Recruit Veterans for Aptitude and Train for Skills

The good people at Bizzeness.com took the time out on Veterans Day to suggest to their subscribers that veterans are a great candidate pool to recruit for aptitude and train for skills: http://bizzeness.com/veterans-this-ones-for-you/.

Many employers are afraid to take the chance on training new hires because they fear a competitor will just hire them away once they have been trained. That is a risk but I believe it is a worthwhile one with veterans because these candidates typically have a high degree of loyalty.

If your company needs an objective assessment tool for recruiting veterans for aptitude then join the Guaranteed Interview Program (guaranteedinterview.com) and receive unlimited free job postings and Clearfit™ assessments of veterans candidates.

2 Minutes of Silence is Not Too Much to Ask.

Today is Nov. 11th. I am in Philadelphia, PA, birthplace of the Marines 236 years ago. This is the first time I have been in the U.S. on either Veterans Day or Memorial Day. I have found out that this day has lost most of its original meaning for the American public. It has been co-opted to be a sale day for merchants and there seem to be minimal ceremonies for the fallen. I am saddened to see this because Remembrance Day in Canada is a big deal and bonds us with our fallen as we take 2 minutes of silence to honour them. I don't know the cultural reasons why Americans chose to make this day one for buying and selling rather than remembrance, but I feel terrible for the American veterans on this day knowing that they are largely the only ones who are remembering.

I wish for our American cousins a greater remembrance of the great sacrifices their brother and sisters have made in their name, and the minimal sacrifice of 2 mins they can offer in return.

Thoughts on "Be The First Mover".

Brad Feld, one of the founders of the Foundry Group put out this post this morning: http://bit.ly/ntrG2j

While the post is very good and reminds me of the Positioning concept, one of the comments from a reader struck me as a huge insight "I have found that you cannot predict the future, nor react to it. The only way to success is to direct the future to your strategy". This insight reminded me of a quote by George Bernard Shaw when he said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man". Only the most unreasonable man would think the world's rules don't apply to him, and yet that is what world changing entrepreneurs do. They assume that the world's rules don't apply to them and have the guts and determination to face the consequences for that thinking.

This adapting the world to one's strategy is also why most others don't see what the visionary is talking about, they think that the rules of the world are immutable and therefore the vision is flawed. Only the visionary can see it because they are actively adapting the world to their vision and changing the future.

First New Epiphany in Awhile.

It's been roughly 7 weeks since I last posted. Only excuse, I had nothing important to say. Well now I do. Arrived in Santiago, Chile last week Thurs. as part of the Start-Up Chile program and have been settling in and building up momentum trying to break out into a run again.

My first epiphany of this renewed period of startup activity is that it takes a village to raise a child, more correctly in this case, a community to raise a startup. CiviSide/GuaranteedInterview.com is a a social enterprise that solves a problem that civic minded people in Canada, the U.S. and around the world want to see solved, the reintegration of their warriors into society. I need to simply facilitate their efforts and help them achieve their desires. To this end I am seeking out community leaders that want to do their part in reintegrating warriors. I am going to spend less time trying to persuade individual companies the benefits of giving veterans a hand up, and instead put my effort into mobilizing civic leaders in industry and government to tap their networks and spread the word of how the recruitment of veterans is being democratized through the Guaranteed Interview Program. This program is a tremendous tool in the hands of those with the will to see the end of veteran unemployment/underemployment.

UWO CFLC's "Most Supportive Employer".

http://communications.uwo.ca/western_news/stories/2011/May/western_honoured_for_reserve_force_support.html

Google helping veterans.

http://iava.org/blog/google-steps-new-veterans

Two Kinds of People in The World.

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office. It almost invariably means being dismissed by arrogant investors who show up a half hour late, totally unprepared and then instead of saying “no” give you non-committal rejections like “we invest at later stage companies.” It means looking prospective employees in the eyes and convincing them to leave safe jobs, quit everything and throw their lot in with you. It means having pundits in the press and blogs who’ve never built anything criticize you and armchair quarterback your every mistake. It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.

