Lost in Translation: Why Veteran Hiring Keeps Missing the Mission

This Veterans’ Day, employers have the opportunity to do so much more than running some asinine content marketing or specious social media campaign thanking veterans for their service (or some variation of the same spurious sentiment). They can finally learn how to recognize the skills veterans really have, and what that service means when it’s applied to the civilian workforce.

Every November 11, while the rest of the world recognizes “Remembrance Day,” “ANZAC Day,” or “Death and Duty Day,” (or, at least, those countries for whom the Armistice to end World War One is worth remembering), America officially celebrates Veterans’ Day, which is sort of ironic, given the fact that the US is one of the very few countries to make celebrating veterans a part of its daily civic and institutional culture.

While other countries honor their current armed forces, past service members, and, most prominently, those killed or injured on the battlefield through solemn national holidays and muted recognition such as wearing poppies, laying wreaths and moments of silence, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that America takes a slightly different approach to honoring our troops.

While we have a national moment of silence, and official remembrance ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, we also honor our veterans with free meals at Applebee’s, 30% off coupons for Kohl’s, and complimentary admission to such fine American institutions as the Harley-Davidson Museum, Six Flags and Sea World, proving, for a day at least, that freedom is indeed free, unless, you know, you’re an orca whale or bottlenose dolphin.

The fact that America is unique in its overt commercialization of Veterans Day should surprise no one; even when they don’t offer any kind of special discount or giveaway for our current and former military service members, corporate America still feels the need to make November 11 as overtly commercialized any other major holiday.

Today, employers will recognize Veterans Day with their own well honed and time honored tradition: specious social media posts and spurious content marketing campaigns reminding everyone how their company recognizes and thanks veterans for their service, and how much they value military experience (which, everyone knows, the best way to do is by posting stuff like American flags and military stock art on LinkedIn).

There are, inevitably, career site landing pages with camouflage backgrounds and dedicated campaigns just for veteran hiring (and, you know, optics); heartfelt executive messages that were clearly cut and pasted directly from an outdated Chat-GPT model, and a few employer branding videos featuring footage of tanks rolling, eagles screeching and soldiers saluting against a dramatically backlit sunset.

Meanwhile, somewhere in America, one of the veterans being publicly extolled by corporate America is getting automatically rejected from a civilian job just because their resume doesn’t contain the right terminology or keywords. You can spend two tours managing a complex, multinational, multimillion-dollar logistics operation for the US Military, but don’t bother applying for a corporate role unless you include the words “enterprise resource planning” or “category management.”

Thank you for your service. Unfortunately, you don’t meet our minimum qualifications. Thanks for applying, and if a role comes along that’s a better fit, we’ll be in touch. We appreciate your sacrifice, even though we’re unlikely to give you even superficial consideration for job opportunities at our company.

There’s a long established, deeply entrenched and foundational issue with veteran hiring:

Employers have spent decades asking veterans to translate their experience into corporate language. But few have done anything substantial to teach their own recruiters (or recruiting systems) how to understand and translate military experience to civilian roles.

The result is one of the deepest and most extraordinary pools of hidden talent anywhere in the world of work, with literally millions of transitioned military veterans hiding in plain sight (and often, on your org chart). Many organizations have at least some familiarity with a military occupation code, which can tell a recruiter roughly what someone did during their service.

Those MOCs, however, rarely communicate the scope of responsibilities, the complexity of the environments they operated in or the capabilities they developed along the way.

A combat medic might have extensive experience with emergency medicine, training, resource management and decision-making under pressure. A military logistics specialist might have managed supply chains, multimillion-dollar budgets and distributed teams across multiple locations.

Unfortunately, those experiences don’t always translate neatly into the job titles, credentials and keywords that determine whether someone gets an interview. And increasingly, those decisions are being made by software before a human recruiter ever sees the application.

The good news is that emerging HR technology is finally making it possible to bridge this translation gap at scale.The less encouraging news, however, is that employers still have to change how they hire veteran talent.

