Rent Heroes USA CEO explains why army expertise supplies distinctive worth that many employers fail to acknowledge.
Veterans are uniquely suited to deal with ongoing expertise shortages within the non-public sector because of the wealth of expertise developed by way of their service, from technical expertise to management expertise – but, they’re usually missed for high-paying, high-performance roles, Rent Heroes USA CEO Ross Dickman advised FOX Enterprise.
As the top of a nonprofit supporting veteran and army partner employment, he’s decided to vary that, particularly with Nationwide Rent a Veteran Day on Friday.
Dickman, who spent greater than a decade within the U.S. Military, is aware of how transferable a veteran’s expertise are within the non-public sector. The issue is that these expertise might be troublesome to convey clearly on paper because of the complexities of the job and the numerous cultural and trade shifts, in keeping with Dickman. To exacerbate the difficulty, there’s additionally a misunderstanding in regards to the roles and management positions the place veterans really excel.
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“It creates this sort of dual hitting problem where the skills don’t translate really simply on paper,” Dickman mentioned. Consequently, veterans are unfairly penalized within the hiring course of.
Veterans’ expertise usually translate properly to the non-public sector, Rent Heroes USA CEO says. (Rent Heroes USA )
Dickman’s group advocates for firms to prioritize skills-based hiring for sure jobs quite than conventional credential-based hiring. Particularly, Dickman says employers ought to concentrate on the precise expertise and competencies wanted for a task, as an alternative of counting on a level or particular credential as a broad proxy for {qualifications}.
“When you think about someone in manufacturing, maybe in a quality control type of role, you’re thinking about someone who will anticipate where there’s going to be holdups in operational efficiency, who can follow the manual. They’re going to take the initiative and leadership to kind of seek out and adjust across the process line,” he mentioned.
CEO of Rent Heroes USA Ross Dickman celebrates the Change of Duty Ceremony for a pilot, CW5 Rolando Sanchez, at Fort Drum in New York. (Rent Heroes USA )
These are all elements of what veterans deliver to the desk, Dickman mentioned.
Relying on the kind of function a veteran had within the army, “you get this really, really high degree of competence in terms of technical acumen,” Dickman mentioned. For example, when he flew helicopters within the army, he recalled that upkeep administration was a giant a part of the job.
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“When we were in Iraq, the amount of maintenance management process that we had to do was like on steroids. It’s all day, nonstop. So you’re getting years’ worth of expertise in a compressed timeline,” he mentioned.
It is one other instance of why his group is emphasizing hiring based mostly off of talent versus focusing purely on credentials or a level, Dickan mentioned, including that it isn’t solely veterans who’re going through such hurdles. It is also their spouses.
In June 2025, the veteran unemployment charge was 3.7%, which is up from 2.9% the prior 12 months, in keeping with the Labor Division. Nevertheless, the unemployment charge for army spouses is at about 21%.
“I think about the amazing spouses in our unit when we were deployed, taking on tremendous leadership responsibilities, event management, program management, long-distance communication planning, all of this kind of stuff, just so that our organization could do our mission in Iraq,” he mentioned. “It’s really hard to fit all that in a single page and outline and get everything you need to that the job description says has to be on it.”
Rent Heroes USA is partnering with about 700 firms which might be actively in search of to rent veterans or army spouses. (Rent Heroes USA )
His group is partnering with about 700 firms which might be actively in search of to rent veterans or army spouses. For its half, Rent Heroes USA evaluates the roles every firm has out there and compares them with the talents and expertise veterans deliver. It then conducts a comparative evaluation to establish areas within the job descriptions that could be unintentionally screening out veterans or their spouses, Dickman mentioned.
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However to really overcome the difficulty, Dickman believes that personal, public and nonprofit organizations need to work collectively. He mentioned the Protection Division ought to assist guarantee these expertise are documented and translated right into a language that employers can acknowledge and combine into their hiring processes.
Dickman mentioned nonprofits must fill the event hole by providing further coaching or help to align with civilian job necessities. Moreover, employers must take away standards that unintentionally filter out veteran candidates, in keeping with Dickman.
He testified earlier than the Home Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on Tuesday, calling for pressing reforms to the Transition Help Program (TAP), which is a compulsory program designed to organize service members for his or her transition to civilian life. He additionally pushed for stronger public-private partnerships that help service members throughout this shift.
