You are a transitioning service member or recent veteran with a clearance. You want a contractor job at one of the primes. Lockheed. Booz Allen. Leidos. BAH. GDIT. SAIC. CACI. Peraton. Or a small shop sitting on a piece of a larger task order. You have heard recruiters live on LinkedIn. You set up a profile. Nothing happens.

This is a different beast than federal civil service. Defense contractor recruiters do not search LinkedIn the way a corporate recruiter at Google does. They search by clearance level. By contract vehicle. By customer agency. By skill keywords that match a Performance Work Statement someone in their capture group is reading right now.

If your profile is built for "veteran transitioning to civilian career," you are invisible to them. The fix is not hard. But it is specific.

On the federal side of the desk, I sat on source-selection panels and approved the contractor staff my contracts brought in. The names that made it through that gate had resumes built around the same signals a LinkedIn Recruiter search runs on. What gets a contractor recruiter to click on your profile is the same thing that gets a contractor name approved by a federal customer. Match the signal, win the click.

How Do Contractor Recruiters Actually Search LinkedIn?

Contractor recruiters use LinkedIn Recruiter, the paid version. It has filters most people never see. They can stack searches like this:

• Job title keywords (Cyber Analyst, Systems Engineer, Logistics SME)
• Clearance keyword in profile text (TS/SCI, Secret, Top Secret)
• Skill tags (RMF, Splunk, ServiceNow, NAVSEA, AFLCMC)
• Past employer (Army, Navy, Air Force, prior contractor names)
• Location radius around their customer site
• Open To Work signal (recruiter-only flag, not the public ring)

If your profile does not include the words their search is looking for, you do not appear in the results. You can have ten years of experience doing the exact work. If the keyword is not on the page, you are not in the stack.

That is the headline rule. Build your profile around the search terms a contractor recruiter would type. Not around what sounds nice in plain English.

What Should the "About" Section Say?

The About section is where most veterans waste 2,000 characters telling a story. A contractor recruiter does not read it like a story. They scan the top two lines. Then they decide if they keep going.

Lead with the four signals that matter:

1. Clearance level and adjudication status (caveat below)
2. Total years in the federal or defense space
3. The customer agencies or commands you have supported
4. The technical or functional skills you bring

Example opening that works:

Two sentences. Four search signals. A recruiter knows in three seconds if you fit a billet on their open requisition.

Below that, you can add a paragraph about what you are looking for and a few bullets on your strongest skills. Keep it scannable. Use real keywords, not buzzwords.

Dominic Landed a Six-Figure Role
With a Top Defense Firm.

"The most effective resource I used in my transition."
— Dominic, E-7, Marines

Read their story →

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Should You List Your Clearance Level Publicly?

This is the part most people get wrong in both directions. Some plaster their full clearance details on the page. Some hide it so well no recruiter can find them.

The rule is simple but rarely stated cleanly. The U.S. Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency handles personnel vetting for most of DoD. Your clearance was granted under a Standard Form 86 and your facility security officer holds the policy on what you can and cannot disclose.

What is generally safe to say on a public profile:

• Clearance level (Secret, Top Secret) without naming the program
• Adjudication status (current, current with periodic reinvestigation, eligible)
• The agency that granted it, if it is not classified

Keep these off a public profile:

• SCI access program names (compartmented information by definition)
• Caveats like SAR or SAP details
• The customer or contract that requires the clearance, if that linkage is classified
• Polygraph results or program-specific access

When in doubt, ask your FSO. Some facilities have stricter rules than DCSA baseline. The cost of getting this wrong is far higher than the cost of a slower job search. We cover this in more depth in how to list security clearance on LinkedIn.

How Do You Use Contract Vehicle Names and Agency Acronyms?

This is the keyword game that decides whether you show up in a recruiter search. Federal contractor work runs on a small number of large contract vehicles. The big primes hold seats on most of them. SAM.gov lists every active federal opportunity and identifies the vehicle the work runs through.

Common vehicles a contractor recruiter might search:

• SeaPort-NxG: Navy services, the workhorse vehicle for engineering and program support
• OASIS+: The new replacement for OASIS, government-wide professional services
• Alliant 3: GWAC for IT services, when published
• CIO-SP4: NIH IT vehicle used across DoD as well
• GSA Multiple Award Schedule: The catch-all, see GSA.gov

If you supported a contract under one of these, name it. "Performed cybersecurity engineering for U.S. Army CECOM under a SeaPort-NxG task order" lands in a recruiter search for SeaPort, CECOM, and cybersecurity engineering. Three filter matches from one sentence.

Same goes for customer agencies. Use the abbreviations recruiters search:

If your past work touched any of these, the acronym belongs on your profile. Spell it out at least once. Then use the short form everywhere else.

How Should You Write the Experience Section?

Most veterans write experience entries that read like an evaluation. Numbered duties. Passive verbs. No context. A contractor recruiter cannot tell what you actually did or who you did it for.

Fix the structure first. Each role gets three pieces:

1. The customer. Name the agency or command if you can. If active-duty, name the unit and the program.
2. The contract vehicle (for prior contractor roles only). One sentence is enough.
3. The work you did. Three to five bullets. Verb plus output plus context.

Here is the before and after:

The second version contains nine distinct keywords a recruiter can filter on. The first contains zero. Same person. Same job. Very different result on LinkedIn Recruiter.

What About the "Open To Work" Signal?

This is the trap that costs the most jobs. LinkedIn has two Open To Work modes. They look the same in the menu. They behave very differently.

