Millennials at Your Service

We have decided to begin another press push with the theme:

"Millennials at Your Service"

The idea behind this theme is that young reservists are differentiated from their civilian peers by the experience, skills, and character gained in their Service to Canada.

For those of you who have not heard the term Millennials, the Millennials are the generation born roughly between 1980-2000. This generation have been characterized as "Trophy Kids" because they expect to receive a participation award for everything. Millennials are also often seen by employers as selfish, disloyal, and lacking in work ethic. This manifests itself in the workplace as an expectation for recognition, promotions, and raises, even for substandard work.

We at civiside.com are contrasting the negative characterizations of Millennials with an image of hardworking, loyal, and team-oriented young reservists. Sure we have the occasional Bloggins in our midst, but overall, our young people are some of the best that this country has to offer. They know how to put in a hard day of work individually and as a team, they are enthusiastic about challenges, and don't expect something for nothing. These qualities alone should make them top of the list for employers. In addition, reservists bring proven team-building and leadership skills, as well as training in First Aid, Harassment Prevention, Media Awareness, and Ethics.

I've said it before, employers are the ones who gain the most when they hire reservists. Hopefully our efforts will help them see this clearly.

Article in HR trade publication

There is an article today in Workplace Magazine that I think very nicely summarizes why employers should be hiring reservists:

http://tinyurl.com/6c3t72

We are now pushing our press campaign into the business and trade press with the message that hiring reservists is good business sense, in addition to good corporate citizenship. This is an irresistable combination for most employers.

As always, I encourage you to tell fellow reservists about civiside.com. Employers are posting jobs and they need to see job candidates in return. We have built the platform, raised awareness of the value of reservists and the need for a supportive employer, now it's up to reservists to complete the final part of the equation by signing up.

Update.

Over the last week I have continued to do press and media interviews in Brandon, Belleville, and Kingston. The media continue to show an interest in what we are doing, and that has been a welcome surprise.

I have also been working on an information package that we will be sending to all the reserve units across Canada. The hardest part of our mission has been getting reservists to sign up for the service. Employers for the most part have been very interested in posting jobs to attract reservists to their companies. The problem is that we can't actively promote the service to many employers without a sufficient pool of reservists to take the jobs. We are at a Chicken or Egg situation that is slowing down our progress. If you are a reservist who has been putting off signing up for the service because you want to see what happens, I recommend that you take the initiative and receive the benefit of being one of the early users.

In case you don't see why using civiside benefits you, here are a few reasons:

1. Position your military experience as a competitive advantage versus your civilian peers. Employers posting jobs on civiside consider military experience to be a competitive advantage versus the other indirect work experiences of your civilian peers.

2. Employers posting jobs on civiside have signed a statement of support for reservists working for them. This means, if you decide to stay in the reserves you will have an employer who won't refuse time of for training requests, or make you use your annual vacation instead of accommodating your military service.

3. Civiside is designed to do the job searching for you. All you need to do is sign up with an email, password, and your educational credentials. Civiside will then automatically inform you whenever a job is posted that matches your credentials. No need to browse, or even return to the site, until you are matched with a job that you want to apply for.

I hope that the benefits of civiside are now clear. I look forward to continuing the iteration of the service so that every reservist that wants a job with a reserve-friendly employer gets one.

CBC Radio One interview.

My interview on CBC Radio One yesterday went exceptionally well. It was a little shorter than I thought it would be, but nevertheless excellent. I received calls from friends all over excitedly telling me that they had heard me on the radio. It really shows how great exposure on CBC is.

With this interview finished we have wrapped up our press campaign and will get back to the job of bringing reservists and reserve-friendly employers together. I expect that we will be putting out an information package in the next week or so to most of the reserve units across Canada, then contacting our list of reserve-friendly employers and encouraging them to post their jobs.

An exciting time to be civiside.com.

To listen to the interview visit http://www.civiside.com/press

90th Remembrance Ceremony

Today I marched with the 1000 member strong Hamilton Garrison in the 90th Remembrance ceremony. It's always an honour to be part of the parade. Marching as part of such a large body of soldiers you also remember that you are part of a much larger fraternity of Canadians that have served the country, many paying the ultimate price of sacrifice.

It is important to remember that when we reach the 100th Remembrance ceremony that most of our current WWII veterans will no longer be with us to give their first hand account of the great suffering their generation went through to protect the spirit of freedom. It is my hope that we as a nation will continue to remember those that fought as part of The Greatest Generation, and what they stood for, and against, whether they are still in our presence or not.

Technical Problems

In case you are wondering why civiside has largely been down since Thurs. afternoon (yesterday), our server host decided to migrate our server to another one, in the process lousing everything up for us. Our site became unusable b/c the database was corrupted. We had to spring into action and decide what to do to salvage the situation, and decided to upgrade our site to what we were intending to launch in a week...a brand new civiside.com site! The new site is developed in Ruby on Rails, a cutting edge programming language that makes development leaner and meaner.

The new civiside.com is designed to be quicker, more robust, and easier to use. We took people's feedback to heart and designed from the ground up a service that will get you in and out as quickly as is possible.

Don't be surprised if there are bugs, as we are rolling out this site ahead of where we intended. If you do find bugs use the feedback buttons to let us know and we will be on it lickety split.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

National Press Coverage

In addition to the media/press we have been receiving in individual cities from Victoria to Charlottetown, we have two upcoming national radio shows: The Roy Green Show on Sun, and CBC Radio One "The Point" on Mon.

We are still waiting for bites from the national press like The Globe and Mail and The National Post. Hopefully they will see fit to do a piece on our mission to help reservists connect with supportive employers.