Vets are the BEST Hires in the Workforce | KMP Ep. 41

0:00There's nothing you can do to demoralize a veteran more when you make it seem like they're getting the job out of charity. Nobody's interested in that. They want to work because they're enthusiastic about working. And these are the finest employees that you're going to find. We have kids growing, you know, they grew up in Beverly Hills, California, privileged kids. They are now all of a sudden for the first time looking at the military as an opportunity. There's been a change in the enthusiasm that kids have in the last year. What do you attribute that to? Change in the administration. You know, you hear a lot about PTS, post-traumatic stress, and that's, for some people, that's real.

0:36But no one ever talks about post-traumatic growth, you know, which doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger. You're going to be talking with Marcus a little later, and he's a living proof of that and likes to talk about it a lot in a really eloquent way. You know, that's something that I think a lot of folks are detached from, the benefits of service, the benefits of stress making you stronger and smarter and faster.

1:07Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller Podcast. We're excited to still be in Washington, D.C. this week, doing a very special episode in honor of Memorial Day with Bobby Kotek and the executive director of the Call of Duty Foundation, Dan Goldenberg. Nice to have you both here. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So can you tell us a bit what the Call of Duty Foundation does and why it's so important that we discuss this, especially being that Memorial Day was yesterday? Well, for us, it's a very important day of remembrance and of honoring all those who have served.

1:44And what we focus on is actual the provision of gainful employment for veterans. And you'd be shocked at the number of able, capable veterans who are in the United States who have served their country and cannot find quality jobs. And so in 2009, we started this organization, the Call of Duty Endowment, to find productive, high-paying jobs for veterans. And I think to date we're up to 160 ,000 placements. 175, as of this morning, 175 ,000. 175 ,000 placements, and these are higher-paying jobs than what the government can find. They're longer-tenured jobs. They're employers who actually can provide development opportunities.

2:29They know how to integrate. And these are the best employees that you could ever find. Why did you get into specifically veterans' employment as your, I would say, passion? This format usually is like a fast format. And that is a little bit longer story, but I'll tell it to you. So I had like a godfather in Los Angeles. I grew up in New York, moved to LA, but Dick Reardon, who was our mayor, was like my godfather. And he did everything for me to help me philanthropically, to help me think about how to be civic-minded in the city of Los Angeles, which is not an easy thing to do. and one day he said to me there's a 400 acre veterans facility in West LA and he wanted to make it better.

3:22It was dilapidated there was no money being put into it and he said you know I've got one donor who's going to build an art museum there another donor who's going to build a performing arts center and I thought I know Jim Nicholson who's the VA secretary and I'm to get it called the Nancy and Richard Reardon Memorial Veterans Park. So I come to D.C. and I go see Secretary Nicholson. He's a great guy. And I said, you know, I really would love, never ask you for anything, but I would love if we could name this park the Nancy and Richard Reardon Veterans Park. And he looked at me and he said, Bobby, do you know any veterans?

3:59And I said, yeah. And he said, do you think they want a performing arts center with special seating? And I said, yeah. And he said, do you think they want an art museum with special docent tours? And I said, why not? And he said, because the number one problem that we have in America today is we're not providing proper employment opportunities. And veterans today are three times less likely to find a job than an ordinary citizen. And he said, so you go back to California and you tell Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman, We don't need 400 acres in West L.A. We should sell this property and use the money to build vocational training centers for veterans and better hospitals and health care for veterans.

4:44And so I was totally dejected and felt stupid. And I came back and I thought, well, Dick Reardon knows those people, so we'll go talk to them. And we went to talk to Feinstein and Boxer and Waxman, and none of them would help. And Waxman said, you know, if you really want to do something useful and meaningful, go find jobs for veterans yourself. Hire them yourself. So I left there and I looked at Dick and I said, that's what I'm going to do. And so I started it. And then I was very fortunate to meet Jim Jones, who was the Marine Commandant. And if you look at him, he looks like the dictionary definition of the Marine Commandant.

