Get to know Quiet Professionals LLC. We are a proud sponsor of the Corporate Fellowship Program at Hiring Our Heroes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) initiative launched in March 2011 as a nationwide effort to connect veterans, service members, and military spouses with meaningful employment opportunities. As a service-disabled-veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB) headquartered in Tampa, Florida, the home of MacDill Air Force Base and US SOCOM, this mission is near to our heart. Listen in to learn more about QP and Hiring Our Heroes community partnership, Marvin Jackson’s (MW), a fellow, experience with QP and Hiring Our Heroes, and Kishima Garcia’s (KG) advice to future and current fellows.
Looking for your next career? Check out opportunities with QP.
Transcript:
We are Quiet Professionals, LLC, a service-disabled-veteran-owned-small business headquartered in Tampa, Florida in the beautiful Rocky Point area. Originally coined by the Green Berets, the name Quiet Professionals has reflected our unique capabilities, professional demeanor, and commitment to excellence from the start. At Quiet Professionals, we subscribe to a set of core values that guide how we work, play, and problem-solve together. Our talented people are the heartbeat behind every one of our successful missions. As we continue to grow, we’re looking for game-changers, rebels, innovators, and leaders who can help take us to the next level in building a safer, more secure world.
We specialize in providing intelligence analysis and collection, geospatial analysis and integrations, technology support services, unmanned aerial vehicle training and support, and counter-ied support to the most elite agencies in the world. We have proven we excel in extreme situations where most others fail, and we believe that our employees are the foundation of our success.
Today we have grown to over 130 employees globally and we are proud to say that more than 90% of QP employees are prior military veterans and spouses. Our astonishing growth has been made possible by these purpose-driven and innovative teams, our committed industry partners, and our proven performance across multiple high-value contract awards.
As veterans ourselves, we are deeply committed to supporting and serving those who have served our nation. We are nationally recognized as a Platinum Medallion Award Recipient by the federal HIRE Vets program for our exemplary efforts to recruit, employ, and retain our nation’s heroes. As a part of these efforts, we have invested in veteran and military spouse hiring, retention, and professional development through programs like Hiring Our Heroes.
MJ: My name is Marvin Jackson. I was born and raised in Fairmont, West Virginia. I joined the military at the ripe age of 18 right after high school and served 26 years and I am getting ready to retire after 26 years of service here in the Tampa community. Today was my first day at Quiet Professionals and it was truly a wonderful experience and opportunity to see exactly what goes on. I spent time in recruiting and it wasn’t a training wheel type of experience. It’s not too much of a far leap, I was kind of afraid of culture shock. And that does not seem to be the case here, I seem to fit right in and it almost feels like home, like I’ve never really done anything but taken off the uniform and then come right back to work.
Quiet Professionals is a defensive contracting company that works with the Department of Defense to help fill critical gaps in its capabilities and so my time here, I’ve had an opportunity to see how they placed high-quality specialized individuals into those critical gaps to meet the needs of the United States military and our special operations. Quiet Professionals is a corporate sponsor of the Hiring Our Heroes corporate fellowship program meaning they are open to accepting resumes from all fellows in the Tampa-Orlando area and for those who are in the National program. I would say for anyone interested in joining the Hiring Our Heroes program, give a lot of thought up front to where you want to be and understand that you will find yourself placed in the company that chooses you or that you choose. So give a lot of thought, because what you don’t want to do is make a wrong choice and end up in a place where it’s not maybe the best match of your skills. It’s really a risk because you may not know much about the company so if you can, be forward-leaning. \
KG: My name is Kishima Garcia and I’m the Executive Vice President of Human Capital and Strategies here at Quiet Professionals. I am an Air Force Veteran and I did 10 and a half years active duty. Quiet Professionals is about 90% prior military either reservists, veterans, retirees. So it’s kind of a passion for all of us here because we’ve been through it. We got involved because actually we came to the Chamber of Commerce and they had a big meeting about it and they wanted to bring it to Tampa and of course we were on board.
We understand how it is to be transitioning from the military and your working alongside to individuals who are accustomed to speaking the same language that you speak and and I mean down to understanding why your demeanor is the way that it is. Or you know some of the focus areas we understand, it is not the same internship as if you were going to work somewhere else where they discredit any of the experience that you were going to be bringing to the table. We want you to showcase your experience, we want you to tell us about your experience, we want you to show the team the experience and the knowledge that you bring to the table because as a growing and innovative company, Quiet Professionals is about the impact that we are going to be making on our community and the world in the global space.
Our first experience with Hiring Our Heroes, we had an opportunity to review resumes and see what was out there. Of course, we had interviews with individuals and then we attended a lot of the social events they had. And just spoke to individuals just like we would have wanted to be spoken to when we were in that position. We were fortunate enough to bring someone to our team at that time to participate in the program in office that worked in our PMO section and he was amazing.
So the advice that I have for the individuals that are going through the Hiring Our Heroes program is that your rank doesn’t follow you. So remember this is a new opportunity for you and any experiences you had in the past, life experiences, just exposure to things, the travel that you had amongst the world. Those are all great things that attribute to who you are today. But the military does not define you, you define yourself.
