Brian Rucker, founder of Veteran Insider. Courtesy photo.
Veterans Day may be an obvious occasion to honor military personnel, but it’s also an opportunity to take a closer look at the struggle many of them face after the mission is over.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among veterans usually trends above the national rate. The numbers are even worse for post-9/11 veterans between the ages of 25 and 34, whose average unemployment rate in 2014 was 7.8 percent.
Brian Rucker had firsthand experience with the struggle to re-enter the private sector. After seven years in the Army and a total of 32 months deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, he realized how hard it can be for veterans to market themselves in the private sector.
He created Veteran Insider to act as a matchmaking service for veterans and the businesses who want to hire them.
“There’s a core belief that employers want to hire veterans, but they don't understand how military service translates into the private sector,” he said. “And veterans are no better at making that translation.”
Veteran Insider does the translation for them. The service analyzes data to connect military experience with common private sector skills, ranking and scoring the skills of each veteran based on statistical analysis rather than subjective human interpretation.
Veterans can sign up now for the site's public beta and upload a resume. Proprietary matching algorithms then connect the dots between their military skills and those required to do a given job in the private sector.
It’s a sophisticated solution to a complicated problem, and Rucker said it wasn’t easy to get it off the ground.
“You would think that someone who founded a technology startup would know how to code, but you would be wrong,” he said. “Fortunately, I have a strong network of people who are emotionally invested in my success. The relationships I’ve been able to build have brought us all to the verge of something worthwhile."
The first month of Veteran Insider saw nearly 100 veterans uploading a resume to their account and start searching for jobs during its public beta testing, which will continue through 2016. Five companies also joined the site and posted jobs, with five more on the way in November.
Rucker hopes to triple that number by the end of December, with a goal of 500 veteran job seekers and 100 companies in the Austin area actively using the site by the end of Q1 2016.
Rucker plans to go national with the service in 2017.
