National Hire a Vet Day Is July 25. Don't Make It a Photo Op.
- Dean Nemecek
- Jul 15
- 5 min read
By Dean Nemecek, Founder, Veteran Bridge Solutions
National Hire a Vet Day is coming up on July 25, and the events are already rolling. Washington State's Hire-a-Vet fair in Tacoma today, July 15, is putting more than 80 employers in one room with veterans and military spouses. Similar events are happening across the country all month.
These events are worth showing up for, and real hires come out of them. But there's a failure also worth naming: a company attends, collects a stack of resumes, posts the group photo with the flag in the background. And then those same candidates go through a screening process that was never designed to read them. Harvard Business School and Accenture studied this and found that 88% of employers admit their applicant tracking systems filter out qualified candidates, with veterans among the groups hit hardest. Not because the software is malicious, but because someone configured the keyword filters to target civilian job titles, and "13B Cannon Crewmember" doesn't match "Operations Coordinator" no matter how similar the work is.
The photo goes on LinkedIn. The resumes go nowhere.
Why good intentions die in the pipeline
Most companies that fail veteran candidates aren't hostile to them. They're just built around civilian assumptions, and nobody has questioned those assumptions.
Here's what that looks like in practice. A recruiter gets a resume from a Marine Corps logistics chief. It says things like "managed embarkation for battalion-sized elements" and "supervised 40 Marines across three sections." The recruiter has fifteen seconds and no translation key. The ATS has already scored the resume low because it doesn't contain the phrases "supply chain," "inventory management," or "cross-functional teams," even though that's exactly what the candidate did, at a scale and under conditions most civilian applicants never touch.
That's not a talent problem. That's a translation problem, and it lives entirely on the employer's side of the table.
The timing matters more than usual this year. June's jobs data showed veteran unemployment rising to 4.1%, with post-9/11 veterans at 4.8% and veterans ages 18 to 24 hitting 17.4%. The talent pool is deep right now. Companies with a working intake process for military talent will have their pick.
Three commitments that beat ten job fair appearances
If you want July 25 to actually mean something at your company, make one structural change before it arrives. Here are the three I'd start with, in order of impact.
1. Train your recruiters to read a military resume
This is the highest-leverage and cheapest fix. A half-day session can teach a recruiting team which ranks correspond to which levels of responsibility, what an NCO actually does, how to read an MOS or rating, and which questions to ask rather than pass. Pair it with a review of your ATS keyword filters: if your system screens out military job titles, you're not veteran-friendly no matter what your careers page says.
A useful test: hand your recruiters a real (anonymized) military resume and ask them to describe the candidate's scope of responsibility. If they can't, you've found your gap. I'm of the belief that companies serious about veteran/military transition hiring will have a veteran on their talent acquisition team.
2. Put a veteran on the interview panel
If you already employ veterans, you have translators on staff. Use them. A veteran interviewer can ask follow-up questions a civilian interviewer might not think to ask and can distinguish between a candidate who is genuinely underqualified and one who is simply describing strong experience in unfamiliar terms.
It also changes the candidate's experience. A transitioning service member who sees someone across the table who's made the same jump is more candid, more relaxed, and more likely to accept your offer over a competitor's. This costs you nothing but a calendar invite and some time training the veteran interviewer on your processes.
3. Commit to interviews, not resume collection. And put your name on it.
I'm not a fan of arbitrary quotas, and you don't need one. There's already a program built for exactly this commitment: the Army PaYS program (Partnership for Your Success). When your company signs on as a PaYS partner, you enter a Memorandum of Agreement with the Army guaranteeing soldiers who selected your company at least an interview. Not a job, an interview. That's the right bar. It gets the candidate past the resume screen and into a conversation, which is where military talent actually shows well.
The program is free to join, and more than 1,000 employers are already partners, from Amazon and USAA down to local police and fire departments. Ideal partners have around 500 employees, but smaller companies are considered. You can learn about becoming a partner at armypays.com.
Two honest caveats. First, this is a real commitment, not a badge: partners are expected to load new positions each July and stay in contact with soldiers through the program's information exchange. If you sign the MOA and then go dark, you've just built a more official version of the photo op. Second, accountability runs both ways: the folks who run PaYS owe partners and soldiers a pipeline that works. If you sign up and the process stalls, say so, publicly if you have to. A guaranteed interview is only a guarantee if both sides hold the line.
And track it like any other pipeline metric: how many PaYS soldiers contacted you, how many interviewed, how many hired, how many still there at 12 months. If you measure it, someone owns it. If nobody owns it, it's a photo op.
The retention argument, briefly
One structural change beats ten job fair appearances, and the payoff shows up in retention, not just hiring. Veterans hired through a process that actually understood their backgrounds ramp up faster and stay longer because the match is real. Veterans hired as a gesture, into roles that undersell them, leave. Then the company concludes veteran hiring "didn't work," when what didn't work was the process.
Where to start
If you're an employer and this is the year you want to move past the group photo, pick one of the three commitments above and put a date on it before July 25. Any of them can be stood up in a quarter.
And if you want help building the recruiter training, auditing your ATS filters, or setting up a veteran hiring program with numbers attached, this is exactly the work we do at Veteran Bridge Solutions. Reach out, or just start with the free version: ask a veteran on your team what your hiring process looked like from their side. The answer is usually the whole roadmap.
Dean Nemecek is the founder of Veteran Bridge Solutions, a veteran-owned firm specializing in military hiring advising, DoD SkillBridge consulting, and veteran hiring programs.
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