You hired a veteran. Good move. Then six months later, they walked. The work was fine. The fit was off. Your workplace was not built for them, and nobody noticed until they were gone.

That gap is what this checklist fixes. Hiring a veteran is one step. Becoming a place where veterans choose to stay is the harder one. The two are not the same job.

A veteran-inclusive workplace does not need a giant program. You do not need ten committees or a Fortune 500 budget. You need a few habits across hiring, onboarding, and the day-to-day. This is the do-this list. Each area below is short on purpose. Where a topic runs deep, we point you to the full guide instead of repeating it here.

Work the list in order. Or pick the gap that hurts most and start there. Either way, you will be further along than the company that just posts a job and hopes.

What does a veteran-inclusive workplace actually mean?

It means your company is built to find, hire, and keep veterans. Not just willing to. Built to.

A lot of firms say they support veterans. Fewer back it up. The talk is a banner on the careers page. The walk is a hiring process that reads a military resume right, an onboarding plan that does not leave a new vet guessing, and managers who know how to lead someone who led troops.

The good news for a midsize company: this is mostly free. It is process and habit, not spend. The U.S. Department of Labor's Hire a Veteran resources for employers back this up. The firms that retain veterans well are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that fixed the basics.

Each section below is one part of the basics. Treat them as boxes to check.

Are your hiring practices built to find veterans?

Most hiring funnels were not built with veterans in mind. They were built for civilian-to-civilian moves. That leaves good candidates out before anyone reads them.

Start with where you look. Veterans cluster in places most job boards miss. SkillBridge interns, base transition programs, and veteran talent pools are full of people ready to work. If you only post and wait, you will miss them. Build a real sourcing plan. Our full veteran recruiting strategy and talent acquisition playbook walks the whole sourcing motion.

One of the strongest moves is to hire before separation. SkillBridge lets you test-drive a service member as an intern in their last few months in uniform. You see the work. They see the team. Then you make an offer. Read how to hire transitioning service members before they separate.

Two more pieces of the funnel matter so much they get their own boxes below: how you read a resume with no degree, and how you interview. Get those right and your top-of-funnel stops leaking good people.

Can you read a military resume without a degree box?

Here is where most good veterans get cut. A screener sees no four-year degree and moves on. They just passed on a person who ran a 30-person section and a million dollars of gear at age 24.

Military training is real training. Schools, certs, and on-the-job hours add up to skill. A blanket degree filter throws that away. The fix is small: change "bachelor's degree required" to "degree or equivalent experience." Then teach your screeners to spot the experience.

This one box opens a wide door. We break down exactly how to score a veteran candidate who has the skill but not the diploma in how to evaluate a veteran candidate with no degree.

Do your interviewers know how to interview a veteran?

Veterans interview differently. They say "we" when they mean "I led it." They use acronyms. They downplay big results. A civilian interviewer who does not know this will rate a strong candidate as soft.

The fix is to coach the interviewer, not the candidate. Teach your panel to ask "and what was your part in that?" Teach them to dig past the jargon. A few small habits turn a confusing interview into a clear read on real talent.

Walk your hiring team through it with how to interview a veteran candidate. While you are at it, clear out the bad assumptions that creep into hiring rooms. The common ones are wrong, and they cost you good hires. See the myths about hiring veterans, debunked.

Is your onboarding built so veterans do not feel lost?

The military runs on clear roles and a clear chain. Day one, a service member knows who they answer to and what good looks like. A lot of civilian onboarding gives none of that. You hand a vet a laptop and say "figure it out."

That is where the 6-month walkout starts. Not bad work. Just no map. The fix is a simple 90-day plan: a buddy, clear goals, and regular check-ins. Give the new hire someone to ask the dumb questions to. Tell them what success looks like by day 30, 60, and 90.

This connects straight to keeping veterans long term, which gets its own box below. A strong start is the first half of retention.

Are your managers trained to lead veterans?

A veteran-inclusive workplace lives or dies with the direct manager. You can run a great hiring process and still lose the vet if the boss does not get them.