5:27And he was so eager to help. And then I fortunately found Dan. How did you find Dan? Search. And usually those - Is this the best job you've ever had? It is. Yeah. It's so rare to come into a job. And it actually is what it was advertised to be, which was, you know, I was coming off a couple of years active duty in the Navy and then business school and then time in the private sector for about a decade. And I was looking for purpose again and the opportunity to really have an impact to the community I came from and really apply what I'd learned in the business world of solving a social problem was really compelling and Bobby gave me the You know the rope to do it and never looked back.

6:11Why do you think you're outperforming the federal government? So yeah, just last year as an example We placed veterans more veterans than the Department of Labor place and jobs and we did it 1 14th the cost per placement and we did it in a time that is just sort of unheard of at that level. And it's because of a number of things. One, we pick the best partners out there. We work with nonprofits that have a proven track record. We assess them every quarter on performance. We hold them accountable to agreements. And that which is measured is managed. And what we've seen over time is we've handpicked out of a huge, huge universe of veteran nonprofits, more than 40 ,000 of them.

6:53We found the highest performers, and we fund them, and we help them grow. But it all comes down to accountability, accountability to performance. And honestly, the federal government's programs are just not accountable to performance over and over again across all administrations. Do you think veteran unemployment is a national security issue? Absolutely. Jinks. I think it's one of the greatest crises that we're facing, because if you are entering active duty and you're three times less likely to find a job than an ordinary citizen, you're going to have trouble populating the military. And if we're going to increase our spending, if we're going to be looking for the best and the brightest and continue to do the things that we have historically done very successfully with our military, and you're less likely to find a job than an ordinary citizen, you're going to have to start worrying about recruiting.

7:46And now we've been fortunate in the last year and a half, recruiting has been better than it's ever been. Gangbusters. And I can tell you, my own, my daughter works the Navy, you know, this is, she's a Duke grad, could do anything. She, she's, she's dedicating her life to being in the military. And we have kids growing, you know, we, they grew up in Beverly Hills, California, privileged kids. They are now all of a sudden for the first time looking at the military as an opportunity. And so there's been a change in the enthusiasm that kids have in the last year. What do you attribute that to? Change in the administration.

8:24And I think you have people who believe that the military matters, that the service is important. And I think, as Dan pointed out, where do you find purpose and meaning in work? And I think more people are seeing that there's an opportunity to provide purpose and meaning and I think we're doing a better job elevating and celebrating the people who serve. At the same time, we aren't doing a good job on the other side. Once you leave finding jobs, once you leave getting the very best healthcare, and it's not for lack of resources. We're spending$350 billion a year on veteran services, but we're not getting the outcomes we need.

9:07And if Dan were to - Who's taking it? Contractors? You know what? It's actually the bureaucratic class. It's a lot like what happened with teachers. You know, over the last two generations, we've failed our students in America in public school. And what's shifted is money has gone from the classroom into administration and bureaucracy and into programs that actually are not about educating kids but about things other than educating kids. And so 60 % of total spending in the U.S. in education is administration. I think what's happened in the bureaucracy of the military is the same thing, is that it's this big bureaucracy that actually is not competent.

9:47And it's why we've been successful is, you know, we can place a veteran in a high paying job for$650. The equivalent job would be$85 ,000 if the federal government does it. And these are jobs that are not paying anywhere near$85 ,000. What rank is the hardest to place? You know, it's a really interesting question. The thing we focus the most on because of that is junior enlisted. So those young folks getting out four or five years in the service, they came in, they might have done something right out of high school, highly specialized, that isn't necessarily obviously transformable or transferable.

10:29So you take, for instance, an infantryman. Infantryman comes out. They've gotten great training. They're highly motivated. They're ready for the next challenge. And they realize very quickly there's no direct translation of what they did. And they can get pretty down about it. And one of the great things our grantees do is they focus on building them up, showing them how the operating under intense pressure, the leadership experience, accountability for equipment, training, safety, all that stuff does translate. But they're often ill-equipped to market themselves and explain that. So that's what our grantees are really good at, is helping them understand how what they've done is in fact useful to employers and showing them how to sell it.

