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BY Joel Junker

The Bottom Line and the August 2016 Career Conference

Today the Cameron-Brooks team will travel to our first Career Conference in Chicago our fourth Career Conference of the year!  Time has certainly flown by in 2016.  As we put the finishing touches on the conference preparation, we expect it to be another jam packed four days with the candidates expecting to average just over 12 interviews!

As the August candidates make their final preparations for the Conference, I wanted to share a quick thought that I often bring up when traveling across the country conducting interview preparation workshops  or in my mock interviews with our candidates.  The challenge with being a non-traditional hire to Corporate America is being able to demonstrate what you have done in the military in a way that recruiters can see how it relates to what they are hiring for.  I am a former Army Armor officer and no company that I have ever interviewed with or worked for, has ever required me to do a tank gunnery, perform maintenance on an M1A2 tank, shoot an M9 pistol, etc. working in Corporate America.  So, it is not about functionally what you have done in the military that companies will relate to or gravitate towards.

Rather, It is your ability to show how you impacted your organization’s bottom line.  Now, the bottom line of business (revenue, profitability, etc) is very different than the bottom line of the military (combat readiness, winning our nation’s wars).  But, if you can communicate to a recruiter, for example, how you were able to increase your platoon/division/company’s proficiency in their critical mission tasks, improve the maintenance rate of your unit, improve efficiencies in logistics of supplies to improve training or a deployment, etc.,  you are able to demonstrate to them how you positively impacted your organization’s bottom line of combat readiness.  It then becomes very easy for a recruiter to extrapolate and conclude that if they can teach you their business, you can positively impact their bottom line.

As for the upcoming August Career Conference, here is a quick snapshot of how things are shaping up:

Sample industries represented at the August Career Conference include: Pharmaceutical, Consumer Packaged Goods, Medical Device, High Technology, Energy, Industrial, Health Care, Construction, Building Materials, Retail, Transportation, and more.

Sample companies include:  Boston Scientific, Cintas Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Koch Industries, Oldcastle, Stryker, Tyson Foods, USAA, Unilever, Whirlpool Corporation, Asurion, and many more.

Same positions include:  Maintenance & Facilities Manager, Applications Engineer, Service Center Manager, Senior Business Analyst, Field Clinical Representative, Project Engineer, Production Team Lead, Development Engineer, General Manager, Senior Financial Analyst, Manufacturing Engineer, Reliability Center Coordinator, District Manager, Operations Leader, Assistant Brand Manager, Regional Sales Manager, and many more.

Sample locations include:  Portland, OR; San Antonio, TX; Chicago, IL; Austin, TX; Kalamazoo, MI; Tampa, FL; Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis, MN; Boston, MA; Atlanta, GA; Indianapolis, IN; San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Oklahoma City, OK; Baltimore, MD; San Jose, CA; and many more.

We look forward to having all the candidates and companies in Chicago to kick off the Conference and help them reach their goals and dreams. Stay tuned next week when I post the results of the August Conference!

Rob Davis