After a decade, banks remain eager to hire military veterans.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other institutions, including about two-thirds of honorees that made the Best Banks to Work For list, show no letup in their commitment to helping service personnel transition into civilian jobs.
Hiring veterans is still a thing. Hundreds of companies have pledged to hire former service personnel over the past decade. Banks are unquestionably at the forefront of the veteran hiring trend.
One could even argue they helped spark it.
In 2011, with veteran unemployment levels nearing 9%, JPMorgan Chase joined a group of companies pledging to hire 100,000 service personnel by 2020. Three years later, with veteran unemployment still stubbornly high, Bank of America announced a five-year goal to hire 10,000 transitioning service people.
All those corporate commitments helped push the veteran unemployment rate to 2.4% in August, well below the national unemployment rate of 3.7%. Even so, employers have shown no willingness to declare victory and move on to a new challenge. They're still eagerly hiring people with military backgrounds.
Certainly, that's the case in banking, where institutions continue to go out of their way to hire veterans, who many say bring with them a set of intangible qualities that set them up for success in the civilian workplace.
Roughly two-thirds of the 90 institutions on this year's
"What we've found is the veteran cohort brings leadership and a sense of dedication, an unmatched work ethic and a willingness to learn," said Lindsey Streeter, a retired Army command sergeant major who leads military affairs strategy at Bank of America.
Streeter himself is a case in point. He joined Bank of America in 2016, after a 31-year Army career. A former colleague who had left the service before Streeter recruited him. Bank of America placed Streeter in a program for senior military leaders that rotates them through various parts of the company. Streeter worked in small-business credit cards and as a consumer banking market manager in Florida before assuming his current role in December 2020.
For Streeter, a job at a major financial institution "wasn't in the plan at all," when he began thinking about his post-service career. Indeed, most transitioning service members "can't imagine themselves at a corporation like Bank of America," Streeter added.
Bank of America seeks to bridge that gap with a military hiring team that works to distill civilian skill sets from resumes that are often loaded with military accomplishments. At first glance, some or all of those accomplishments might seem alien in a bank setting, but Streeter and his team are adept at discerning traits adaptable to a civilian setting. Infantry noncommissioned officers, for example, often make "dynamic" project managers, according to Streeter.
"To move a unit of soldiers anywhere around the battlefield or to get them ready for movement is all project management," Streeter said. "We recognize that."
'Word began to spread'
Banks have scored some notable successes in veteran hiring.
The group JPMorgan Chase helped assemble in 2011 has evolved into the Veteran Jobs Mission, which now includes 300-plus companies with more than 830,000 veteran hires to their credit. Earlier this year, the coalition upped the ante, pledging to hire 2 million veterans and 200,000 veteran spouses over the next decade.
Bank of America surpassed its 10,000-veteran goal in February 2020, and while the company hasn't announced any new targets, neither has it shown any less of an inclination to bring on veterans as employees. In August, Bloomberg News reported that BofA said in an internal memo it had hired 2,600 veterans in 2022.
"What we found is that they got here, and they were working out extremely well," Streeter said, referring to Bank of America's veteran hires. "Word began to spread to hiring managers and other leaders within the company, so the requests for additional veteran hires began to increase and they've continued to this day."
To be sure, it's not just industry giants tapping the military-connected labor pool. According to Jill Castilla, president and CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond in Edmond, Oklahoma, 20% of her 55-person staff "has served or is currently in the armed forces." Statewide, about 7% of Oklahoma's 3.95 million residents claimed veteran status in 2021, according to the Census Bureau.
For the $346 million-asset Citizens, the best tool in hiring veterans has been old-fashioned word-of-mouth: referrals from service members who work or have worked at the bank. And since so many veterans opt to continue their service in the Reserves or National Guard, Citizens offers 14 days of paid military leave. If a mission exceeds that span, the bank makes up the difference between the service member's military pay and his or her civilian salary.
The CEO of Cape Cod 5 in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Matt Burke, is himself a veteran — he served in the Army National Guard from 2000 to 2008. It's no surprise, then, that Burke has made hiring veterans a personal priority. He didn't have to shake things up much, though, since veterans have been a key target for the bank for years, Burke said. The $4.9 billion-asset Cape Cod 5 has made American Banker's Best Banks to Work For list for several years, coming in at No. 9 for 2022.
"We have at least a dozen or so veterans that work here," Burke said. Joint Base Cape Cod in nearby Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, "is a pretty active base," so the military is held in high regard by the local community, Burke said.
"That appreciation for our veterans and service members precedes my time, but it's an area I take significant interest in where I've been able to focus some of the bank's energy," Burke said.
Above and beyond
In addition to a strong record of hiring veterans, Citizens plans to start an online bank aimed at offering newly enlisted service members a checking account, secured credit card linked to what Castilla — in a recent interview with American Banker — described as "a really cool savings tool. The secured card will allow the service member to build and monitor their credit and really get a strong credit score, even though they're at potentially the lowest levels of our military," Castilla added.
At Armed Forces Bank in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, approximately 75% of the workforce has some type of military affiliation. The $1.3 billion-asset Armed Forces Bank, and its sister bank, Academy Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, currently employ 22 veterans along with 57 spouses of active or retired military personnel.
Armed Forces Bank and Academy Bank are owned by Dickinson Financial Corp. For Armed Forces, which focuses on serving service personnel, "having employees who've walked in their shoes and are [familiar] with the challenges a military career poses is invaluable," said Jody Vickery, the company's director of military consumer lending. The bank moved to ramp up its military hiring efforts this summer, agreeing to join a program sponsored by the Army that promises a job interview and networking opportunities to transitioning service members who apply.
"It's who we are as an organization," Vickery said. "It was a natural step to formalize things" by joining the Army PaYS program in August.
Echoing Streeter, Vickery said veterans have intangibles that make them excellent employees.
"They bring to the table the things you can't teach, sometimes," Vickery said. "It's the work ethic, strength of character, values. If you can bring someone onto the team with that kind of foundation, the sky's the limit."
Serving spouses
Vickery, who is herself a military spouse, said Armed Forces has long made a practice of hiring husbands and wives of service members, as well as veterans. Armed Forces was a founding member of the Military Spouse Employment Network, Vickery noted.
Serving military spouses appears to be emerging as a new frontier among many military-friendly institutions. They have noticed that, while veteran joblessness has dropped significantly, military spouses still struggle to find employment.
Streeter called unemployment among military spouses "the next chasm that we need to bridge."
The military's reputation for regularly moving its personnel around the country and the world serves to dampen spouses' hiring prospects, according to Castilla. "There's a perception they might not be here long, so it's not easy for [military spouses] to get jobs," she said.
With several estimates indicating unemployment among military spouses could be as high as 40%, the issue is top of mind for Castilla. Citizens recently hired a military spouse in Germany to work as a mortgage processor and Castilla hopes the normalization of remote work in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic might act as a boon for spouses' job prospects.
Bank of America is seeking to hire military spouses and to position itself as "thought leaders in this space," Streeter said. In June, Streeter was selected to participate in the George W. Bush Institute's inaugural Stand-To Veteran Leadership program. Under the aegis of the Bush Institute, Streeter is advocating to designate military spouses as a protected class, like veterans.
"That will allow employers to see them and begin to hire them," Streeter said.
"We know the industry is ready," Streeter added. "It's just some policy that needs to be put in place, is what I'm thinking."
