The Montana SHRM has a free resource to assist HR professionals, hiring managers, business owners, and supervisors implement successful veterans hiring programs. 

The Montana SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) State Council was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the SHRM Foundation to help promote the SHRM Veterans at Work Certificate program.

In the fall of 2018, Ronda Wakefield, SHRM-SCP, SPHR, was selected by the SHRM Foundation to be one of the founding 50 Inclusion Captains for their new Veterans at Work certificate program.  After receiving training on the program in the Washington, DC area, Wakefield committed to promoting the program across the entire State of Montana. The Montana SHRM State Council met in January of 2019 and decided that they wanted to utilize the program to it’s fullest potential and incorporated it into their strategic goals for the year.

In April of 2019 the council submitted a grant proposal to the SHRM Foundation and based it on their goal to get 1,000 certificates issued in the state.  The news came in May that they had been selected as a recipient.  The biggest challenge would be getting the information out across the entire state.  Montana only has seven SHRM chapters in the state, so distributing the information through the chapters was only touching about 1,000 HR professionals and hiring managers. To help reach a much broader audience across the entire state the council designed a newspaper ad that will go out in 60+ newspapers in Montana for four weeks, including the week of Veterans Day.  Wakefield has also done radio interviews and attended job fairs and recruiting events around the state to distribute the information to employers.  The council is looking for more opportunities to promote the program throughout the state.

The Veterans at Work Certificate program is a free resource that was developed to assist HR professionals, hiring managers, business owners, and supervisors implement successful veterans hiring programs in their organizations.  The program is a self paced computer based training that takes approximately 10 hours to complete.  All of the materials are free and participants do not have to be a member of SHRM to take advantage of the program.  The course focuses on the value that veterans bring to the workplace along with tools and resources to attract, hire and retain this incredible candidate pool.  Topics include: The Business Case for Hiring Veterans, Leveraging Veteran Talent in the Workplace, The Foundation for Competitive Advantage, and Talent Deployment and Development.

Any group or organization that has an upcoming conference, meeting, or program based on veterans services and/or hiring and recruiting is encouraged to reach out to Ronda Wakefield, Owner of NW MT HR Solutions, LLC at 406-250-1120 or [email protected] for more information.  There is no cost to the organization.