Former military recruiter now leads Ford's quest to hire veterans at BlueOval City in TN

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 his 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.”

Smart and the talent acquisition team are partnering with different military groups to help recruit and hire military and veterans. He said those groups include the local reserve, reserve component units, National Guard, Veteran Affairs (VA) and all the veteran outreach departments in the Memphis area.

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In addition to Memphis and Western Tennessee, the search to find military and veteran talent extends regionally to areas like Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri as well as to the armed forces branches, including the Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force reserve components units located within 100 miles.

Smart said Ford signed an agreement in January with the U.S. Army Reserve Private Public Partnership to offer job interviews for veterans. The company also signed a U.S. Army Partnership for Your Success agreement in August, which guarantees job opportunities to transitioning service members at Ford Motor Co.

Ford has a long history of supporting veterans, dating back to 1919 when founder Henry Ford employed disabled veterans. During World War II, Ford stopped civilian vehicle production to manufacture more than 280,000 vehicles for the Allied war effort. Currently, Ford employs more than 4,000 veterans.

"Ford has a great history of supporting veterans, and I'm a great reflection of that," Smart said.

For more information about jobs at BlueOval City, visit BlueOvalCity.com.

Corey Davis is the Collierville and Germantown reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Corey.Davis@commercialappeal.com or 901-293-1610.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Ford in TN: Meet man leading efforts to hire veterans at BlueOval City