He is the new CEO of Hire Heroes joining us right now Andrew Sandoe.
Hello Andrew, welcome in.
>> Hey, how are you?
Good to be here.
>> Thank you for being with us on The Bump and
I wanna give our audience a little bit more background on you.
You began your career at Morgan Stanley in the south tower of
the World Trade Center in New York.
And after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers,
you pivoted to a career of service as a Marine Corps pilot.
You were deployed twice to Iraq serving both in the cockpit and
at the headquarters in Baghdad as the advisor to the director
of military operations for the nation of Iraq.
Now that we know a little bit more about you,
what is Hire Heroes USA's mission statement?
>> Hire Heroes exists simply to help military members transition
from the military into the civilian world.
And there's an enormous amount of data out there now that shows that
when military members can make that move quickly and
simply, they contribute immediately to their civilian workplace.
They can bring all of the positive habits from the military,
into their civilian job.
But sometimes if they can't make that transition seamlessly and
they develop a gap between the military and
the civilian world, they can become bogged down.
Stress creeps in, expectations creep in, it becomes harder to tell your story and
why you're the right person for this civilian job.
And so we exist only to help
military members make that transition into the civilian world.
And as it stands now, we help roughly 15% of the service
members who get out of the military every single year.
>> Wow.
And Miss Lacey for you, we know how involved you are in so
many different efforts to support our women and men in uniform.
How important is it to keep awareness of charities like Hire Heroes USA as
public as possible?
And do you feel like being a WWE superstar gives you an opportunity to get the word
out on a bigger scale?
>> Absolutely and
Hire Heroes honestly is one of my favorite partners that we have in WWE.
What they do for our veterans, and you know what, what he said is like,
people have no idea what the extent of what Hire Heroes does.
Because yeah, they help veterans, but they help their families.
They are not just specialized to active
duty service members that are getting out and transitioning.
They grab up the wives, everybody involved.
That way they could teach them how to as a family unit, survive.
How they can transition and be successful.
One of my favorite things that Hire Heroes does that I love to be a part of
is the working with the men and women in suits.
I forgot the company of men's Wearhouse I believe,
but it doesn't matter we then literally bring in these veterans and
remember that gap he's talking about, that is so important.
Because mentally they already have so much pressure on their shoulders.
It's going from one lifestyle to the other.
Well, Hire Heroes comes in, grabs them by their hands, throws in WWE superstar
like myself to use our platform to remind all the other veterans out there.
The veterans, their families, the active duty that are getting out, to be ready,
to know that they exist and that they can help.
And they brought these veterans in, they teach them, they give them suits.
They try them on from their socks, their shoes to make sure they feel confident.
They give them classes to learn how to sit in a,
what do you call it when you get a job interview, job interviews.
How to create resumes to make you look competitive to
all the civilians out there.
Because let me tell you,
it's hard to have a military resume transfer over to civilian because
mentally you look at it like in a certain way as as a military member.
Like how am I going to convince an active duty or
no excuse me a civilian that I have what it takes to do this job?
And that's what Hire Heroes does.
They don't end with just the veterans, they don't end with just active duty,
they don't just end with the families.
They make sure everybody involved is ready to be successful.
And it's just an incredible, incredible company, and one of my favorites.
>> Lacey is absolutely right and Happy Birthday by the way, Lacey.
>> Thank you.
>> It's pretty amazing.
When I started in the Marines, I was in training for
2 years and 11 months before I was able to contribute anything operationally.
And when it came time to get out of the military, they gave us four and
a half days of training.
And you get it about two weeks before you separate from the military.
And so for military members who aren't familiar at all with the civilian world,
if you get that four and a half days of training, and then two weeks later,
you're out of the military and you're a civilian with no paycheck.
You're already behind the eight ball, you're already behind and
you don't have a good idea of how to catch up.
And that's where we step in,
because all of the training that we do is custom to that service member.
It's not an algorithm.
It's not a self-paced YouTube curriculum.
It's working one on one with a paid
transition specialist to get a credible resume,
a credible LinkedIn profile, interview preparation, suits, clothing etc.
We do everything that we can to help prepare you, and
you see the results in that our salaries are 50% higher than the national average.
And the veterans that we place last longer than their civilian counterparts,
they get promoted faster than their civilian counterparts.
And so the impact is very real.
>> And this is for both of you, little tongue in cheek, but my dad,
he always mentioned before to me, as an Air Force Veteran says, the Air Force is
the best because, they don't just let everybody into the Air Force.
And my mother's like Army's better,
she's like Army's the best because of her fond memories of her time served.
I often hear about the friendly competition between each branch of
military and I was wondering in your opinion, where does that come from and
in your mind who is the best soldiers in the United States of America.
>> Honey, you lost me at soldiers.
It's the United States Marines.
Of course, we are the finest fighting force in the entire world.
And it comes from competition.
I mean, think about it, competition brings out the best in you.
And if you are going to support and defend our country we need the best.
We need people who are ready to compete on a level that the average American
could never even consider.
So here you are you got these branches Airforce, Navy, Marines.
We're gonna compete with each other because guess what,
across the board, we're the ones that are going to go out there boots on deck and
defend this country.
So I compete in life, I compete with myself when I wake up.
I compete as a mother, as a wife, everything that I do,
obviously as a WWE wrestler, competition brings out the best in people.
And I don't know for sure, but I'm Pretty confident that that's where it stems from.
We even do competitions within each other in the military where we go out and
compete against the Marines with wrestling and basketball and the CFT/PFT.
We compare scores and we push ourselves to do better next time,
to outdo our brothers and sisters next to us.
At the end of the day we work together to get the job done.
But at night when we're sipping our coffee and breaking going to bed or whatever it
is we're doing, we tell ourselves that we're the best no matter what.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> As if you had anything to add good
luck, but go ahead.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> Andrew before we let you go, how can
our audience and how can people help the gargantuan efforts of Hire Heroes USA?
>> Well, for me this is an incredible opportunity and
incredible job just because the message that I bring to people sells itself.
And when I was growing up, through the 80s and 90s, military
service had this big shadow over it from Vietnam and it's been really amazing.
It's probably the only silver lining to being in conflict for 19 years, 20 years.
There's lots of data on how veterans do once they come into the civilian world.
>> Yes.
>> And when I was growing up, military and veterans were kind of viewed as a charity
and something to take care of because it was the right thing to do and
a patriotic cause.
But what I love about this is that
employing veterans is the profitable decision to make.
Veterans tend to outperform.
They tend to get promoted faster.
They tend to last longer in their jobs.
They tend to teach their teams.
They tend to be coachable.
And they take responsibility for
specific outcomes, so they make wonderful employees.
And so it's the right decision for an organization.
It's not something to do because you feel badly about
a veteran serving their country or you want to honor that sacrifice.
You make the decision because it's the profitable decision to make.
It's a free market solution,
your company will do better if you have people like this on your team.
>> Well, Andrew, we're gonna continue on with Lacey.
But thank you so much for joining us today here on The Bump.
>> Thank you, Andrew, >> Like you said,
>> Absolutely, thanks for having me.