Darn Tough Vermont, the Northfield sock manufacturer, is getting recognition for its commitment to hiring and retaining military veterans.
“It’s just good to be around more people that are veterans,” said Jim Decker, chief technology officer at Darn Tough.
Decker, who has worked for the company since 2019, served in the U.S. Army from 1985 to 1989. He joined Darn Tough in 2019, when the company employed about 185 people. The company has experienced explosive growth in the last three years, and it employs nearly 500 people now, he said.
Last month, Darn Tough was awarded a 2022 HIRE Vets Medallion Award from the U.S. Labor Department. Darn Tough is the only Vermont company to have earned the award in the four years that it has been presented.
The awards are based on the percentage of workers hired and retained who are military veterans. To earn the “gold” tier award, the company had to show that 7% of the people it hired in a calendar year were veterans.
“And that’s not an easy mark to make, because the overall national percentage of veterans is 5.4%,” said Randall Smith, director of the Labor Department’s HIRE Vets Medallion program. In Vermont, veterans account for 4.7% of the civilian labor force, Smith said.
One goal of the award, Smith said, is to let veterans know about companies that do an especially good job of hiring and retaining veterans. The program posts a map of awardees.
Lawrence Forsyth, veterans services coordinator at the Vermont Department of Labor, estimated that Vermont has about 40,000 veterans, many of them older veterans of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
He said the small number of veterans in Vermont, compounded by the fact that it does not have an active military post, makes it hard for employers to hire veterans.
However, Forsyth said, veterans are “adaptive. They’re resilient. They’re very team-oriented and they perform under stress. Why wouldn’t someone want to hire them?”
Forsyth said he goes four times a year to a recruiting event at Fort Drum in New York to persuade people leaving the military, as well as veterans living there, to move to Vermont. He said he works in partnership with the Vermont State Police, the Vermont National Guard and the Vermont Air National Guard to recruit people leaving active-duty military service.
Forsyth encourages businesses interested in attracting people leaving the armed services to visit the website for SkillBridge, a U.S. Department of Defense program that pays for internships for up to 160 days, which “could turn into a full-time job,” he said.
He said he has placed five veterans through that program in the past two years.
One way Darn Tough retains the veterans it hires is by identifying the skills they bring from their military service, said Jennifer No, the company’s talent acquisition recruiter.
“What we do internally is we continue to build on those skills and develop them to positions like the (chief technology officer),” No said.
Businesses could also earn the “gold” award by retaining 75% of the veterans they hired in a calendar year for 12 months or more, Smith said. Forsyth said Darn Tough excels in retention, in addition to recruitment.
“They’re always a go-to organization that I send people to,” he said.