You have a defense req open. It needs an active Secret or Top Secret clearance. You post it. The applicants roll in, but almost none of them are cleared. So the offer comes with a catch. You sponsor a new clearance, wait months, and pray the contract start date does not slip.

There is a better pool. Veterans separate with active clearances every single day. Many held Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI for years. The investigation is already done. The vetting is already paid for. If you can reach these people before their clearance lapses, you skip the most expensive and slowest part of cleared hiring.

This guide walks you through how to find cleared veteran talent and how to move on it fast. It covers where these people are, how clearances actually carry over, and how to read a military resume so you do not pass on a perfect cleared candidate by accident.

Why Is Cleared Veteran Talent So Hard to Find?

Cleared work has a supply problem. You cannot just train your way into a clearance. The government grants it. That takes a sponsor, an investigation, and time. So the pool of people who already hold one stays small and stays in demand.

Most cleared job postings sit and wait. The few cleared people on the open market field five offers at once. You end up bidding against other contractors for the same handful of names. That is slow and it gets costly.

Veterans change the math. They do not trickle out of the cleared world. They flood out of it on a schedule. Every month, thousands separate. A large share of them held a clearance the day they took off the uniform.

The problem is timing, not supply. These people are leaving the service in waves. But they are not all sitting on a job board with "cleared" in their headline. You have to know where they are and reach them in the right window. That is what most employers miss.

What Clearance Levels Should You Know?

You do not need to be a security officer to source cleared talent. But you do need to speak the language. There are a few core levels.

• Confidential: The base level. Less common in the contracts you are likely staffing.
• Secret: The workhorse level. A huge share of cleared veterans hold this.
• Top Secret: A deeper investigation and higher access. Common in intelligence and senior roles.
• TS/SCI: Top Secret with Sensitive Compartmented Information access. SCI is an access add-on, not a separate level. It often comes with a polygraph.

When your req says "TS/SCI required," you are asking for a narrow group. When it says "Secret," your pool is much wider. Veterans fill both. Match the level to the real need, not the wish list, and your pipeline opens up fast.

How Does a Clearance Carry Over From the Military?

This is the part that makes veteran clearances so valuable. A clearance does not vanish the day someone separates. It can carry over. But there are rules, and you should know them before you make an offer.

First, who runs this. The Director of National Intelligence is the Security Executive Agent. That office sets clearance policy across the government. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency runs most of the background investigations. Those two names show up a lot in cleared hiring. Now you know what they do.

What Is Reciprocity and Why Does It Matter to You?

Reciprocity is the rule that lets a clearance move with the person. Agencies are generally supposed to accept a clearance determination another agency already made. So a veteran who held an active Secret clearance can often cross that over to your contract. You do not always have to start a brand new investigation.

That is the win. A new investigation costs money and burns months. You can put real numbers on that gap with our guide to the cost savings of a cleared veteran hire. A crossover can be far faster. When you find a veteran with an active or recent clearance, you may be skipping the slowest step in the whole process.

How Long Does a Clearance Stay Reinstatable?

This is the timing rule that drives everything. A clearance can lapse after someone leaves a cleared job. But there is a window where it can still be reinstated without a fresh investigation.

The key marker is a break in service. For years the rule was simple. A break of more than 24 months meant a new investigation. Recent policy changes may stretch that window for some cleared people. The FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act added new provisions here. But the rules vary by agency. Your facility security officer can confirm the current threshold. Either way, the sooner you reach a veteran after separation, the more clearance value you keep.

So the math is simple. The sooner you reach a veteran after they separate, the more of their clearance value you keep. A vet who left the service four months ago is a much cheaper hire than the same vet two years later. The clock is the whole game.

One more shift to know. The government moved to Trusted Workforce 2.0 and continuous vetting. That replaced the old periodic reinvestigation cycle for many cleared people. It does not change your sourcing job, but you will hear the terms. It means cleared status is checked on an ongoing basis, not just every few years.

Where Do You Actually Find Cleared Veterans?

You know the value. Now the practical part. Where are these people, and how do you reach them inside the window? You want more than one source running at once. Cleared talent moves fast, so a single channel will leave reqs open.

Reach Them Before They Separate

The best cleared veteran is one you meet before they leave the service. Their clearance is active. They have not started fielding ten offers yet. And you have time to line up the crossover.