11:10Bobby, you've built a billion-dollar business and now one of the largest veteran employment nonprofits in the country. Which one's harder to run? It was an$80 billion business. I said multi-billion. Yeah, and it became very difficult to run. And it wasn't the reason we sold to Microsoft, but what we were seeing is AI and machine learning was going to have such a profound impact on everything. And it was harder and harder to find the talent and became very difficult to manage. You know, COVID really affected the workplace. And our most productive employees, people who showed up to work every day, who, you know, were mission focused, were actually our veterans.

11:58And then if you look at the other category of employees at the company who showed up to work, our employees in Poland, our employees in China, and our employees in South Korea. They were the people who were motivated to come to work every day. They would work the 12-hour days. They weren't looking for a vegan meal in the cafeteria. And, you know, but running a business in America today, you know, until we get rid of the ridiculous regulation and the ridiculous bureaucracy and you don't coddle mediocrity and you actually can get people motivated and focused, it's, you know, it's challenging. What we're doing here, you know, we fund it all ourselves.

12:40We're not we don't take any government funding. We do it all ourselves You know, it's a small team Dan runs it unbelievably efficiently and we are maniacally focused on measurement The FAA has recently started recruiting gamers for the air traffic control Has the gaming community become more patriotic just as you've seen kind of that uptick as you said with your daughter Do you think that's translated also into military recruitment? Maybe on Call of Duty players? We have probably 130 million monthly active Call of Duty players around the world. And I would say that, you know, over the last 15 years, you probably would see a higher percentage of those people being enthusiastic about service.

13:25Yeah, and Call of Duty players in general have been incredibly, and Activision incredibly supportive of this mission over and over again consistently. recently, you know, they've been inspired by the stories about the military and they want to give back in a meaningful way. So it's been gratifying really across the whole run of this effort to see that. Do you think younger Americans have enough exposure to military culture to understand the sacrifice that veterans are making and active duty military is making every single day? No, I don't. Yeah, I, you know, we did a study with Ipsos looking at the question of the perception of veterans and whether it affects the ability to recruit the next generation.

14:05And one thing is for sure from that research, it wasn't the point of it, but it came out of it, is this continued detachment from what it means to serve, from the sacrifice, but also from the benefits. You know, you hear a lot about PTS, post-traumatic stress, and that's for some people that's real, but no one ever talks about post-traumatic growth, you know, that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. You're going to be talking with Marcus a little later, and he's a living proof of that and likes to talk about it a lot in a really eloquent way. But that's something that I think a lot of folks are detached from, the benefits of service, the benefits of stress making you stronger and smarter and faster.

14:43When you work with some of these companies that are new to placing veterans, do you think there's an uphill climb in explaining to them why veterans are qualified workers when I feel like there's such a negative connotation with hiring a veteran? Well, we try and focus on people who have had success with veterans, and they will generally, and I would say across the board, this is the case with all the NGOs we support, their employers are people who see the benefits of hiring veterans because they've been doing it for a while. I think if you're a newer company, tech company, there is a bit of a stigma.

15:19And there's this question of, you know, why did you choose that career path? And I think to Dan's point, there's this wrong perception that there's this widespread PTSD that can affect your ability to be successful instead of actually seeing the benefits of post-traumatic growth. And so there is a stigma in certain places, but we try and stay away from those. You know, a friend of mine in the space said companies hire on skills and they fire on values. And if we can get companies to be more open-minded about the skills, some tangible, some less tangible, that veterans bring, they're going to be real happy with the values they get.

16:00What's the number one type of job that you're placing into? Oh, wow. All across the economy. A lot into tech. Some into consumer. A lot into local and state government. Those are some of the biggest areas. What company's been the most disappointing? Let's name names. No, honestly, we focus on where we went. And so we don't have time for companies that don't have time for veterans. So we focus on the ones that have done really, really well. There's got to be one that's come across that you're like, that's very disappointing. I mean, we really stay, like we know, you could tell when you talk to people in the HR department, do they have dedicated resources for veterans hiring?

