It’s September and you know what that means: scarves, sweaters, Pumpkin Spice Lattes (#PSL) and EEO reporting…wait, what?!? EEO reports??? Yep. For those of you lucky enough to live in a place where the leaves start turning to autumn colors and the temperature dips just enough to don that cozy, oversized sweater on casual Fridays, I truly envy you. You have a pretty Fall landscape to lessen the blow of that incredibly dull but important (and mandatory) EEO reporting task while I’m here on the West Coast dying in 62 – 80% humidity and 88 degree weather AND trying to get the numbers from my (annoying) payroll system’s EEO report to match up with the number of active employees, their job titles, ethnicity and gender. It took me a few hours of creating a number of different reports to audit myself against to finally realize that what the payroll system was calling an “EEO Report” was actually an EEO Type 3 (Headquarters Only) Report, which is why my numbers weren’t adding up correctly. Thanks Paychex, I appreciate the gap in what you think is an EEO 1 Report and what is actually an EEO 1 Report. Enough of my griping and back to the matter at hand, which is the evaluation of my finalized EEO data.

This year, I see that my organization has a great opportunity to increase it’s visibility and reach in the military focused and Veteran community. San Diego has the highest population of returning/new Veterans in the country. This also means that we have one of the highest rates of unemployed Veterans in the nation. Many HR professionals that I talk to are excited to get out there and start targeting Veterans in their recruiting initiatives but run into the same roadblock that I do; that is to say, it can be incredibly difficult to find cost-effective, qualified candidate-yielding resources to target job searches to. Outside of posting our open requisitions with local VA affiliates and spreading the word to my colleagues within our local chapter of SHRM, I’ve found it very challenging to find cost-friendly, reliable national military and Veteran-focused job boards that have been vetted as being successful resources to reaching this particular job seeker demographic. This conundrum led me to start looking into new outlets being touted by one of the most trusted voices in the Recruitment/Talent Acquisition community: ere.net. I happened upon an article entitled: Social Network Just for Military is Helping Vets Get Jobs where article author John Zappe called out RallyPoint as being one of the most effective military and Veteran focused recruiting resources of 2014.

After reading the article, I was enticed to scope out RallyPoint for myself. Being the aggressive #techgeek that I am, I went into full beta test mode. I created a profile as a ‘civilian supporter’ to see if I could passively connect with both Active Duty and new Veteran members. To my dismay, I couldn’t respond to any member discussion boards or connect with members directly about a possible employment opportunity without upgrading my account to a paid subscription. Being that recruiting this demographic is important to me on a personal and professional level, I went a step further and checked out the pricing options to advance my military-focused efforts. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the pricing for one 30 day job posting: $499!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There simply aren’t enough exclamation points in the world for me to wrap my head around a $500 price tag for one 30 day posting on job board that has a user base of 300k or less, where I would calculate that on a good day 50% of members have profiles that are 100% complete and up-to-date. Even a 30 day LinkedIn posting in the nation’s most populated cities isn’t $499. I knew I had to conduct some additional resource to see if more of the military-focused/Veteran job boards are as outlandishly overpriced as RallyPoint. My research concluded that the bulk of military and Veteran specific job boards are insanely expensive, especially for organizations that operate on a lean Recruitment budget and don’t have Fortune 500 money to throw at talent sourcing tools. If I wanted to post 1 job requisition a month all year on RallyPoint, I would have to fork over $6,000 a year on a site that just focuses on one niche talent pool. That is my entire external recruiting budget for 1 calendar year… INCONCEIVABLE! <said in Vizzini voice>

I’m calling on my talent managers, my procurers of high performers and my sourcing gurus to help me. There have to be some reasonably priced, effective military and Veteran focused job boards out there that you are using to interview and hire a population of job seekers that have notoriously been underserved and overlooked. Email me, call me, tweet me, Link with me  to share your secrets and pearls of wisdom so I can do my part in giving back to those who have done so much to serve and protect us.

– Namaste