Thanks for visiting Ruralink!
If you are considering recruiting a veteran into your rural business, you have come to the right place! We are the only company in the UK which works exclusively to support ex-forces into the land-based sector.
Military values and those of the land-based sector match.
We want you to employ a veteran!
How can we help?
The Need for Innovative Approaches to Labour Recruitment
This report includes a general discussion on how approaches to attracting farm labour can be improved as well as specific chapter on why recruiting from the military community can be successful.
Click on the image to go to the report.
Gateway Jobs & Work Experience Opportunities
We're passionate about opening up land-based careers to professionals with prior out-of-sector experience. The combination of deep lifelong experts working with career-changers who bring a wealth of diverse experience and outlook is highly likely to drive productivity and innovation. We'd love to collaborate on projects to develop opportunities and support career-changers.
A key enabler which benefits all is identifying Gateway Roles, where the portable professional skills, such as leadership, project management, teaching, mentoring and logistics are brought by the veteran providing immediate impact in the rural business. Service personnel are used to learning new roles fast: they are sure to pick up the missing 20% sector knowledge quickly. If you wish to collaborate to make such an opportunity available, please get in touch.
Work experience is very easy to provide for a resettling military person as the MOD allows serving personnel paid time to attend an organised placement. If you feel able to offer work experience placements from one day up to a few weeks long, please get in touch. There is no cost to you.
FAQs
Why employ a veteran?
Ex-military personnel of all ranks are highly trained pragmatic problem-solvers, planners and creative thinkers, used to living with and managing change. They may not have a detailed knowledge of your business but they will certainly ask why you do things the way you do, make constructive suggestions for change and are capable of managing that change with you. Crucially, they have worked in an environment that expects collaborative planning but demands unity once a decision is made, so they will pull behind your business plan once in place, even if they advocated for a different direction.
Who works with Ruralink?
We have a small core team who work remotely to manage the head office function. For each project, we then engage expert consultants, including ex-military wherever possible. This provides our clients with unrivalled expertise, cultural context and a direct link into the military community. It also provides the ex-military consultant with a “Gateway Job” from which each can go on to develop their own land-based career with us, with our client, or elsewhere in the industry.
What is the Armed Forces Covenant?
The Armed Forces Covenant is the nation's commitment to the military community in recognition of the sacrifices service personnel and their families make for us.
Fiona Galbraith signed the covenant for Ruralink on 23 August 2019. We were delighted to be awarded the Bronze Award within days and then the Silver Award one year later. In 2023, we were one of the first small businesses to be recognised at the Gold level. You can read our pledges here and find out more about the scheme here.