Most hiring starts the day a req opens. A role gets approved. Then the scramble begins. You post the job, wait, and hope the right people show up fast. With veterans, that cold-start approach almost never works.

Good veteran candidates do not sit on job boards waiting for your post. Many are still in uniform. Some are mid-transition. Others are happily working and not looking. By the time your req is live, the people you want are already gone or already committed.

The fix is simple to say and harder to do. Build the pool before you need it. Keep a warm list of veteran candidates ready. Then when a req opens, you reach out to people who already know your company. This guide shows a midsize team how to do that without a huge budget or a dedicated recruiting army.

Why does a warm pipeline beat a cold scramble?

A cold req start puts you at the back of the line. You compete with every other company posting that week. You have zero relationship with the candidate. And you have to move fast, which means you make rushed calls.

A warm pipeline flips that. You already know names. You already have people who follow your company. When the req opens, your first outreach goes to a list, not a void. That cuts your time-to-fill and raises the quality of who you talk to.

The veteran labor market makes this even more important. In 2025, the unemployment rate for all veterans was just 3.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was up from 3.0 percent the year before, but still well below the nonveteran rate. A low jobless rate means good veteran talent moves fast. If you wait for the req, you miss them.

There is a second reason a warm list wins. Veterans value fit and trust. A service member leaving the military wants to know a company gets their background. If you have nurtured that person for months, they already trust you. A cold recruiter pinging them out of nowhere starts from zero.

This is the same logic sales teams use. You do not start selling the day you need the deal. You build the relationship first. Recruiting works the same way. The teams that win veteran talent treat sourcing as an always-on motion, not a reaction to a req.

What is a veteran talent community, and how do you start one?

A talent community is a group of veteran candidates who know your company and stay in touch with you over time. They are not all ready to move today. Some will be ready in three months. Some in a year. You keep them warm until the timing lines up.

You do not need fancy tools to start. You need a way to collect interested people and a reason for them to stay connected. Here are the channels that feed a veteran talent community.

A simple talent newsletter

Start an email list aimed at transitioning service members and veterans. Send it monthly. Keep it useful, not salesy. Share what your company does, what roles tend to open, and tips on translating military experience. People opt in. You now have a warm list that grows on its own.

Events, both in person and virtual

Run a short virtual info session once a quarter. Title it something like "What it is like to work here as a veteran." Invite your own veteran employees to speak. Service members trust other veterans. Anyone who shows up goes onto your list. Anyone who registers but misses it still goes on the list.

SkillBridge relationships

The DoD SkillBridge program lets service members do a civilian work placement in their final months of service. As a host, you get a working tryout. The service member is still on military pay, so there is no salary cost to you during the placement. Even when a SkillBridge intern does not convert right away, they stay in your community. Every cohort feeds your pipeline.

Base and TAP office contacts

Most installations run a Transition Assistance Program. Those offices talk to separating service members every week. Build a real relationship with a few of them. When you have roles coming, they can point people your way. This is slow to build and worth it.

You do not have to run all four at once. Pick one. Get it working. Add the next. A midsize team can start with a newsletter and one SkillBridge host relationship and already be ahead of most competitors. For a deeper look at the program-side mechanics, see our guide on how to become a SkillBridge host company.

How do you tag and nurture candidates over time?

Collecting names is step one. Keeping them organized is step two. A list of 200 veterans means nothing if you cannot find the right 10 when a req opens. This is where tagging comes in.

Tag each candidate with a few simple labels. Keep it light. You are not building a database for its own sake. You are making it easy to search later.

Nurture means staying in light, useful contact. Not spam. A monthly note. A heads-up when a relevant role is coming. A congrats when someone finishes their service. The goal is that your company name stays warm in their mind.

Watch the timeline tag closely. Someone tagged "ready in 6 months" should get a check-in around the 5-month mark. That is the moment they start looking. If you reach out first, you are the call they take, not the cold recruiter they ignore. Many of your best future hires are passive right now. For more on this, read our guide on how to reach passive veteran candidates.

How do you keep a living candidate list current?

A pipeline is only useful if it stays fresh. A list of names from two years ago is a graveyard. People moved, got hired, or changed goals. A living list takes light, steady upkeep.

Set a simple rhythm. Once a quarter, review your list. Remove anyone who took another job and is settled. Update timeline tags for people whose situation changed. Add the new names from that quarter's events and signups. This takes a few hours, not a few weeks.

Give candidates an easy way to update you too. A one-line reply to your newsletter that says "still looking" or "I got hired, thanks" tells you everything. Make it normal to hear from them. The list stays accurate because the people in it help you keep it that way.

A living list also tells you where your pipeline is thin. If you have plenty of logistics fits but no IT, you know where to focus your next event or outreach. The list is not just a hiring tool. It is a map of your future supply.

How does a candidate database speed all of this up?

Building a community from scratch takes time. The newsletter grows slowly. Events fill up over quarters. That is real work, and it pays off. But you do not have to start from zero on the supply side.

A veteran candidate database lets you build the pool now and reach out later. Instead of waiting for veterans to find your newsletter, you search a pool that already exists. You tag and shortlist candidates today. Then when a req opens, your outreach list is already there.

That is exactly what BMR's veteran talent pool gives a midsize employer. The pool grows by over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month. It is backed by 60,000 resumes built on the platform. So your pipeline does not stall waiting for organic signups. There is a fresh, growing supply of transitioning service members and veterans to draw from.

Pairing a database with your own community is the strongest setup. The database gives you scale and speed. Your newsletter and events give you depth and trust. Together they mean you almost never start a search cold. To see how this fits the bigger picture, read our veteran recruiting strategy playbook.

How is this different from running a volume hiring program?

It helps to know what this is not. Building a pipeline before reqs open is a sourcing-and-relationship motion. A volume hiring program is a throughput machine that runs once reqs are already flowing.

Think of it as two phases. First you fill the pool. Then, when reqs open in volume, you run people through a repeatable process. If your team is hiring veterans at scale, see our guide on how to run a volume veteran hiring program. That covers cohorts, screening at scale, and standard onboarding.

The pipeline feeds the program. A warm, tagged pool makes a volume program faster because you are not sourcing from scratch each cycle. One builds supply. The other moves supply through. You want both, and you want the pipeline first.

The pipeline approach also pairs with industry-specific sourcing. If you hire cleared or technical talent, a focused pipeline matters even more. Our guide on building a cybersecurity veteran hiring pipeline shows how the same warm-pool logic applies to a niche field.

Where should a midsize team start?

Do not try to build everything at once. Most midsize teams stall because they plan a giant program and never launch. Start small and let it compound.

Pick one feeder channel and one place to keep your list. A simple spreadsheet works to start. Add tags as you go. The point is to begin collecting and nurturing names today, not to have a perfect system. The best pipeline is the one that actually exists.

The federal government also offers free help for employers building veteran pipelines. The DOL VETS team runs employer resources for hiring veterans, including regional coordinators who connect companies to local talent. There is no reason to do this alone or pay a premium when these channels exist.

Once your community is humming, layer in the other sourcing channels. Build relationships with base TAP offices and treat military transition programs as a sourcing channel. If you want to catch talent at the perfect moment, learn how to hire transitioning service members before separation. Each one feeds the same warm pool.

The companies that win veteran talent are not the ones with the biggest budget. They are the ones who started building their pipeline before they needed it. Start now, even small, and you will never have to scramble again. When you are ready to plug into a ready-made veteran talent pool, reach out to access BMR's veteran candidate pool and build your pipeline today.