16:41Are they enthusiastic about veterans? They have their own internal stories of the heroes who become heroes within their companies. And so Dan's right. We're not going to spend a minute on an employer that doesn't already have some commitment or dedication to this type of workforce. And how do you support families? So a veteran, I would say most probably have a wife and children when they're done serving. Yeah. And how is that contributing to success in job placement? Yeah, it's massively important. You'll talk to Ross a little bit later. and his organization, not only do they do military veterans, but they also do spouse employment.

17:19I think the single best thing you can do for veterans is find them a high quality job. It's number one thing transitioning service members ask for when they leave the military. Strangely, less than one tenth of one percent of the federal spend on veterans goes to employment. And that's, and that which does is not very effective. So, you know, I think it's, if we can get that veteran a job, they can help support their family and give back to their community. By the way, 90 % of post 9-11 veterans tell us after they take off the uniform, they want to continue to serve in their community. They want to serve in their church, their local nonprofits, the ambulance corps, whatever it might be.

17:54So if we can get the job right, they can put a roof over their head, provide for their family and give back to the community. But that's the key to unlocking it. What's the most military thing you still do in everyday life? I work out six days a week. What's the workout routine? I alternate between cardio and weights. How much of the veteran transition problem from going from serving your country to the private sector is cultural versus logistical? That's a great question. I think it's about, this is not going to be a great answer for you, but I think it's about 50-50. You put your finger on both the issues.

18:30So we know, for instance, if veterans get help with two things, they're three times more likely to get a good job. Professional help with a resume and LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Setting up the LinkedIn profile for sure. And they don't get that training when they leave the military. And it's certainly not personalized. You know, it may be like there's this LinkedIn thing, go do it, as opposed to sitting down with them and understanding how to optimize it for search. If someone retires or takes a step out, how long does it take for them to be gainfully employed? If they start early, and that's the big question.

19:05If I've had friends call me, I'm getting out next week, a little late. You know, if they start, what we recommend is six months prior to getting out. If they start there, they should have a job ready for them by the time, you know, within a month or two of transition. But it's very reasonable to expect it to be a six-month process. And they're also missing some of the basics, like interviewing skills, not just their LinkedIn profile. That's the second part, is if you get the interview, you will get that quality job. How about, you know, people don't have a suit. You know, it's like if you're going to go to a company, most of the kinds of companies we're looking at, they'd like you to show up and look professional and you're not coming out necessarily with a suit.

19:42And so you've got... And your dress blues? Yeah, well, you can't really do that. But, you know, I think that we could do a better job as, you know, our organized military of getting people ready for transitioning to the private sector. And that's something that the government needs to figure out. Do you help generals who are retiring as well? Absolutely. I've had generals and admirals call. In many ways, their problems are the same. One of the things that's amazing to me, and I'm sure Bobby's experienced this too, is people who have every reason in the world to be confident about what they can offer, lose their confidence in transition.

20:20And I've seen it from junior enlisted all the way up to generals and admirals. I had a three-star special operations officer tell me, he's like, I don't know why any board would pick me. I don't have four stars. Oh my goodness. Like that kind of, this person who had more than a dozen combat tours had done unbelievable things. The confidence, so restoring their confidence to show them that what they've done is valuable and will be appreciated in the market is super important. I just had this with two four stars. Jeez. Two four stars who are extraordinary people who needed guidance and support in figuring out how to navigate the work opportunities.

21:03what's your favorite American tradition? Thanksgiving. Love it. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. And we're back with a special Memorial Day edition of the podcast. We're joined by Ross Dickman and Marcus, oh my gosh, now you're gonna have to pronounce your last name for me. Ruzek. Ruzek. I'm so sorry. You nailed it. Can you briefly tell me what each of you do for a living? Or what you did for a living before your current job, I should say. And then I'll brag about both of you. Okay, great. Perfect. So I served in the army for 13 years. I was infantryman first and then a special forces officer and Are you allowed to say the coolest special forces thing you did?

