The Virginia Employment Commission and Virginia Department of Veteran Services

The Virginia Employment Commission and Virginia Department of Veteran Services Veteran Employment Initiatives and Virginia Values Veterans Program(V3) Caleb Cook Veteran Employment Representative Virginia Employment Commission 1

What we will cover during this webinar: Overview of Virginia Workforce Connection (VAWC) and Virginia Values Veterans (V3) Program Benefits of using the VAWC and from hiring Vets Work Opportunity Tax Credits (WOTC) Navigating the VAWC Creating Job Orders Conducting various candidate searches Other VAWC bits and pieces 2

What is the Virginia Workforce Connection? The VAWC is a web-based software used by the Virginia Employment Commission and our Workforce Development partners to directly connect employers with job seekers. It is an adjustable self-service state of the art system which allows employers and job seekers to control their own experience. It is also the leading resource for employment and labor market information in Virginia. 3

Employer Benefits for using Virginia Workforce Connection No cost whatsoever to post job openings or to search for qualified candidates with mass upload capability from your company Applicant Tracking Systems. It s free of charge! Comprehensive job matching and screening functions to ensure best qualified applicants. Based on skills and key words use select and job seekers have in their resume. Provides additional information including wage data and other LMI information, skill requirements, industry and occupational trends, and HR professional links. Meets OFCCP which is a requirement for companies that work off of Federal contracts. 4

Employer Benefits for using Virginia Workforce Connection We have VEC teams, that work for the employer, when you use the VAWC (LVER s, DVOP s, and WSR s) The screening and referral of candidates to the requirements in your Job Posting is an HR Department force multiplier You can have candidates submit to questionnaires as part of the screening process Other recruitment services using our facilities or yours throughout the Commonwealth such as a job fair or hiring event 5

Employer Benefits for using Virginia Workforce Connection Recruitment Services: One of the core features on Virginia Workforce Connection for employers. They provide all the necessary steps in posting and managing job orders, and recruiting qualified talent. Recruitment Services Manage Jobs Candidate Search Manage Job Applicants Job Market Trends Candidate Market Trends 6

Virginia Values Veterans (V3) The Virginia Values Veterans (V3) Program is a Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Veterans Services Program whose mission is to educate and train employers throughout the Commonwealth on the Value of Virginia s Veterans, and to help employers connect with these personnel assets to maximize the productivity of their workforce. We are committed to assisting employers recruit, hire, and retain Veterans. The V3 Program answers these two questions that employers have pertaining to Veteran employment: Why should I hire a Veteran? and Where can I find Veterans to hire? Step 1: Get Enrolled: Companies may apply to the V3 Program by completing the application and submitting to the Governor a public commitment to increase employment opportunities for Virginia s Veterans. Step 2: Get Trained: After becoming enrolled, companies must complete all training requirements that pertaining to Veterans recruitment, hiring, and retention within one year of the enrollment date. Total training time is approximately 6 hours. Step 3: Get Certified: After completing the training requirements, companies will submit to V3 their Organizational Veteran Hiring Plan, which outlines a strategy for actively recruiting, hiring, and retaining Veterans, and incorporates best practices and lessons learned through the V3 Training. Step 7

Virginia Values Veterans (V3) CERTIFICATION PROCESS: As a V3 Member Company, you will have one year to complete a robust and comprehensive curriculum designed to ensure your organization is well-prepared to build an Organizational Veteran Hiring Plan. Other curricula topics on which companies will receive training and education include: How to build an On-the-Job Training or Apprenticeship Program in order to accept GI Bill Benefits How to use the Virginia Workforce Connection Database Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act (USERRA) Understanding the National Guard and Reserve Components Removing the Stigma of PTSD and TBI: The Truth About Today s Veterans How to build an Organizational Veteran Hiring Plan Training events will be held throughout the year, both in-person and by webinar. Contact the V3 Program Manager for more information. Here is a flowchart that shows the enrollment and certification process in a visual format: V3 Cert Process Employer. 8

Virginia Values Veterans (V3) Like the VEC, the V3 Program has Recruitment Services that are available that utilize a partnership with other job seeker databases such as Hero s to Hired (H2H), the Army Career and Alumni Program, Employment Counselors at Airman and Family Readiness, and Capstone Employment Preparation at Fleet Support Centers H2H is a robust web based job bank system developed to serve primarily the Veterans of the Reserve Components and National Guard 9

Employer Benefits of Hiring Veteran Transferrable and Soft Skills that come with their training Leadership, Supervision, Maturity, Crisis and Deliberate Planning Skills, Organization Skills Resilience, capable of dealing with deadlines and stress Though younger Veterans may not have the education of their same-age counterparts, their life experience and practical experience is an equalizer in the majority of cases Most will have education benefits to gain degrees after they secure employment Great retention, and exceptional work ethic Many certifications may transfer Veterans Employment Act of 2009 and the Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011 - Training opportunities 10