The public green ring goes on your profile photo. Everyone can see it. That includes your current command leadership, your current contracting officer, and your security manager. If you are still in uniform or still on a contract, that ring tells people you are looking. Some commands do not care. Some do.

The recruiter-only signal is invisible to your network. Only people paying for LinkedIn Recruiter can see the flag. Your command cannot. Your current employer cannot. Your buddies cannot. But every defense contractor recruiter searching for cleared talent can.

For most transitioning service members and active contractor employees, recruiter-only is the right setting. Per LinkedIn's own help documentation, the recruiter-only flag stays hidden from anyone at your current organization.

Set the location filter to where you can actually work. Cleared roles are heavily concentrated in the National Capital Region, Norfolk, San Diego, Huntsville, Tampa, Colorado Springs, and a few other contractor hubs. Putting "Open to relocate within CONUS" can also widen your hits.

How Do You Connect With Contractor Recruiters?

You do not wait for them to find you. You go find them.

The big primes each have a team of dedicated cleared-talent recruiters. Search LinkedIn for "recruiter" plus the company name. Filter by current employer. Connect with the ones who post about cleared roles in your skill area.

The connection note matters. Three sentences max.

• Who you are in two phrases (clearance, skill area, years)
• What you are looking for in one phrase (the role family)
• Why you reached out to them specifically

Example:

That note will land. Generic "I would love to connect" requests will not. Recruiters reading a hundred messages a day pattern-match instantly on specificity. If you do not know their work, why should they care about yours?

Connect with five recruiters a week. Track them in a spreadsheet. After 30 days you have a network of 20 cleared-recruiter contacts who can route requisitions your way before they go public. That is how the cleared market actually works.

What Do You Put in the Featured Section?

The Featured section sits high on your profile. Most veterans leave it empty. It is the easiest win on the entire page.

Put three items there:

1. A link to a polished resume hosted on your BMR profile or LinkedIn directly
2. One unclassified work product or white paper, if you have one
3. A short statement of what you are open to, written for a recruiter who has 15 seconds

Do NOT put any classified work in Featured. Do NOT put a screenshot of a contract you were on. Do NOT put a customer logo without permission. The point of Featured is to give a recruiter one more piece of evidence that you are the real thing. Not to bait a security incident.

If you have written a public-facing article on your technical area, link it. If you have a GitHub repo, a published certification, or a public DAU/DAU equivalent training credential, link those too. Anything that shows you can produce work outside a uniform.

Which Skills and Endorsements Actually Help?

LinkedIn lets you list 50 skills. Most veterans pick generic ones. Leadership. Teamwork. Operations. None of those help a contractor recruiter search.

Pick skills the recruiter would actually filter on:

• Certifications by name (CISSP, Security+, PMP, CompTIA A+, ITIL)
• Tools by name (Splunk, ServiceNow, Tableau, AWS, Microsoft Azure)
• Frameworks by name (RMF, NIST 800-53, CMMC, DoDAF)
• Agency or vehicle names where allowed (NAVSEA, AFLCMC, SeaPort-NxG)
• Specific platforms or systems you supported

Get endorsements from people who actually worked with you. Reach out to former teammates and ask. Three endorsements on each of your top five skills moves you up the ranking algorithm for that skill. It is one of the few visible signals LinkedIn uses to sort search results.

Salary data for federal contractor roles by skill is on the Bureau of Labor Statistics OES tables if you want to know what to ask for. The DC metro area numbers run high because most cleared work happens there.

What Should You Avoid Putting on the Profile?

A few things will torpedo your search faster than a bad headline.

Do not list classified program names. Do not list the customer if your contract terms forbid it. Do not name the prime contractor of a current task order if you signed an NDA that covers it. Do not put your DoD ID number, your CAC number, your SF-86 reference details, or your facility address.

Do not write the profile in the third person. Recruiters hate it. Write as yourself.

Do not use Mickey Mouse certifications you got in a weekend boot camp as your top skills. Recruiters can spot them. Save those for the bottom of your profile or leave them off.

Do not lie about clearance status. The first thing a contractor recruiter does after the call is a JPAS or DISS check. Anyone in the cleared community can confirm an active eligibility in 30 seconds. If your profile says active and the check says expired, your name goes on a quiet do-not-call list.

What to Do Next

Pick one of these and do it today.

Rewrite the first two lines of your About section to lead with clearance, years, and skills. Update your most recent role with the customer name and three keyword-rich bullets. Turn on the recruiter-only Open To Work signal. Add 10 cleared skills to your Skills section.

If you want help building the resume that backs all this up, BMR's resume builder handles the military-to-contractor translation and the ATS formatting for you. The free tier gives you two tailored resumes you can use to apply to contractor jobs, plus the LinkedIn optimization tool that mirrors the keyword logic above.

For a deeper dive on the LinkedIn fundamentals, read LinkedIn for transitioning military. To see how a contractor profile compares to a federal civilian one, read contractor vs government employee for veterans. If you might switch later from contractor back to civil service, see contractor to federal employee for veterans. And if you want a tactical view on the cleared market itself, read defense contractor jobs for senior veterans with clearance.

If the keyword work above feels overwhelming, the LinkedIn visibility guide walks through the recruiter-search side in plainer terms. The military bio for LinkedIn piece has more on the About section. And if you want the resume side of the contractor pivot for the GS-1102 contracting community specifically, the GS-1102 resume guide covers the keyword logic from the other direction.

The cleared contractor market rewards specificity. Generic profiles get nothing. Specific profiles get five recruiter inbounds a week. The work to close that gap is a Saturday afternoon.