend on-site or of-site training and education for your teams. Reach out to us for a consultation, and we’ll schedule time to assess what we can do to assist you in reaching your goals, and design the specific program for your work. Our initial half-hour session is available at no cost to institutions of higher education focused on enhancing their veteran work force.

Speaking

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James Schmeling speaks publicly, at private events for industry groups, to business and industry leaders, to higher education leaders, and to human resources leadership in public, private, government, and philanthropic organizations. James has spoken to the Veteran Jobs Mission including providing training to new member companies, at Hiring Our Heroes summits, to the National Industry Liaison Group, to SHRM chapters, to universities individually including Cornell University, Syracuse University, various community colleges, and to higher education groups including the New England HERC’s Annual Diversity Recruitment Conference to senior administrators from Yale, Harvard, Northeastern, and many other institutions. He is available to speak at your organization or conference.

James also speaks on university and academic entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship initiatives, research centers, faculty and staff careers in entrepreneurial centers, and more. He is interested in how universities and their teams engage with the world, fund their work, and deliver value, and has extensive experience establishing and leading such research organizations, including with funding from external sources.

Other members of the VTRNgroup speak on ethnic diversity and inclusion, women in leadership, women and diverse professionals in the legal industry, at the Hispanic National Bar Association, on Latinos in the legal profession, on student inclusion, STEM education, diversity scholarships, and other topics.

Please send us your request for a speaker through our Contact Us page. We can arrange special rates for non-profit organizations, and hourly or all-inclusive honorarium rates as required for your organization starting at $2,500 for conference talks. Travel reimbursement or pre-paid arrangement is required for all speaking engagements outside of the Syracuse or Washington, D.C. areas.