Because even the smartest technology in the world can’t fix a hiring process that’s fundamentally lost in translation.

The War for Talent Has a Language Barrier

Veteran unemployment statistics tell an interesting, if incomplete, story.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2025 veteran employment report⁠, veterans experienced an unemployment rate of 3.5%, compared with 4.2% for nonveterans, so it’s not like veterans seem to be having difficulty finding jobs. However, like all aggregates, there are some nuances worth noting; younger veterans aged 25 to 34, for example, faced a 5% unemployment rate, while female veterans in that age group experienced an unemployment rate of 8.1%, both significantly higher than the national average.

What’s decidedly harder to measure, however, is whether those jobs that they do have are commensurate with their experience, qualifications and potential, particularly when that expertise is acquired during military service, rather than as a member of the civilian workforce.

This is where traditional recruiting processes and policies start to break down.

Consider how most employers define minimum basic qualifications for an open req. HR generally uses a job description that’s nothing more than a slightly repurposed compensation document, which defines open roles using specific job titles and internal conventions, appends minimum experience and educational requirements, and ensures those elements align with the position’s job level, associated compensation range, internal salary bands and external market averages. Only then does that requisition get sent over to talent acquisition as an open job.

This relatively simple and straightforward approach almost guarantees that internal recruiters (or, increasingly, automated screening and stack ranking systems) will find those candidates whose experience most closely resembles the requisition and associated job description. This makes a ton of sense for TA teams; for veterans, however, this approach to matching open roles with available talent creates an obvious and intractable disadvantage.

Take, for example, someone who managed a team of 40 service members, oversaw complex field operations and maintained accountability for millions of dollars in annual capital expenses. Those qualifications, obviously, include many of the competencies that companies generally struggle to find in the civilian workforce when tasked with filling operations management positions.

The only problem is, that MOC code, or its associated military occupational specialty, probably won’t appear on the core list of job titles or associated keywords that companies use when sourcing or screening candidates for open positions.

As the move to skills based hiring and the associated talent acquisition conversation continues to evolve, it’s become conventional wisdom that evaluating candidates against demonstrated competencies rather relying exclusively on credentials or traditional employment histories can significantly widen the pool of available talent, surfacing qualified and interested candidates that traditional screening structurally overlooks.

This is particularly relevant for veterans, whose professional experience and qualifications use a completely different career ontology and associated vocabulary than civilian employers, even when describing roles with nearly identical requirements and job related responsibilities.

That means that the first step towards improving veteran hiring efficacy is remarkably simple, technology agnostic and doesn’t require a single dollar in spend: defining jobs around related responsibilities, accountabilities and what’s expected in terms of performance, outcomes and relative impact. A good place for recruiters to start is by using O*NET’s Military Crosswalk⁠ to identify potential civilian equivalents for military occupations.

Occupational equivalency, however, is only a starting point; an individual’s actual responsibilities, training and accomplishments, like any candidate, often extend well beyond their formal military occupational code or job designation. A veteran, for example, with extensive aviation maintenance experience might not have a ton of chances to work with fighter jets or guided defense systems in the civilian workforce, but they’re likely qualified for a litany of roles in fields like manufacturing, logistics, quality assurance or operations – even though it’s unlikely any of those career paths would ever surface from simple keyword matching.

The good news is, that’s exactly where emerging technology has an opportunity to make an actual difference.

Military Intelligence, Meet Artificial Intelligence

For all the justified skepticism surrounding AI in recruiting, military-to-civilian skills translation represents a genuinely useful application. Military service records contain extensive information about responsibilities, training, qualifications and operational accomplishments; the primary challenge lies in interpreting that experience in a way civilian recruiters and hiring managers can understand.

New tools and emerging technologies are beginning to tackle that problem. GoGig’s Veteran Alignment Intelligence (VAI)⁠, for example, uses AI to analyze military service records and identify transferable skills and potential civilian career paths (full disclosure: I advise GoGig, and I’m proud to do so – it kicks ass).

