Yinon Weiss served 10 years on active duty in the military, including two tours of duty in Iraq. But it wasn't until he and another Iraq veteran, Aaron Kletzing, ran into each other as graduate students in the network-savvy world of Harvard Business School that they realized what their military careers had lacked.
"At Harvard Business School, people are always thinking about their next career move and leveraging their connections," Weiss said. "That's not the culture in the military. It's more reactive, which can be frustrating. It also hurts people when they join the private sector because introducing themselves and creating a network aren't necessarily skills they've cultivated."
Weiss and Kletzing had an idea: What service members needed was the military equivalent of LinkedIn, the social networking website for professionals.
Three and a half months after it began on an invitation-only basis with about 500 testers, RallyPoint goes live today, a Veterans Day tribute to the 2.5 million men and women in uniform.
Service members can register for free to connect with one another and find out about job opportunities in both the military and the private sector. Only employers pay to be matched to members who have indicated they wish to be contacted.
As one of the site's testers, Richard Becker, a 31-year-old Army captain attending business school at the University of Hawaii, has used it to reconnect with old friends and find out which units he may ask to be assigned to after he earns his degree.
"Before, you were beholden to human-resource managers," Becker said. "This is a one-stop shop for information on how to manage your career, so once it's time to move on, you have all your ducks in a row."
And he isn't the only one who thinks the idea has merit.
RallyPoint — the military term for the place where scattered service members on a mission are to meet up — recently was awarded $100,000 as one of four top-prize winners in the MassChallenge competition, a validation, Weiss said, of all the nights he and Kletzing stayed up until 1 a.m., refining their idea.
The two plan to eventually extend the service to military spouses and to veterans, for whom the Department of Defense spends about $1 billion annually, reimbursing states for unemployment benefits.
According to a new CareerBuilder study, 65 percent of employers said they would be more likely to hire a veteran over another equally qualified candidate. Yet for post-9/11 veterans, the unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, higher than the national average of 7.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"One of the causes of unemployment is service members only start to look for a job once they get out, and they often don't know where to look," Weiss said. "It should not be the case that someone can risk their life for their country, and the day they get out of the service, they can't find a job.
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