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A new start-up focusing on helping veterans secure employment looks set to make a huge impact going forward, having already dramatically boosted its headcount in a relatively short period of time to meet rising demand.
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Speaking to Defence Connect’s Phillip Tarrant, WithYouWithMe co-founder and CEO Tom Moore said that part of his firm’s business strategy centred on capitalising on existing resources already in place in the workforce.
Specifically, Moore attributed his company’s early success, at least in part, to the value that veteran employees are known to bring to a job environment.
“If you can tap into it and on-sell that in a different way, which is what WithYouWithMe does, you can grow a significant proportion of your population in your workforce with really good people,” Moore said.
WithYouWithMe said it was founded by a keen group of young, ambitious people who had become increasingly aware of issues with the way in which veterans were transitioning from the Defence Force.
The emerging company also flagged the staggeringly high under-employment rate among veterans who had found work (19 per cent) – a downward spiral leading to low job satisfaction and lack of purpose.
Armed with a highly effective mix of military and corporate experience, the original team made it their mission to help hundreds of veterans.
“I guess our story is, and I guess the company's main aim is, to solve veteran employment and underemployment,” continued Moore, noting that “for the purpose of the defence sector”, the firm’s key focus is exposing people outside of the traditional engineering and IT paths to the abundance of talent.
According to Moore, this includes combat professionals as well as combat support professionals, two core components making up the main part of Australia’s military.
“What we do inherently which has allowed us to grow so fast, is that we match veterans to jobs on their transition through our own system that we built purposely, which looks at their skills and personalities,” said Moore. “Then we train them for it.”
“What that means for companies is they have someone that's deployable, and for someone in the defence industry, a whole new bunch of security cleared people that can come to Canberra from different areas,” Moore said, listing some sites that could fit into niche gaps that could yet prove hard to fill, including cyber security, data science and robotics process automation.