But the larger opportunity extends beyond any particular platform. AI-powered skills extraction and semantic matching could help recruiters identify qualified veterans whose experience traditional screening systems would otherwise overlook; that potential, obviously, comes with some caveats: military records (like civilian ones) don’t capture every professional competency, automated inferences aren’t always accurate, and any algorithmic recommendation engine will inevitably overlook or omit qualified candidates from consideration.

That’s why it’s incumbent upon employers to fully validate the skills these systems surface, evaluate real candidates against real job requirements and keep that proverbial “human in the loop” looped in so that they can maintain meaningful human oversight (and, optimally, optimize for outcomes).

After all, replacing a recruiter who doesn’t understand how to translate military experience into civilian jobs with an algorithm that’s incapable of aligning these often disparate ontologies isn’t much of an upgrade, unless you’re trying to suck at scale. The real value of emerging technology lies in making relevant experience more visible, understandable and actionable.

And that’s a capability that’s worth investing in for any employer; whether it comes from a large language model, a more configurable ATS or simply better recruiter training, the opportunity cost for not having a better strategy for evaluating skills instead of simply searching for familiar job titles or short tail keywords is simply too high, particularly in today’s highly competitive market for top talent.

Beyond the Offer: Why Your Veteran Hiring Strategy is Broken

Of course, translating military skills accomplishes relatively little if employers aren’t reaching veterans in the first place.

Too many so-called “veteran hiring initiatives” still amount to nothing more than a neglected careers page, a token appearance at the occasional military job fair, and a wishful assumption that slapping “veteran-friendly employer” on your branding will somehow produce a steady pipeline of qualified candidates.

It’s the recruiting equivalent of putting a “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker on your car and expecting it to improve traffic; employers have better options. Programmatic job advertising, for example, can help organizations distribute opportunities across relevant recruitment channels and optimize spending based on candidate engagement and hiring outcomes.

Rather than treating veteran hiring as a once-a-year campaign, employers can build sustained outreach programs connecting relevant opportunities with transitioning service members and established veteran talent communities. They should also establish relationships with military transition programs, veteran employment organizations and the Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service⁠.

The combination of recruitment marketing technology, credible partnerships and skills-based job matching can help employers build more effective veteran talent pipelines. And, unlike the annual ‘patriotic’ LinkedIn post, those pipelines can actually produce measurable hiring results.

Of course, employers can invest heavily in outreach, develop sophisticated skills translation capabilities and build relationships with every veteran employment organization in America; none of it will matter if qualified candidates are rejected by the same screening rules that created the problem.

This is where recruiting technology needs to move beyond sourcing and into actual process improvement. A recent analysis of recruiting industry benchmarks found that application rates dropped 59% across the 16 occupations studied when application forms expanded from two pages to three.

That’s an astonishing amount of candidate attrition triggered by nothing more than tacking on a single extra page to an application.

For transitioning veterans, unnecessary friction can be compounded by systems that demand civilian job titles, conventional employment histories or educational credentials that don’t accurately reflect military training; employers can address these barriers through relatively simple changes.

Start by removing unnecessary degree requirements and replacing rigid years-of-experience thresholds with clearly defined competencies; recognize relevant military training and certifications wherever appropriate, while preserving genuinely necessary professional licensing requirements.

Configure applicant tracking systems to recognize military experience and transferable skills rather than relying exclusively on exact keyword matches, and allow candidates to submit military transcripts or other documentation without manually translating every detail into a standardized résumé.

And, wherever possible, replace subjective screening questions with structured, job-relevant assessments that give candidates an opportunity to demonstrate what they can actually do. Hell, hiring managers need basic training, too.

Beyond the Offer: Why Your Veteran Hiring Strategy is Broken

Hiring a veteran doesn’t end when they sign the offer letter. If you think compliance begins and ends with putting a flag on your careers page, guess again. USERRA isn’t a suggestion; it’s federal law. You need to actually understand your legal obligations to National Guard and Reserve members.

