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A former Army recruiter is helping to round up former service members for possible job opportunities at the massive BlueOval City project in Stanton.
Ryan Smart joined Ford in July 2022 as the automaker's senior talent acquisitions partner, focusing on military and veteran outreach. He is part of Ford’s talent acquisition team that looks to help recruit and hire more than 3,000 employees in the next 18 to 24 months at the Tennessee Electric Vehicle Center at BlueOval City.
The TEVC is part of Ford’s BlueOval City manufacturing complex, located about 40 miles northeast of Memphis. TEVC will produce Ford's next generation electric truck, with production expected to begin in 2025.
Connecting with armed forces groups
Smart, who has more than two decades of military service in the U.S. Army, started as a military recruiter in 2001. After coming back from a deployment assignment in Iraq in 2005, he said he went back into recruiting and worked every level from field recruiting up to the Pentagon.
Smart retired in 2022 as a master sergeant in the Army. He most recently served as command career counselor at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Smart said Ford has placed him in a position to flourish by allowing him to apply skillsets he learned in the military. He wants to help other veterans find gainful employment as well.
Four veterans from East Memphis have been hired at BlueOval City so far, including three working in the human resources department and one at the BlueOval SK battery plant, he said.
Smart understands the distinctive abilities U.S. military veterans possess that can be valuable at BlueOval.
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“Veterans have a unique skillset,” he said. “They are tactically and technically proficient in their jobs. They have more skills than they get credit for and the skills that we train them in, can cross over to Ford and help us in our EV production. It’s just a very humbling experience knowing we can take what the military has invested into them and keep making America stronger economically in the automotive industry.”
Helping military back into civilian word
Smart said his duties as senior talent acquisitions partner include being a “translator” to help military personnel transition back into the civilian sector. He takes on the challenge of helping translate their resumes so they can be understood by those hiring in the private sector.
“What happens is when we have transitioning service members coming off active duty or they are in the Reserves or National Guard, they don’t know the lingo of corporate world,” Smart said. “When they talked, it’s of their military skills. When they put that on their resume, the recruiters and hiring managers really don’t know what that is, so what I do is take their skills and schooling and I translate that over to the corporate world.”