Work Opportunity Tax Credit Is a Federal tax credit incentive that Congress provides for privatesector businesses. The WOTC objective is to increase hiring of individuals from target groups who face significant barriers to employment. Certain Qualified Veterans (Disabled / recently separated / or those that have been unemployed for 6 months or longer) Goal is to ensure targeted employees gradually move from economic dependency into self-sufficiency as they earn a steady income and become contributing taxpayers. Participating employers are compensated by being able to reduce their federal income tax liability. 11

WOTC Eligibility Under current WOTC program You must submit two forms (8850 completed by employer and 9061 completed by new employee) within 28 days of the hire date Targeted Groups Include: Temp Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Recipients, Designated Community Residents, Qualified Veteran, Summer Youth Employee, Qualified Ex-Felon. For descriptions go to: www.vec.virginia.gov/vecportal/employer/wotc.cfm OR www.doleta.gov/business/incentives/opptax/ The arrows point to the forms that the employer and newly hired employee need to fill out in order to use the tax credits and can be found at the websites above. 12

WOTC benefits for employer Benefit Amounts calculated based on the number of hours new employee has worked. New employee must have worked at least 120 hrs and not more than 400 hrs to get 25% of credit. New employee who works over 400 hrs earns 40% credit. Most target groups will get a maximum of $2,400 tax credit. However more is assigned against: $4,800 tax credit for a disabled veteran new hire $9,000 tax credit for long-term family assistance recipient hired over a two-year period. Instructions and forms available at: http://www.doleta.gov/business/incentives/opptax/wotcemployers.cfm 13

https://www.vawc.virginia.gov Begin by logging in. 14

This is your Employer Dashboard 15

This is your Employer Dashboard To change from your employer dashboard to the Directory of Services or the Help view, click on these tabs. Or you can use the sidebar on the left under My Employer Workspace.. 16

This is the Directory of Services This is the Directory of Services view on your Employer Workspace. You can further personalize your view between the Quick Menu, Services for Employers menu, and the Other Services menu. Go ahead and click through these to see the different options. 17

This is your Employer Services selection Here is the much larger group of Services for Employers. 18

More VAWC services for the employer Here is the Other Services selections. 19

How We Can Help You Here is the view for the How We Can Help You tab There are several sub-tabs you can select from here. 20

Customizing your view of the Dashboard (optional) From the My Employer Dashboard tab, scroll down and click on the Configure Dashboard on the very bottom of your page. This will take you to a page where you can customize your Dashboard view. (Simply X ing out the widgets will not save your viewing preferences. 21

Keep or remove all you want. It s your choice. You can leave all of the widgets up, or you can remove those you don t care to see. After you save it, every time you log-on only the widgets you want to see will be present. 22

Moving on Return to the My Employer Dashboard view. If you removed widgets, you will see that they are no longer visible to you. You can always go back and turn them on if you like. Personally, I don t like the Services Preview. It s too busy for me, so I turn it off, being all the services are on the left column anyhow. 23

Your Employer Porfolio Now that we have our preferences adjusted to our liking, we can now start learning how to post jobs and do candidate searches and other neat things. Find your mouse pointer over to the left column; and under the Quick Menu you will see your Employer Portfolio selection. Click on it. 24

This is your Employer Portfolio Please remember how to get to this view. This is where you will be the view that you likely spend the most time using. 25

Ensure your Corporate Profile is up to date Before we go over posting a job or searching for candidates, please Make a note to ensure all of the data in your Corporate Profile is up to date and accurate; to include your contacts/users. 26

Posting a Job To post a job on the VAWC, from your Portfolio, under the Human Resource Plan, click on Job Orders, which is directly below the Job Order Plan folder icon. 27

Posting a Job If you already have an Active job order in the VAWC, here is where you would see them. For this example, we wo not have an active job order for this employer, so we are going to click on the Add New Job Order box. 28

It s a quick 10-step process!! If this is a new job you are posting and not a reposting, then you will want to select Manual Entry. If this job is a re-posting of an old job you have posted before on here, then you can choose the Copy Existing Job Order and select from the drop down. Fill in the Job Title and then you will have to select the Job Occupation industry/sector that your position falls under. Sometimes your job title will prompt an automatic selection, other times you will have to select your own form the Search for an occupation link. 29