21:41Sure, I mean we I was in I was in the second rotation back into Iraq, you know So after 2011 when President Obama pulled us all out and said that we won or whatever we did we'd stopped fighting Of course, ISIS happened. So we had to go back in and during that deployment I served as some of the greatest people that this country has to offer, and we got to take the fight to ISIS in a meaningful way. It was a lot of fun. You kind of look like a Green Beret. Well, thanks. That's good to know. Like if there was central casting. I'm glad to say, well, rule number one of Special Forces is look cool. I usually fail that one.

22:17I could give you some lessons from the aviation community, Mark. Yeah, that's right. Later. Yeah, because Russ was a helicopter pilot. Yeah, I was in the Army as well for 12 years. I flew Apache helicopters, so the coolest helicopter and the coolest mission. And now I lead Higher Heroes USA, which is one of the Call of Duty Endowment grantees, and we focus on veteran and military spouse employment. What's the best American tradition? For me, it's opening presents on Christmas morning. I just love that. And seeing my daughter open them is just such a prideful moment. What's yours? Fourth of July.

22:49We do big fireworks, big party. Love it. You've spoken publicly about the challenges facing veteran services. How much damage has bureaucracy done to veteran health care and recovery? I can start. I mean, so after I got out of the Army, I was hired by Bernie Marcus, Home Depot co-founder, because Bernie wanted to hire a veteran and build a focused veterans philanthropy portfolio. Bernie knew that the bureaucracy was not getting it done. A quick statistic. On 9-11, the VA budget was around$40 billion. Today, it's about$440 billion. and we have about 10 million fewer living veterans. So it's not for lack of spending.

23:29It's for lack of effective programming. And for some reason, we continue to keep funding it. So Bernie knew philanthropy exists to innovate, to do things government can't do. And that's what we're trying to show the right way through philanthropic models. Has your organization changed at all? The VA or? No, Bernie Marcus. Bernie Marcus. So the VA is still the same from when it was founded. The VA has gotten worse. Yeah, sadly, Bernie passed away about a year and a half ago at 95. He's an incredible man. We miss him every day. But no, our values are Bernie's values, and we're going to keep doing it his way.

24:04Ross, you've lived both sides of the story, an Army officer and now veteran employment leader. What was the hardest personal adjustment for you? For me, it was definitely finding my rhythm. The military is really easy in some ways. Everybody's wearing their rank, their expertise on their uniform. You can see and know where you build trust really quickly. Navigating that in the civilian environment, working with corporations and kind of driving their veteran hiring practices, it's really hard to assess who's faking the funk, who's just going to say the right thing and then not deliver on results.

24:37That was probably my hardest part. Does corporate stress feel trivial after flying helicopters? You know what's really fascinating for me is like flying a helicopter, I was affecting a life in that moment. My life, my co-pilot's life, the lives on the ground. You know, leading an organization, you're affecting livelihoods. And so the clients we're serving, this is their entire livelihood, their family and their legacy. So it's very different, but in a lot of ways it feels deeply important. One of the things I was just talking with Dan about, of course, was how a family affects a veteran's employment when they go to look for a job after serving.

25:13You both have children. What was that like for you? How far in advance did you all look? And why did you choose this as your career path? Do you want to go first? Sure. I mean, for me, I got, I call it divine intervention. It's incredibly lucky. I think my name's Marcus, so that helped me when Bernie met me. He said I had the right name. But, I mean, look at family life. I mean, my wife and I, in our first five years of marriage, we moved seven times, had two kids. I was gone for three of those five years. What's the best base? Fort Bragg. I mean, it's home. I will say Fort Benning is, you know, I would argue it's where I became a man.

25:46They do say welcome home when you get there. But those two are my favorite. Yeah, but no, no, the family's everything. I mean, because we're trying to serve, and in order to do it, you've got to have a supportive family. What about you, Ross? Yeah, I got married after the Army. You know, I so I'm one of those statistics where I could not make family life and the military life work together So thankfully, you know as I met my my wife And we were deciding whether or not like to stay in it was kind of like if I I want to make this relationship work I knew how I am in the army is not gonna work with that so same kind of thing like finding the right person the right partner and and then building a family from there Forced me then to go now.