Why Hiring Military Spouses Is a Growth Hack for Businesses

As a small- to medium-sized business, hiring is difficult. Very difficult.

But there’s a hack that I have leveraged to consistently find dedicated, top talent: hiring military spouses. Let’s dive a bit deeper into why hiring military spouses can solve several challenges for lean small businesses, and why talented military spouses are often underemployed.

Why Military Spouses Are Underemployed

It’s a fact: Military spouses are underemployed, often because of employer bias around in-person work requirements.

Military spouses typically relocate every few years, driven by their spouse’s military assignments and position changes. These frequent relocations create two significant challenges:

1. Military spouses are eliminated from the potential candidate pool for every employer that requires in-person work.
2. Military spouses are unfairly seen as unstable employees due to frequent cross-country or even cross-world moves — even when they are highly qualified. Many companies allow remote work, but may perceive a military spouse’s life as being unstable because they move so often. That leads to a subconscious hiring bias against them.

Because of their adaptability and resilience, I recommend that companies actively seek military spouses as valuable employees — especially given how impactful their contributions are to our company.

Military Spouses Are Highly Educated, Resourceful, and Motivated

We have about 10 military spouses on our team. Every single one of them is college-educated, very smart, resourceful, and incredibly motivated.

I want to focus on the qualities of “resourceful” and “incredibly motivated,” as these qualities are often hard to find in employees.

The life MilSpouses lead teaches them to be resourceful. They often navigate the difficulty of caring for their family alone for months at a time — sometimes even years — while their spouse is deployed.

We have multiple MilSpouses on our team whose spouses are about to deploy. It’s not an easy time for them, especially because many of our military spouses have multiple children. It’s a sacrifice they make so their spouses can serve in the military.

They must be resilient, strong, capable, and resourceful to navigate life during their spouse’s deployment. And they bring these qualities with them into the workforce.

MilSpouse Motivation is Sky High

Why are MilSpouses more motivated, in general, than other employees?

The answer is that many of our military spouse team members choose to work. From a financial perspective, they don’t have to work — but they want to.

They’re doing it out of intellectual curiosity, a desire to pursue personal growth, and a desire to challenge themselves. This makes the ownership they exhibit over their work much stronger than that of someone who feels “stuck” working to make ends meet.

Let’s break this down a bit further. We tend to hire military spouses who are in the following situation:

• They have more than one child, and their youngest is now in daycare or school, which usually means they are in their mid- to late 30s.
• Their military member spouse, at this point, is usually 15+ years into their military career and has moved up the ranks.
• The military member is likely making a healthy salary that can support their family (plus, the military covers many cost-of-living expenses). As a result, the family could live off of one income if they wanted to.
• They have more time on their hands and want to challenge themselves with a career, even though they technically don’t have to work.

Important note: This is a very specific sliver of the MilSpouse demographic that we are connected to and hire from, as a result of referrals and a strong military spouse community network. Not every military family can live off of a single income.

MilSpouses Frequently Seek Part-Time Work, Reducing Your Expenses

Many military spouses are re-entering the workforce.

While some want immediate full-time work, in our experience, many military spouses we talk with are interested in starting slow and then scaling up their hours.

They want part-time work that can lead to full-time. With 20 hours to start, they may want to increase that to 30 hours in 6 months, then move to full-time work in a year or two.

A familiar story we hear is, “I graduated from college and started climbing the corporate ladder. Then, I got married and had kids and was out of the workforce. My kids are now in school, so I’m interested in slowly jumping back in and ramping up.”

That is the dream scenario for many small businesses looking to scale employee-related expenses slowly!

A Tightknit MilSpouse Community Makes Future Hiring Easier

Whenever we need a new team member, we send out a Slack message saying something like,

“We’re hiring for a [insert role]. We’re looking to hire by [date]. Can you please pass this message along to your military spouse communities?”

From there, the MilSpouses on our team share it with their local Facebook Groups, friends, and other contacts.

Within a week, we typically find 8-10 qualified candidates to begin interviewing.

Most Military Spouses Don’t Need Health Insurance

All of our military spouses opt out of health insurance since they are already covered under their spouse’s plans.

While this seems like a small expense, it adds up when you have multiple military spouses on staff! You can leverage that budget toward marketing or other growth efforts.

MilSpouses Are Dedicated and Skilled Employees

I have mentioned some of the business benefits of hiring military spouses, including motivated employees who want to start part-time and then scale, reduced health insurance expenses, and a network for tapping into future talent.

But at the end of the day, these folks are talented and skilled. Military spouses are capable employees who will exceed your expectations, beat deadlines, and challenge ideas to drive business growth. It’s a win-win.

Contributed to EO by Joey Randazzo, an EO Accelerator in Portland who is the founder and CEO of SEO Growth Partners, a digital marketing agency with 55+ ongoing monthly clients that they support, leveraging a team of nearly 10 military spouses.