Message From Robbie Rich
Executive Director, ALA Joining Forces Initiative

On April 30, 2013, the White House Hosted an event to say thank you to companies that have leaned forward on the Joining Forces Initiative. I was proud to report that to date 100 ALA companies have pledged to hire veterans and military spouses resulting in 18,564 hires. The American Logistics Association was the first organization to join on at the 25,000 hiring commitment.

As I listened to the President, Vice President, First Lady and Dr. Biden announce that to date 290,000 veterans and military spouses have been hired since the launch in 2011 and that a new commitment to hire an additional 435,000 veterans and military spouses by 2018 it confirmed to me just how important it is that we lean forward on the Joining Forces pledge so that our returning military veterans and military spouses receive all the help we can provide to them. 

To help reach the new level of commitment the administration has a plan to help veterans find jobs when they leave the military by redesigning the military's Transition Assistance 

Program to ensure that America's veterans are "career ready" and by increased access for veterans to intensive reemployment services and new online tools to boost veteran employment. And for our part in helping an additional 435,000 veterans and military spouses find jobs click below to find a job, and if your a company with a job posting click below and follow the prompts to list your position in the Veterans Job Bank.

	If you are a Veteran looking for a job - Click here - To Find a job
	If you are an Employer with a job opening - Click here - To Post a job Instructions for Employer Participation How to Add Job Openings to the Veterans Job Bank There is no cost to include job postings in the Veterans Job Bank. If you have any questions about the Veterans Job Bank, please contact info@NRD.gov. Step 1 – Determine if your jobs are already on the Veterans Job Bank. Your company’s jobs may already have been picked up by SimplyHired or one of our other job aggregator partners. Please search for your jobs on the Veterans Job Bank to confirm that they are not already listed. Step 2 - Determine where your jobs are posted online. Organizations post jobs online in a variety of ways. The first step in making your jobs available on the Veterans Job Bank is to determine where your jobs are posted online. Ask yourself two questions:  Does my company have a careers page? If so, how are jobs posted to the careers page? What software tools are used to post the jobs? Does my company post jobs on an external job board? Once you have identified where your jobs are posted, you can begin the process of making them available on the Veterans Job Bank. The Veterans Job Bank uses a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) that crawls the Internet and includes those pages that contain the Veterans Job Bank HTML schema in the search results. To have your jobs added to the Veterans Job Bank, the jobs must be “marked up” (or tagged) with the Veterans Job Bank HTML code on the pages where they are posted. The search engine will then identify and return those tagged jobs to users as they perform a search on the Veterans Job Bank.  Organizations that have a careers page, which details open positions, can apply the code to each Veteran- committed job listed on those pages. If your jobs are listed on sites such as Monster, LinkedIn or SimplyHired, you will need to contact those job boards to ensure that each job is tagged appropriately. We currently do not have the capability to include job openings for organizations that do not post their jobs online. We are working on developing a mechanism to facilitate those requests in the future. Step 3 - Apply the code. Having located your jobs, the next step in the process is applying the code found on our Instructions for Tagging Your Jobs page. These steps will need to be completed by your IT department or webmaster as they require advanced HTML knowledge. Alternatively, you can provide an XML feed of your jobs. **Step 4 VERY IMPORTANT - Contact the National Resource Directory to let them know the markup process is complete. Send an email to info@NRD.gov with the domain name of your site where the jobs appear so it can be included in the Veterans Job Bank search results. Once we have verified the code tagging, it may take up to 48 hours for your jobs to begin showing up on the Veterans Job Bank. I have included how to list your jobs in the Veterans job bank since I am often asked about how does a company find veterans and military spouses. At the site above you are able to drill down by zip code to list your position.

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UPDATE: Returning Heroes and Wounded Warrior Tax Credits 
The tax credits were extended through the end of 2013 by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.  Here is a link to the Fact Sheet for Returning Heroes and Wounded Warrior Tax Credits.

Under the Recovery Act, employers who hired certain unemployed veterans were eligible for a tax credit of up to 40 percent of the first $6,000 of wages, for a maximum credit of $2,400. This credit expired at the end of 2010. 

On November 21, 2011, the President signed into law two new tax credits:

• The Returning Heroes Tax Credit is a new hiring tax credit that will provide an incentive for businesses to hire unemployed veterans. 

1. Short-term unemployed: A new credit of 40 percent of the first $6,000 of wages (up to $2,400) for employers who hire veterans who have been unemployed at least 4 weeks.
   
   
2. Long-term unemployed: A new credit of 40 percent of the first $14,000 of wages (up to $5,600) for employers who hire veterans who have been unemployed longer than 6 months. 

• The Wounded Warrior Tax Credit will double the existing tax credit for long-term unemployed veterans with service-connected disabilities. 

1. Maintain the existing Work Opportunity Tax Credit for veterans with service-connected disabilities (currently the maximum is $4,800).  
   
   
2. A new credit of 40 percent of the first $24,000 of wages (up to $9,600) for firms that hire veterans with service-connected disabilities who have been unemployed longer than 6 months. 

If you would like more information on the Transition Assistance Program transformation please click here to read more.

To date the member companies of ALA have reported hiring 18,564 veterans and military spouses since the beginning of the ALA pledge for Joining Forces which began October 2011. The companies have pledged to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses by December, 2013 so we need every member company to sign on to this important initiative. Please do email me or call me if I may be of assistance. I look forward to hearing from you.

Robbie Rich
Executive Director
ALA Joining Forces Initiative
robbierich@alajoiningforces.org
(240) 463-7830