SkillBridge is the cleanest path here. It lets a service member intern with your company during their last months in uniform. A cleared service member doing a SkillBridge tour with you is about as warm as a cleared lead gets. You can read more on running a host program in our guide to hiring transitioning service members before separation.

Use Veteran-Focused Channels

Generic job boards bury cleared veterans. They do not always tag themselves "cleared," and their resumes read in military terms. Veteran-focused channels surface them better. Base transition offices, veteran hiring events, and veteran-built talent pools all skew toward the people you want.

For a full breakdown of which channels reach veterans best, see our guide on where to post jobs to reach qualified veteran candidates. The short version is that you go where the veterans already are instead of waiting for them to find your generic posting.

Tap a Veteran Talent Pool Directly

This is where Best Military Resume comes in. BMR has a steady, growing pool of transitioning service members and veterans. More than 1,000 new veteran profiles are added every month, and over 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. A large share of these people come from intelligence, cyber, and other cleared career fields.

Instead of waiting for cleared veterans to find your req, you can reach into a pool that is already full of them. If you hire cleared talent for defense or contractor work, partner with us to get in front of these candidates while their clearances are still active.

Which Military Jobs Produce Cleared Talent?

Not every veteran held a clearance. But whole career fields are built around classified work. If you learn to spot these codes on a resume, you can find cleared candidates fast, even when the resume never says the word "cleared."

Intelligence is the deepest well. These people lived inside classified systems daily. A few examples map almost one-to-one to cleared civilian roles.

• Army 35F and 35N: Intelligence analysts and signals intelligence analysts. See the 35F intelligence analyst career guide and the 35N signals intelligence analyst guide.
• Air Force 1N0X1: All-source intelligence analysts. The 1N0X1 all-source analyst guide shows what they do.
• Navy IS: Intelligence Specialists. The Navy Intelligence Specialist guide covers the role.

Cyber career fields run the same way. Army 17C cyber operations specialists, and their cousins across the other branches, hold clearances because the work demands it. If your req is cleared cyber, these are your people. We go deeper on that field in our guide to building a cybersecurity veteran hiring pipeline.

Beyond intel and cyber, plenty of other roles carry clearances. Communications, certain logistics and acquisition jobs, and many staff roles all touch classified material. The lesson is to read the duties, not just the code.

How Do You Read a Cleared Military Resume?

Here is where good cleared candidates get lost. A military resume does not look like a contractor resume. It is full of codes, acronyms, and humble team-credit phrasing. A screener who does not know the language passes on people they should be calling.

Start with the clearance itself. A military resume may list it plainly, or it may be buried, or it may not appear at all because the person was told not to advertise it. Do not assume "no clearance listed" means "no clearance." If the career field implies one, ask.

Read the duties under the code, not the code alone. "Maintained access in a SCIF" tells you the person held high-level clearance and worked classified daily. "Briefed the CG" means they presented to a general officer. That is poise under pressure. Translate the jargon and the candidate gets clear fast.

Watch for the humble phrasing too. Veterans write "we" when they led the effort. They downplay their own role. A line like "supported the team's reporting" may hide the fact that this person ran the shop. Ask follow-up questions to pull out their actual scope.

For a full screening framework, our recruiter's checklist for screening veteran applicants walks through this step by step. Pair it with our guide on how to map a military career field to your open reqs so you stop screening out strong people by accident.

How Do You Move Fast Enough to Win Cleared Talent?

Speed is the whole job in cleared hiring. The clearance has a clock. The candidate has options. If your process drags, you lose them to a contractor who moved quicker. Build for speed from the first contact.

None of this needs a giant program. A midsize contractor can win cleared veterans by being faster and smarter than the bigger shop down the road. You do not need more headcount. You need a tighter process and a better source.

If cleared sourcing is part of a wider veteran hiring push, our veteran recruiting strategy playbook ties the whole motion together. And if you also staff physical security and protective roles, our guide on hiring veterans for corporate security and public safety covers that side.

What Should You Do This Week?

Cleared veteran talent is real, large, and on a clock. The contractors who win it are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who reach these people early and move fast.

Start with one cleared req. Map the military career fields that feed it. Then pick a veteran-focused source and reach in, instead of waiting on a generic posting that cleared veterans never see.

Best Military Resume gives you a direct line to that pool. With more than 1,000 new veteran profiles added every month and over 60,000 resumes built, a steady share of cleared intelligence and cyber talent flows through every month. To get in front of them while their clearances are still active, partner with us and put your cleared reqs in front of the right veterans.