What I saw in Tim Hortons today.

What would you have done at 10:57am on Remembrance Day if the location you were standing in refused to observe a moment of silence? This is the situation I faced this morning in the Tim Hortons just before the Kingston sign, ironically on the Highway of Heroes. I was on Hwy 401East to Ottawa and unable to make a Cenotaph ceremony, so I stopped at the Tim Hortons. I went in and looked around, noticing that nobody seemed to be preparing for the moment of silence, so I walked up to the counter and asked a blonde cashier if they would be turning off the radio so that we could observe the 2 minutes of silence. The response “We don’t do that here”. I immediately asked to speak to the manager; we still had two minutes to right this. The cashier went into the back room and emerged about a minute later with a message from the manager that “She is busy in a meeting with head office”. Apparently they would not be observing the moment of silence. The last minute before the moment drew down and I realized that I would be the only one in the restaurant to observe it. I became nervous, butterflies stirred in my stomach. At 11am I put my right hand over my heart, just under my poppy, and put my head down. A few moments later another person with a poppy realized the time and stopped to observe the moment, then another. I wish I could say that the movement spread like wildfire and everyone stopped, but unfortunately that is not what happened. The radio kept blaring, the people kept walking, the cashiers kept serving and the moment went by without any notice from the dozens of people in the restaurant. I’m sure that scenes like these played out across Canada today but I think Tim Hortons is worthy of being singled out, not because a single manager of a roadside stop refused to observe a moment of silence, but because the head office of a corporation that brands itself as the reflection of Canada chooses to do business instead of taking two minutes honouring our war dead and veterans. However, they are not the only ones to blame, remembrance begins in our hearts and from what I saw in that restaurant, we have forgotten.

The Networked Job Market

Thinking about The Guaranteed Interview Program and why it is so powerful in aiding veterans disadvantaged by their military service led me to coin a new term that I think should be an alternative to the "Hidden Job Market". I was reading an interesting blog piece asking whether the "Hidden Job Market" was in fact a myth?: http://www.quintcareers.com/hidden_job_market_myth.html

The piece discussed the often cited statistics that 75%+ of jobs are unadvertised but still filled in the Hidden Job Market. The problem for this statistic is that there is no quantifiable evidence that this is the case. Many experts cite evidence that 70%+ of job seekers claim to have found their job through networking, as proof that a Hidden Job Market is where the majority of jobs reside. However, the author rightly argues that this is not conclusive proof because we don't know that those jobs weren't advertised with a winning candidate in mind. In fact, I know of many cases where the job was advertised because of company policy, with no intention of hiring someone other than who they already had in mind, the piece suggests that 30% of jobs are filled this way.

The author does find some evidence that a Hidden Job Market exists by using statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor to show that the difference between the number of hires reported by employers and the number of positions advertised for was about 40% of all jobs. What this suggests is that these positions were filled by some form of direct or indirect connection to the person interviewing. This is where the disadvantage for transitioning military veterans comes in. Most transitioning military veterans usually have most of their professional connections among other veterans and therefore their access to civilian-professional connections that can help them secure interviews is much more limited than their civilian peers. This puts them at a distinct disadvantage in getting interviews through connections. To make things worse veterans also have a great deal of difficulty communicating their transferable skills because many jobs in the military have no civilian counterpart, therefore their qualifications on a resume often don't offer much for job recruiters to use in deciding whether to grant an interview to a veteran versus a civilian with clearly parallel experience.

The Guaranteed Interview Program puts transitioning veterans on equal footing with their civilian peers by ensuring that at least one veteran per job posting will get a fighting chance to earn the job they are applying for. Some people may perceive the program as discrimination against non-veterans but this is not the case. It simply gives veterans an accommodation that overcomes the disadvantages created by active duty service to country.