Military Veterans Bring Technical Skills Employers Often Miss

By Nathan Brooks

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that about 200,000 service members transition out of the military each year, while ManpowerGroup reports that 69% of U.S. employers have difficulty finding qualified talent. Indeed and The Harris Poll found a parallel mismatch: 57% of veterans surveyed felt underemployed or believed their jobs underrepresented their military responsibilities.

Nathan Brooks has spent more than 30 years helping companies find talent, and he has seen employers screen out capable people because their backgrounds do not match a familiar profile. Veterans spend years developing practical skills, but civilian job descriptions often make those achievements harder to recognize.

What changes for employers that recruit veterans?

Brooks recommends starting with a five-year hiring audit: count veterans hired, then separate those recruited proactively from those who applied without prompting. That distinction shows whether veteran hiring functions as a broad talent pipeline or remains a narrow résumé filter.

Brooks says many employers want veterans but lack a reliable way to evaluate military experience. His four changes are to decode that experience, prioritize skills and learning agility, prepare the organization to support veterans and build relationships before positions open.

Decode the work behind military titles. Brooks’s Orion Talent team once placed a Navy pilot in a service area manager role at a medical imaging company. The role oversaw technicians who installed and repaired MRI and CT equipment in hospitals, fields he had never entered. What he had done was operate complex, high-value equipment where maintenance discipline could mean life or death.

The candidate also worked closely with maintenance crews and led people under pressure. Once the hiring manager understood that overlap, the candidate became the strongest applicant for the job.

During interviews, Brooks asks what equipment candidates used, whom they supervised and which decisions they owned. Those questions reveal operational experience that a military title or résumé keyword can obscure.

Prioritize skills and learning agility over traditional credentials. Brooks has encountered employers with rigid ideas about what a qualified technical hire should look like. When requirements become too prescriptive, those employers risk rejecting candidates with directly relevant experience even as they struggle to fill roles that are notoriously difficult to staff.

Service in the Navy’s nuclear program or work as an Air Force Electronics Technician, Electrician’s Mate or Electrical Power Production specialist can map to data centers, power generation, advanced manufacturing and other critical infrastructure operations.

Applicable experience rarely arrives as a 1:1 match with a job description, so recruiters must probe for it. Giving veterans and all candidates a chance to show what they know, and how quickly they learn, can expand the qualified pool.

Prepare the organization to support veteran talent. Brooks says adding veterans to the recruiting pipeline differs from actually hiring from it. Recruiters may recognize a veteran’s strengths, while the hiring manager making the final call cannot picture the person in the role and chooses a safer candidate.

Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that skills-based hiring reforms increased opportunities for workers without bachelor’s degrees in fewer than one of every 700 hires. Brooks says the finding is not merely anecdotal and wants hiring teams coached to recognize relevant experience.

“My challenge to every organization this Veterans Day is to commit to coaching its hiring teams on how to evaluate veteran job candidates,” Brooks said. Organizations without a starting point can bring in a consultant with specialized military recruiting expertise.

Build relationships before positions need to be filled. Brooks says many employers wait until someone leaves or a new position opens, triggering a scramble for candidates. Service members often plan their next career move well before leaving the military, and they may not be available to start within the next two to four weeks.

An always-on approach lets employers engage military talent pools while strengthening their pipeline. Even without a perfect opening, regular conversations reduce the rush when a vacancy arrives, especially for a new location or facility expansion planned months or a year ahead.

For specialized or technical fields such as energy and data centers, Brooks recommends starting three to six months before separation. These employers often struggle to attract skilled candidates willing to relocate, while service members are still deciding where they want to live.

“Starting the conversation early means you both have time to determine if your organization is a good match for their skills and career goals,” Brooks said. That timing gives both sides room to test skills, career goals and geographic fit before an offer.

Brooks describes former service members as highly skilled leaders. He calls on every HR executive, recruiter and hiring manager to make hiring more inclusive of veterans and other nontraditional candidates.

The next recruiting cycle will show whether that approach works: a company should already know which transitioning service members could fill upcoming roles, whether they will relocate and where their skills fit. The advantage comes from advance relationships, not another filter on the résumé.