Veterans are uniquely suited to address ongoing talent shortages in the private sector due to the wealth of skills developed through their service, from technical skills to leadership experience – yet, they are often overlooked for high-paying, high-performance roles, Hire Heroes USA CEO Ross Dickman told FOX Business.
As the head of a nonprofit supporting veteran and military spouse employment, he is determined to change that, especially with National Hire a Veteran Day on Friday.
Dickman, who spent more than a decade in the U.S. Army, knows how transferable a veteran’s skills are in the private sector. The problem is that those skills can be difficult to convey clearly on paper due to the complexities of the job and the significant cultural and industry shifts, according to Dickman. To exacerbate the issue, there is also a misunderstanding about the roles and leadership positions where veterans truly excel.
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“It creates this sort of dual hitting problem where the skills don’t translate really simply on paper,” Dickman said. As a result, veterans are unfairly penalized in the hiring process.
Dickman’s organization advocates for companies to prioritize skills-based hiring for certain jobs rather than traditional credential-based hiring. Specifically, Dickman says employers should focus on the specific skills and competencies needed for a role, instead of relying on a degree or specific credential as a broad proxy for qualifications.
“When you think about someone in manufacturing, maybe in a quality control type of role, you’re thinking about someone who will anticipate where there’s going to be holdups in operational efficiency, who can follow the manual. They’re going to take the initiative and leadership to kind of seek out and adjust across the process line,” he said.
Those are all aspects of what veterans bring to the table, Dickman said.
Depending on the type of role a veteran had in the military, “you get this really, really high degree of competence in terms of technical acumen,” Dickman said. For instance, when he flew helicopters in the military, he recalled that maintenance management was a big part of the job.
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“When we were in Iraq, the amount of maintenance management process that we had to do was like on steroids. It’s all day, nonstop. So you’re getting years’ worth of expertise in a compressed timeline,” he said.
It’s another example of why his organization is emphasizing hiring based off of skill versus focusing purely on credentials or a degree, Dickan said, adding that it’s not only veterans who are facing such hurdles. It’s also their spouses.
In June 2025, the veteran unemployment rate was 3.7%, which is up from 2.9% the prior year, according to the Labor Department. However, the unemployment rate for military spouses is at about 21%.
“I think about the amazing spouses in our unit when we were deployed, taking on tremendous leadership responsibilities, event management, program management, long-distance communication planning, all of this kind of stuff, just so that our organization could do our mission in Iraq,” he said. “It’s really hard to fit all that in a single page and outline and get everything you need to that the job description says has to be on it.”
His organization is partnering with about 700 companies that are actively seeking to hire veterans or military spouses. For its part, Hire Heroes USA evaluates the roles each company has available and compares them with the skills and experience veterans bring. It then conducts a comparative analysis to identify areas in the job descriptions that may be unintentionally screening out veterans or their spouses, Dickman said.
But to truly overcome the issue, Dickman believes that private, public and nonprofit organizations have to work together. He said the Defense Department should help ensure those skills are documented and translated into a language that employers can recognize and integrate into their hiring processes.
Dickman said nonprofits need to fill the development gap by offering additional training or support to align with civilian job requirements. Additionally, employers need to remove criteria that unintentionally filter out veteran candidates, according to Dickman.
He testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on Tuesday, calling for urgent reforms to the Transition Assistance Program (TAP), which is a mandatory program designed to prepare service members for their transition to civilian life. He also pushed for stronger public-private partnerships that support service members during this shift.
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