I don’t care if you succeed or fail, if you are Bill Gates or an unknown entrepreneur who gave everything to make it work but didn’t manage to pull through. The important distinction is whether you risked everything, put your life on the line, made commitments to investors, employees, customers and friends, and tried – against all the forces in the world that try to keep new ideas down – to make something new.

http://cdixon.org/2011/04/26/there-are-two-kinds-of-people-in-the-world/

Startup Chile

Really proud to announce that Civi-Side was selected to participate in Startup Chile. If you don't know what it is, essentially it's an offer from the Chilean Gov't to bootstrap your company in Chile for six months. They give a $40K grant, free office space, and media coverage. Nice article in Inc. Magazine about the program http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/the-silicon-valley-of-south-america.html. This is the break I have been waiting for. An opportunity to focus 100% of my energy on the business rather than having to also worry about making a living on side contracts. I leave in mid-July.

Great program for the families of injured veterans.

"The Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, along with sponsor Ernst & Young, is offering "boot camp" for entrepreneurs. The program—open to family members who are full-time caretakers of wounded veterans, as well as surviving spouses of those who lost their lives in combat—consists of a four-week online course, followed by a week of classes and a year of mentoring."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805004575606963165060290-search.html?KEYWORDS=boot+camp&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month

Great to see programs that empower those that take care of veterans who have been severely injured.

Veteran Homelessness

Excellent article on the problem of veteran homelessness and the issues that lead to it.

http://www.ctmirror.org/story/12286/homeless-veterans

We’d be smart to start listening to the Turks

Scott Taylor on why Canada would be smart to follow the Turks lead after our combat mission ends. http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1238918.html

Crushed "The Pitch"

For the last month we have been hard at work rebranding to GuaranteedInterview.com and developing a new job feed of careers advertised by Guaranteed Interview Program employers, finishing at the 11th hour before I was to go on a national television show called "The Pitch" to talk about the program and business. I practiced the heck out of my elevator pitch for the weeks before the show, but was still nervous when they walked me up to the stage. Goes to show that practice does make perfect http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip449605. My job from this point on is to make employers, the media, and veterans aware of what we are doing. You can help by Facebook "liking" the GuarantedInterview.com page and making more veterans aware of it. Thanks for your support.

G.I. Bill for Canadian Vets?

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/966323--ignatieff-hints-at-college-university-funding-for-veterans?bn=1

Helmets to Hardhats

A new program for veterans to transition into careers in the construction industry http://www.dcnonl.com/article/id43547. An identically named program in the U.S. has been very successful, so I can't see any reason it won't be successful here.

Washington Post article on loss of a son in Afghanistan.

An amazingly written Washington Post article about one military family's loss of a son in Afghanistan http://wapo.st/dEKsfW. The General makes a great point that we either need to support the mission or actively work to bring the troops home, indifference should not be an option.

New Advisors

This week has been a really good one for CiviSide. We added two highly relevant new advisors to our board. Duncan Haberly, former VP Biz Dev. at military.com, and Ashleigh Emerick, former Director of Marketing at military.com. Both were at military.com when it was a startup looking for its business model and have the experience in our market to help us find a way to make the company sustainable from a revenue standpoint.

I haven't talked about it much in this blog, but my vision for CiviSide and the Guaranteed Interview Program is to make it universal, a symbol for employer support for veterans everywhere. I have a conviction that society owes its veterans transition support and employers represent society in the vocational aspect of that transition. In turn, I owe employers who join the program the opportunity to find the best veterans for their positions. It is my belief that everyone wins when veterans are given a hand-up.

If you are reading this and looking for a way to help, the simplest and most beneficial thing you can do is to share this link for the Guaranteed Interview Program with your employer, all of society wins when you do http://civiside.com/guaranteed_interview.