Month: May 2015

Continuum Veterans Foundation Applauds Hire Heroes USA For Confirming 618 Veterans Hired In Civilian Jobs In Q1 2015

Continuum Veterans Foundation Thanks Veterans and Their Families This Memorial Day including U.S. Army Mechanic Turned IT Specialist, Sandra Pittman

BOSTON and ATLANTA – May 21, 2015 – Continuum Veterans Foundation, helping returning troops find jobs in the IT industry, applauds Atlanta, Georgia-based Hire Heroes USA, an organization dedicated to creating job opportunities for U.S. military veterans and their spouses through personalized employment training and corporate engagement, for confirming 618 veterans in civilian jobs, from January – March 2015. Continuum Veterans Foundation, established by Continuum® Managed IT Services, donated $50,000 to the organization last November to support its mission.

“We are happy to continue supporting Hire Heroes USA and its mission of increasing the veteran employment rate,” said Michael George, CEO at Continuum. “We are delighted that our investment in Hire Heroes USA continues to help so many veterans transition to jobs in the civilian workforce, and we look forward to many more veterans securing jobs in IT and other industries. This Memorial Day, let us all honor and celebrate the courage and sacrifice of our veterans who have served this great country.”

Hire Heroes USA helps veterans and their spouses gain employment by empowering them with the skills to successfully represent themselves on their resume and during interviews. During Q1 2015, Hire Heroes was able to help revise 1,287 resumes, conduct 10,570 career counseling sessions and serve 1,582 veterans with online assessments and workshops. The organization has helped numerous veterans with translating their military skills for civilians industries including Sandra Pittman, a former U.S. Army light wheel mechanic, now an IT Specialist with the Social Security Administration.

“Before Hire Heroes, it was very frustrating, continuing to fill out applications and not getting enough results,” said Sandra Pittman. “Presenting myself on paper is totally different than what I was used to in the military. I had to translate my skills into how they benefitted an organization. It makes a big difference when someone steps in and says, ‘we can help – let’s get this done.’ After Hire Heroes helped me with my resume, I felt like I won the lottery.”

Continuum is the sole donor to the Continuum Veterans Foundation with a percentage of revenue from its Help Desk going to the Foundation. Continuum also provides preferential consideration in hiring veterans at the company. For a listing of current job openings, visit: http://www.continuum.net/company/careers.

“Donations from corporate partners like Continuum will help Hire Heroes USA assist 9,000 transitioning service members, veterans and spouses in 2015, at a 40 percent conversion rate to reach our goal of 3,600 confirmed hires,” said Brian Stann, President and CEO of Hire Heroes USA. “We thank the Continuum Veterans Foundation for its continued support.”

Hire Heroes USA is participating in the Partner Pavilion at Navigate 2015 by Continuum, the company’s second annual user conference on Sunday, September 27 – Tuesday, September 29, 2015 at the Cosmopolitan™ of Las Vegas. By exhibiting at Navigate, Hire Heroes USA is sharing with Continuum’s Managed Services Provider (MSP) partners how to hire qualified veterans for their open IT positions.

To view a Memorial Day video tribute to Sandra Pittman and all veterans, visit: http://cvf.continuum.net/.

About Continuum Managed IT Services

Continuum is the technology industry’s only channel-exclusive provider of fully integrated managed IT services, allowing its Managed Services Provider (MSP) partners to maintain both on premise and cloud-based servers, desktops, mobile devices and other endpoints for small-and-medium-sized businesses. Continuum’s SaaS platform enables MSPs to efficiently backup, monitor, troubleshoot and maintain clients’ IT infrastructurefrom a single pane of glass, all backed by an industry–leading network operations center (NOC) and Help Desk. MSPs leverage Continuum’s pay-as-you-grow business model to scale IT services without committing to long-term contracts and to reserve in-house staff for strategic initiatives. The company employs over 1,000 professionals worldwide, supports over 3,500 partners and monitors over 650,000 endpoints. For more information, visit http://www.continuum.net/ or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @FollowContinuum.

Maximizing Veteran Support

Promoting nonprofit effectiveness through intelligent charitable giving

For anyone unfamiliar with the nonprofit award making process, funders often begin Requests for Proposals with the same question: What is the need?  Nonprofits try to answer that question clearly and compellingly if they hope to edge out competing charities to secure a portion of the $50 billion in Foundation grants awarded annually to nonprofits in the United States.

If $50 billion sounds like a surprisingly large amount of donated money, consider this: according to a 2013 study, foundation gifts accounted for only 15 percent of the $335 billion donated to charity by Americans in 2013. That level of giving supported nearly 10% of the country’s work force and generated an economic impact equivalent to 5.4% of Gross Domestic Product.  When charities have access to such an enormous philanthropic corpus, the need in the nonprofit sector is not for greater generosity but rather for enhanced effectiveness with existing charitable resources.

Nowhere is the need felt more acutely than in the cluttered veteran service space, where 46,000 nonprofits compete for scarce resources. For example, donors who wish to support veteran economic resilience must evaluate programs with names like “Hiring our Heroes”, “Hero 2 Hired”, “Hired Heroes”, and “Hire Heroes USA” before making a funding decision. Several resources help inform donor decisions – Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance are the best known – but charity raters emphasize non-operational items such as transparency, governance, and overhead ratio. All of those factors are worthy of donor consideration but none of them measure program effectiveness.

Cue the George W. Bush Institute’s Military Service Initiative Summit held on February 18th in Dallas. There, the former President invited national leaders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors to discuss best practices in the veteran service space in order to equip nonprofits with tools to enhance their program effectiveness and equip funders to make wise philanthropic investments. In essence, Summit leaders challenged nonprofits to follow best practices and funders to support only those nonprofits that do so, in an attempt to drive scarce resources to programs that do the most good.

Charity best practices shared at the Summit were derived from case studies of 25 veteran-oriented nonprofits across the country; read a summary of the report here. Hire Heroes USA was profiled in the report and recognized as a category leader in Structure, Process and Leadership. The report highlighted Hire Heroes USA’s robust metrics for service delivery and its rigorous performance management system, which contributed to a 25% reduction in the program’s cost per veteran confirmed hired in FY 2014.

Not satisfied with those results, Hire Heroes USA has further reduced by 20% the cost per veteran confirmed hired in FY 2015. Put another way, a $100,000 donation to Hire Heroes USA in 2013 would have resulted in 37 veterans confirmed hired; in 2015 that same donation would help nearly 61 veterans find jobs. At a time when more than half a million veterans are unemployed the need to help unemployed veterans is as compelling as ever – why not do so by investing with confidence in the best-in-class programs of Hire Heroes USA?

Posted by Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith has held the position of Chief Operating Officer for Hire Heroes USA since 2012, following seven years of distinguished service as United States Marine Corps Infantry Officer. Click here to read Nathan’s full bio.