Veterans Preference
This issue keeps coming up in forums, debates and especially in news reports about the Police and Fire Department Hiring practices.
The City of Methuen has adopted a Veteran preference. Looking at the City website there are numerous links that allow one to click through and see the resolution. here is the link from the Home page; http://www.ci.methuen.ma.us/Documents/Resolutions/VETSJOBS.pdf
This is the statement listed on the City website; Veteran Preference for City Employment: There is a Veterans Employment Preference list in the Methuen Human Resources Office regarding City of Methuen job opportunities. Interested veterans may sign their name to the list and receive preference for jobs available. The list has been established per the resolution adopted by the Methuen City Council.
If one were to scroll down the left hand column of the Methuen website, notice the Job oppurtunity button. I clicked on that and it opens a page that tells me there are no current job openings. That page has a link that states;Â
City of Methuen Printable Employment Application .Â
I clicked that open and found that the application was created in March of 2008 for the Public School System. It has never been modified. It also has no place to state if any military experience has been attained and what that may be.
I would like to recommend that instead of maintaining a seperate list of Veterans, who, of course, must automatically know that we even have the preference,, we should modify the Application to include a section that requests information about military service.
Is this a far fetched idea? No. The State employement application , as well as the Federal application and numerous businesses, already adopted this format to capture that information. See Massachusetts State Job Application, Page 4 of 12; http://www.mass.gov/dcr/documents/application.pdf .
I recommend that our elected officials modify (amend) the resolution to require the addition of veterans question on our application. This should be accomplished ASAP and can, realistically, be done in less than a day. Don’t make more hurdles for our veterans. Streamline the process.
Eliminate the seperate veterans list and update the job application form.