And for disabled veterans? Stop treating accessibility like a compliance headache. If your assessment process screens out talent based on arbitrary physical requirements that have zero to do with essential job functions, your TA process is broken.

Here’s a crazy idea: count military training toward internal advancement. Nothing exposes corporate absurdity faster than requiring someone who managed multi-million dollar operational logistics in a combat zone to complete “Intro to Leadership: Module 1” before you’ll let them supervise three people.

Stop treating veterans like a monolith. They aren’t all destined for security detail, warehouse logistics, or middle-management purgatory. The military produces cybersecurity specialists, intelligence analysts, software engineers, combat medics, and executive administrators. Some want to do in corporate America exactly what they did in uniform; others want to burn that bridge and try something completely new.

A real talent strategy gets out of the way of both.

Mission Metrics: 5 Ways to Stop Virtue Signaling and Start Hiring

Accountability is boring compared to an inspirational social media campaign, but unlike your PR team’s Veterans Day video, it actually hires people. You don’t need a six-figure tech implementation, a change-management consultant, or another executive task force; you need common sense, an owner, and metrics that actually matter.

Here are five things every recruiter can do to improve their veteran hiring efforts.

1. Nuke your arbitrary job reqs. Pull ten open requisitions today. Strip out the lazy “5 years of corporate experience required” language, the unnecessary degree filters, and the hyper-specific job titles. Focus on core competencies. Use O*NET to translate military skill sets into what your business actually needs.
2. Break your ATS on purpose. Run actual or synthetic military resumes through your applicant tracking system. Watch your screening filters reject elite talent because your system doesn’t know what an MOS code is. Fix the parsing rules and run them again.
3. Teach recruiters to translate, not drop out. If your recruiters hit “reject” every time they see military acronyms, that’s a training failure. Give them practical cheat sheets for military roles. Deploy AI skills-matching tools if you have to, but keep a human accountable for final screening decisions.
4. Build a pipeline that lasts past November. Stop treating military hiring like a seasonal PR pop-up. Partner with military transition programs year-round and use recruitment marketing technology to talk to these candidates like professionals, not charity cases.
5. Track outcomes, not vanity metrics. Audit your funnel from application to retention with voluntary self-ID. Track interview conversion rates, offer acceptances, and 12-month retention rates.

• Metrics that matter: Qualified candidate flow, interview rates, offer acceptance, hires, retention, and career progression.
• Metrics that don’t: LinkedIn impressions on Veterans Day, how many camouflage graphics your marketing team posted, or the number of times your CEO used the word “hero” in a company email.

If your shiny new AI parser flags hundreds of qualified veterans and zero of them make it to a recruiter screen, the tech isn’t the problem. Your hiring managers are.

Start small, fix the operational friction, and stop buying software to solve process problems. After all, common sense remains the rarest technology of all in Talent Acquisition today.

All Gave Some. Employers Can Give Jobs.

Veterans Day is great for thanking people who served. There’s nothing wrong with a little patriotic sentiment. But if you really want to show gratitude, give them an opportunity where they can build a real career.

The tech exists. AI can translate military records into civilian skill sets. Skills-based evaluations can test real capability instead of corporate buzzwords. Recruitment marketing platforms can find candidates you’d normally miss. None of this requires lowering your bar, guaranteeing job offers, or running a charity drive. It just requires corporate America to fix its own illiterate screening filters.

The barrier to veteran hiring has never been a lack of talent. It’s been corporate America’s complete inability to read a resume that isn’t written in corporate speak.

So by all means, raise the flag. Thank a veteran. But then go look at your job descriptions, your ATS rejection rules, and the qualifications your hiring managers insist are non-negotiable.

Because military capability shouldn’t become invisible the moment someone takes off the uniform. And if corporate America really wants to thank veterans for their service, learning how to value that service in the civilian workplace is a damn good place to start.