Build your Veteran Recruiting Program with TangoAlpha3
Note: This article is a guest post by Drew McDanald, Managing Partner and President of TangoAlpha3.
TangoAlpha3 announced in 2020 that we would begin offering Military Veteran Recruiting Programs (MVRP) for our customers, branding such an offering VetRaaS, or–long-form–Veteran Recruiting as a Service. We had built the company leveraging a veteran-centric recruiting model to staff global IT programs, and were really interested in how we might help a broader spectrum of military veterans and private sector enterprises realize their potential in one another.
TangoAlpha3 would concurrently serve as both a skills talent acquisition engine and “military to civilian” skills translator, and the nature of this unique talent pool would allow us to help enterprises build an incredibly scalable framework for acquiring human capital: veterans are always transitioning somewhere, just about everywhere.
Sure, General Motors and Amazon have the capital to build out holistic military veteran recruiting programs, but given our experience and status as a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, TangoAlpha3 felt perfectly positioned to act as a fractional MVRP for enterprises that wanted to test the military veteran labor market.
Less than six months after that announcement we were awarded a subcontract to support the Veteran Administration’s TAP (Transition Assistance Program). This wasn’t necessarily the target of such VetRaaS offering, but very much embodied the mission: optimize the successful transition of military veterans into civilian life. Moreover, it provided additional credibility to our efforts, and in the latter part of 2020 TangoAlpha3 engaged with an Austin, Texas-based company to hire an assortment of military veterans (wheeled and tracked vehicle mechanics, fuel supply specialists, small arms repair specialists, etc.,) that possessed strong electromechanical skills to refurbish technical equipment.
In fact, we stood up a team of around ten veteran employees in a short period of time, while also building out a framework that would allow us to continually optimize outcomes.
This experience validated our fundamental premise, while also providing important lessons learned—which allowed us to further refine our process.
Earlier this year (2021) we engaged with HomePoint, a rapidly growing company that is disrupting the industry of home maintenance services, to help them develop a MVRP.
Jon Driscoll, CEO of HomePoint, understood the combination of electromechanical skills with integrity and mission accomplishment orientation many service members gain in the military would translate very well to their industry, while also providing the scalable framework necessary to take their business national.
At HomePoint, we are revolutionizing an industry by providing high end homeowners with a trusted partner in effectively maintaining their most valuable asset, their homes. This means we need to tap into and create a new level of Home Technicians (employees) providing this new level of proactive and comprehensive service. Military veterans have proven to have mechanical understanding, combined with integrity, professionalism, and a desire to learn, grow and achieve the mission. This has been instrumental in fueling our ability to rapidly grow the company. It has also been a joy to watch how easily this group of people rally around each other creating a natural comrade and even deeper bonds, friendships, and support systems with each other much more rapidly than the general public.
TA3 Continues to Expand
And TangoAlpha3, and especially this offering, continues to expand. You know why? Because there is always a Vet for that. Okay, we admittedly stole that slogan from the 2009 iPhone 3g commercial, but our specific claim is more accurate:
- Your company needs someone to support your enterprise IT environment at a tough to fill location; hire a veteran!
- You deliver services that include capturing angry raccoons encamped in attics; hire a veteran!
It’s a use case we never envisioned, to be sure. We can find a veteran for these tasks because they have a sense of adventure, mission, and don’t shy away from austere environments.
And as if this couldn’t get better, TangoAlpha3 can help you build out a military veteran internship program whereby your company and a veteran get to try one another out while the military foots the bill! We are building out pilot programs for customers as I type…please reach out if you might be interested and we will keep you in the loop regarding developments and start talking through how we might be able to partner.
Tim Chapman, TangoAlpha3 Founder and CEO, and I were recently discussing the evolution of our company…and we were pondering how we would describe what we had become, as it doesn’t fit in any traditional box.
While TangoAlpha3 started out as NorCal Staffing Group, we now had W2 staff deployed across the globe in support of enterprise DoD and VA programs. Yet we aren’t the typical Federal Systems Integrator either. Tim and I are both recruiters at our core, and the fastest growing segment of our company is helping companies develop frameworks based upon Lean, Continual Improvement Processes, for hiring Military Veterans. Yet while our services manifest themselves in radically various ways, at the core of all our services is a Military Veteran Talent Acquisition company, we simply deliver military grade talent in the manner best suited for the enterprises and military veterans we strive to serve.