Managers need to know a few things. Veterans want a mission and a clear standard. They take ownership. They will say what they think when asked. A manager who reads that as "too blunt" or "too intense" will clash with a great employee for no reason.

Train your managers on what veterans bring and how to lead it. The strengths are real: leadership under pressure, calm in chaos, follow-through. See the leadership skills veterans bring to employers. Lead those strengths well and you keep the person.

Do you have an ERG and a mentor for new veterans?

People stay where they belong. A lone veteran in a civilian company can feel like the only one who speaks the language. Give them a group and a guide.

An employee resource group, or ERG, is a simple way to do this. It is a group of veterans inside your company who meet, swap notes, and help each other. It does not need to be big. One sponsor, one chair, a small budget. It pays you back in retention and referrals. Start one with how to start a veteran employee resource group.

Mentorship is the other half. Pair each new vet with someone a step ahead. Mentoring beats a buddy system over the long haul because it covers growth, not just onboarding. Build it with how to run a veteran mentorship program at work. The U.S. Department of Labor flags veteran affinity groups and mentoring as practices that move retention, not just morale.

Will you keep them past the first year?

Hiring a veteran and losing them in nine months is worse than not hiring. You paid to recruit, train, and ramp, then handed all of it to a competitor.

Retention is its own skill. It runs on a few things: a real mission, room to grow, a manager who gets it, and the support from the boxes above. None of it is hard. All of it gets skipped.

The full playbook on why veterans stay and why they leave is in veteran employee retention and why they stay. Read it before you lose your next good one.

Do you support Guard and Reserve members the right way?

Some of your veterans still serve. Guard and Reserve members drill, train, and sometimes deploy while holding a full-time job with you. A veteran-inclusive workplace plans for that instead of fighting it.

This one is not just good practice. It is the law. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, or USERRA, protects service members who leave for duty and come back. You hold their job. You cannot punish them for serving. You can read the statute itself at 38 U.S. Code 4312.

The smart move is to know your duties before a drill weekend or a deployment ever comes up. Set the policy now. We lay out exactly what you owe Guard and Reserve members in USERRA employer obligations for Guard and Reserve.

Is your workplace accessible for veterans with disabilities?

Some veterans come home with a service-connected disability. Many do not see it as one and will not ask for help. That puts the first move on you.

The Americans with Disabilities Act covers this. Absent real hardship, you owe a reasonable accommodation so the person can apply and do the job. Often it is small: a flexible schedule, a quieter spot, a different tool. The cost is usually low. The return is a strong employee who stays. The EEOC spells out what this looks like in its guide for employers on veterans and the ADA.

One rule keeps you clean and kind at the same time: do not ask about combat, injuries, a diagnosis, or how someone was discharged. Ask if they can do the job and what they need to do it well. That is inclusion and the law, in one move.

Have you set a real veteran-hiring target?

What gets measured gets done. A company that "supports veterans" with no number is just hoping. A company with an honest target makes progress you can see.

The target does not need to be huge. For a midsize team, a reachable goal beats a slogan. Pick a number you can hit, track it, and report it straight. No tokenism, no padding. Set one that fits your team with realistic veteran hiring targets for your team.

One more group belongs in your goal: military spouses. They are a skilled, loyal pool that civilian employers keep missing, and they fit remote and distributed teams well. Reach them with recruiting military spouses for distributed and remote teams.

Where do you start this week?

You do not have to do all ten boxes at once. You just have to start. Pick three small moves and run them this week.

First, open one job. Change the degree line to "degree or equivalent experience." That one edit widens your veteran pool today. Second, send your next interview panel one page on how veterans answer questions. Third, name one person to be the buddy for your next veteran hire.

That is it for week one. Small, real, done. Next week, pick three more. In a quarter, you are the company veterans tell their buddies about.

The biggest gap for most midsize firms is not effort. It is supply. You cannot build a veteran-inclusive workplace if you cannot find veteran candidates in the first place. That is the part BMR handles. We add over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, on top of 60,000+ resumes built on the platform. It is a fresh, growing pool of people ready to work.

Build the habits. Find the people. Keep them. That is the whole job, and now you have the checklist for it. When you are ready to fill the top of the funnel, reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool.