HP's compelling call to action to hire veterans

How do hiring managers speak to a group as diverse as the millions of men and women who have worn the uniforms of the U.S. armed forces? How do they connect with veterans, who represent every race, ethnic group and religion in America?

Since its launch last year, HP’s Reinvent Mindsets campaign has promoted diversity and inclusion in hiring and in the workforce with messages aimed at women, African-Americans, Latinos and members of the LGBT community. The latest spot in the series, Ask Me About, reaches out to former members of the military, and debuted at the inaugural Silicon Valley Veterans Summit in San Jose, Calif., last week.

Starting with the right questions

As the title of Ask Me About suggests, making veterans feel included means starting with the right questions. The black-and-white video features seven vets, including some who work at HP, talking candidly about their experiences in job interviews. It reveals how these former members of the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps say they are often stereotyped, like the 80 percent of all veterans who say they feel misunderstood by the non-military public.

“Don’t ask me how many people I’ve killed,” says one of the vets. “Don’t ask me what’s the craziest thing I’ve seen,” adds another former service member. “Don’t ask me about my mental health,” says another.

It’s these awkward and misguided questions, all of them actual queries encountered by the vets in the video, that perpetuate those stereotypes while getting in the way of meaningful communication that might actually lead to a job offer. Stereotypes like this: Despite the common misconception of vets as professional killers, only about one in five has actually served in combat. The featured veterans had a wide range of jobs, from medic to aviation electronics technician to intelligence analyst.

“That’s the sort of unconscious bias we’ve strived to remove from the conversation at HP,” says Lesley Slaton Brown, HP’s chief diversity officer.

“This video is saying, ‘Don’t ask that. But do ask a vet about leadership principles. Ask them about the way they process information. Ask them about the methodology they use to come to a conclusion or manage a program,” says Slaton Brown. “At HP, our mindset is around understanding the veteran’s perspective and saying, ‘Bring that to us. We get it.’”

To produce the new Reinvent Mindsets video about biases that are by definition unconscious, the challenge was first to define them.

They began by interviewing former service members currently employed by HP who told stories about the difficulty they had translating their work skills to hiring managers whose knowledge of the military is limited and comes mostly from movies and TV. In a recent study, 80 percent of employers agreed with vets that average citizens struggle to relate to them and understand their experience. At the same time, 37 percent of vets felt they hadn’t been able to land their desired position because they didn’t know anyone in that field to ask for advice or support, and 43 percent of employed vets feel their current employers don’t take full advantage of their experience and skill sets. “There’s a huge communications gap,” says Lauren Elliott, director of strategy at Badger & Winters, the creative agency who helped HP make the video. “The thing that we heard loud and clear from the vets we spoke to is, ‘We have incredible skills but we may describe them differently.’”

On set with the vets

At the sprawling studio in Queens, N.Y., where the video is being filmed, Bridget Dolan, 36, a former U.S. Navy helicopter aircrewman who flew nearly 500 hours as a member of a mine-clearing squadron and now works as an actress and bartender in New York, took a seat under the bright lights and, on cue from the directors, began to describe the types of questions that keep that communications gap alive.

“Don’t ask me about my war stories,” she says. “Don’t ask me if I’ve lost friends in combat. Don’t ask me if I have PTSD.” Suddenly, Dolan falls silent and wipes a tear from her check. The lines she is delivering have stirred up memories of her military service. But within minutes she resumes taping. “See why you shouldn’t ask that stuff?” she says with a smile.

Between takes, Dolan and the other Ask Me About vets talked about the frustrating misconceptions that the public, including prospective employers, seems to cling to. Beth Woloszyn-Redman, 31, a former U.S. Marine signals intelligence analyst who is now a HP marketing research analyst in San Diego, recalls that she has heard employers talk about the “angry vet” who’s likely to bark orders at his or her colleagues, or the “damaged vet” who needs to be treated with caution. “As a vet, I don’t want you to be worried about working with me,” she says.

Another common misconception, this one dating from the days of the military draft, involves the comment, “Thank you for your service.” It’s always nice be thanked, says John-Peter Cruz, 34, who served in a U.S. Army engineering unit in Afghanistan, but it’s really not appropriate when speaking to a member of today’s all-volunteer armed services about their career. “We chose to do this, nobody's forcing us,” Cruz explains. “This is what I signed up to do, so why thank me? This is my job.”

Veterans also want employers to know how experienced they are working with all types of people. "If you want to see how people from all walks of life  interact with each other, go check out a military unit," says Jason "Jay" Fraser, who served as a Marine and is now HP's VR business development manager and a member of HP's Veterans Business Impact Network. "They are absolutely fantastic about everybody being on board. It doesn't matter your color, your creed — all that is out the window. So I think the military overall is the model of how folks should interact and be on the same team."

Woloszyn-Redman says she hopes vets will see the video and feel empowered to better sell their skills on job applications and interviews. “You know, the military and companies are alike. They both use a lot of acronyms and lingo that nobody else understands,” she says. “One of the biggest hang ups on the veteran’s side is making your resume understandable. You worked on aircraft? That’s fine and good, but you have to translate it on your resume for the guy who’s hiring a team to do 3D printing. It’s all about speaking the same language.”

Read our profile of HP’s Jason Fraser, a Marine turned business development manager.