Wesley, Brown & Bartle Inc. (WB&B) - the nation’s leading executive search firm dedicated to the recruitment, retention and professional development of women and people of color—announced today that it will continue to contribute a substantial percentage of its profits, annually, through the office of its Chairman, to the nonprofit organization The Center for Military and Private Sector Initiatives (The Center).

The Center was founded in 1996 by Wesley Poriotis, the founder and Chairman of WB&B, at the request of President Bill Clinton.  President Clinton, who had read the landmark study of veterans’ employment that Poriotis and his team had just completed (at the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), invited Wes to brief him about the study—then asked Wes to create a nonprofit to continue his work on behalf of veterans.

Dr. Ray Healey, Jr., who runs The Center and is co-founder and Executive Director of The Center’s online employment initiative—Veterans Across America ™—said: “This latest move is nothing new.  It simply formalizes an informal process that has unfolded over the last couple of years as Wes Poriotis, one of the great champions of veterans’ employment, has sought to reinvest profits from his search business into supporting a cause that he holds dear, and for which he has labored tirelessly.”

Dr. Healey, Mr. Poriotis and their team recently completed a year long, Congressionally-mandated and VA-sponsored study of veterans’ employment, which concluded that “today’s veterans face significant barriers for successfully transitioning to private sector employment.”  The study included visits to seven major American companies, meetings with alumni networks and summit conferences about mounting a “marketing and branding” campaign on behalf of veterans.

Based on the major findings of the study, Dr. Healey and his team have developed a comprehensive veterans’ employment program, The Veterans Launch Pad, which can be reviewed at the Veterans Across America ™ web site, http://www.veteransacrossamerica.org.  Veterans seeking quality employment, especially wounded and disabled veterans, are invited to register with The Launch Pad.

Dr. Healey said about the study: “We learned an enormous amount about why companies do or do not hire veterans, and we hope to share this knowledge widely as soon as the report is officially released from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs.  But one disheartening conclusion we reached is that many of the same barriers to employment that Wes Poriotis and Barbara Mendez-Tucker found were affecting veterans 10 years ago, are still operating today.  Young veterans today continue to have a hard time finding quality jobs, and this problem has been aggravated in the last couple of years by the explosion in the population of wounded and disabled veterans.”

Wes Poriotis, whose testimony before the House Veterans Affairs Committee in March 2005 inspired the launch of the latest study—and who has testified before Congress about this issue on three other occasions—said: “I’ve been working in the search vineyards for more than 30 years, first on behalf of women and people of color, and more recently on behalf of veterans, many of whom these days are women and minorities.  Veterans seeking good jobs today face many of the same obstacles that women and people of color faced 20 or 30 years ago.” 

Poriotis continued, “To overcome these hurdles, today’s veterans need three key tools: 1) They need a ‘network’ of veterans and veteran-friendly executives they can join as soon as they leave the military 2) They need private sector champions who will help them connect with hiring managers at companies big and small, because the government’s efforts in this area have failed, as our study reported; 3) They need to be included in a searchable database of talented veterans, which companies can access when they are searching for veterans to hire.”

Poriotis added, “The team of branding and marketing experts in our study concluded that the ‘brand’ of the veteran has lost a great deal of the luster and appeal it enjoyed during the post World War II era—and that it is imperative to mount a branding and marketing campaign that will ‘rebrand” the veteran in particular, and military service in general, as the valuable assets they are to American business and our country.  Such a campaign would also help dispel the ‘widespread myths, misperceptions and stereotypes’ that linger in the minds of many employers—much in the way that misconceptions about women and people of color slowed the progress of those groups in earlier generations.”

Dr. Healey, Mr. Poriotis and their team are actively developing The Veterans Launch Pad at http://www.veteransacrossamerica.org and they invite veterans to register.

About Wesley, Brown & Bartle Company, Inc.
WB&B, one of America’s leading management consulting and executive search firms, is the nation’s premier diversity search firm. WB&B has placed executive personnel in more than 300 of the Fortune 500 corporations, as well as many foreign multinational firms doing business in the U.S.  The founder and Chairman of WB&B, Wesley Poriotis, also founded, at the request of President Clinton, the Center for Military and Private Sector Initiatives, a nonprofit whose mission is to help veterans compete for quality employment.