Important note on step 3 Each step is self-explanatory. Simply ensure all of information Is accurate. After you do a few of these, you will be able to post a Job in less than 5 minutes. Of importance is this selection ability here on Step 3. At the top under the Job Order Information to be Displayed Online area, you can choose a few options there. If you want to suppress your for reasons that you might have that you don t want others to be aware of, you have this ability. You also have the ability to have a VEC representative (LVER, DVOP, or WSR) to screen your applicants/candidates before you receive notification about them. Lastly, here on Step 3, just ensure your Job Details reflect your hiring intentions. Once complete, continue on. 30

Step 5 options Usually, it is best to select the default skills for the occupation, unless you have some specifics you would like to add. If this is the case, then choose the Select skills from a list and then choose all the required skills you want the applicant to be able to have. The previous step was where you put your detailed job description, and this Other Skills box would be for certain certifications, or any other sort of tangibles that you would want to keep separate from the job description. 31

A couple things on Step 7 If you require any sort of pre-employment testing, be sure to select The requirements that are listed. As for the minimum education, don t shoot for the stars, but rather select the lowest education that you would accept an employee to to have for this position; if you are considering his experience in conjunction with his education. Some Veterans have 10+ years of managerial experience or HR experience, etc; and requiring a bachelors degree at a minimum might be causing you to lose some potentially very good employees. The Driver s License requirement is self-explanatory. If the position requires driving a company vehicle or travelling from one location to the other, then it should be required. If the position is a job where the employee comes to work and doesn t ever leave until he is done with work for the day, then a DL might not be required. 32

Putting a salary in is not required You do not have to put down a min/max salary for the position. It is recommended, but not recommended. In doing so, potential candidates can search for jobs by the level of salary, and if you omit the salary, your job may not be part of the results of the search. If you do put in a salary, select whether it is by wage or by year. Leaving the salary blank allows you to select DOE. Be sure to include any benefits you might offer for the full-time position. 33

Pay close attention on Step 9 The VAWC makes your life easy here for the methods that one can use for applying for your open position. You can choose what you want here, but be sure to keep one or both of the top two selections. This enables us to see that the applicant applied and gives us the ability to further screen him/her if that was one of your requirement on a previous step. You also have the ability to post a link to YOUR company s website, if your HR requires a candidate to apply from there. Same is true of mailing or dropping in or emailing you a resume. if there is any other pertinent information that you want the applicant to know, you can write it the space provided. Below the screenshot you will see a few other items you need to pay attention to. You can require the candidate to attach certifications or any other document you require. You can also choose to create a list of questions for the candidate to answer and your preference of applicant notification. 34

Step 10: You re almost done! Finish the questions and you re finished. If you want to, you can click Preview Job and take a look at the entire thing in the same view that It will be in to a job seeker. Since this Job Order example was for the purpose of this PowerPoint, I won t click Finish myself, but after you do, you will see the finished Job Order and then you can either create more Job Orders or go and search for candidates which is what we are going to do next. 35

This is what a job order looks like The Job Order Number is the identification That we use to track every single Job Order in the system. Always write down your Job Orders somewhere, for if we are helping you, we will refer to your positions by them. 36

Let s look for some qualified candidates At the bottom of the Job Order page, if you Scroll all the way to the bottom, you will See many selections. Click on the Search Candidates spot. 37

Pick and choose your criteria This is the page that will allow you to select the criteria that you want to choose when conducting your candidate searches. You have about 20 different means of altering your results. At the top, ensure you make the Area you want to search from the area that best reflects your target pool of candidates. As you move down the page, you will have multiple filtering abilities and also the ability to choose a Veteran if you would like. Searching takes practice, but be diligent, you will get the results you want with a little determination. Once you are done, click Search and then view your results. You can always refine or change criteria at any time. 38

Narrowing your search if needed Sometimes your search results will have way Too many results to logically search through. This is when you would narrow your search. 39

Choosing your candidates Sometimes your search results will still have a lot in them, and if this is the case, simply take the top 20-25 or so and focus on them. You can either click on their view resume to see that, or you can click on the Details to view other aspects of the candidate. There will always be contact information available to you from either the resume or the details link. You can contact the potential employee via email, or through a system message. 40

Does anybody have any questions at this time? We covered just the very top layer of this VAWC system. There are many layers of this onion remaining if you want to spend the time to dig a little deeper. LMI information can be very helpful in determining many decisions you may have as an employer. Please use this free resource. It does work. If you have more questions, contact us. 41

More information at: Employer Services http://www.vec.virginia.gov Caleb Cook Veteran Employment Representative (804) 229-3945 (Cell) Caleb.Cook@vec.virginia.gov V3 Program - http://www.dvsv3.com/ Andrew Schwartz V3 Program Manager (804) 336-5547 (Cell) Andrew.Schwartz@dvs.virginia.gov 42