Your team is busy sourcing veterans. Recruiters post jobs. They run searches. They send messages. People show up to interviews. But your boss asks one question and the room goes quiet. Which of those efforts is actually working?

Most sourcing teams cannot answer that. They feel busy. They have a few hires to point to. But they cannot tell you which channel produced them. They cannot tell you where good veterans drop off. So when budget gets tight, the work that cannot prove itself is the first to go.

A veteran sourcing scorecard fixes that. It is one simple sheet that tracks how your sourcing performs. Not the whole program. Not the interview itself. Just the front of the funnel, where you find veterans and move them toward a hire. This guide shows you which numbers to track, how to set targets your team will actually own, how to build the sheet, and how to run the review so it changes what you do.

A quick fence so you read the right guide. If you want to measure the whole program for your CEO, including retention at six months and manager satisfaction, read the metrics that matter for a veteran hiring program. If you want to score one candidate fairly inside the interview, read the structured interview scorecard for veterans. This post is about the sourcing funnel only. The top of the pipe, not the program and not the room.

What is a veteran sourcing scorecard?

A sourcing scorecard is a single sheet your team reviews on a set schedule. It tracks how veterans move from first contact to a qualified candidate handed off to the hiring manager. That is the slice it owns. Finding people and getting them ready for a real interview.

It is not a dashboard for the boss. It is a working tool for the people doing the sourcing. The sourcer looks at it and changes what they do next week. That is the whole point. A number nobody acts on is just decoration.

Keep the scope tight. A program dashboard tries to measure everything, including how the hire works out a year later. A sourcing scorecard stops at the handoff. Did you find enough qualified veterans? Where did they come from? Where did the good ones fall out before the manager ever saw them? Answer those and you know if your sourcing works.

Why does a sourcing scorecard beat a gut feeling?

Without a scorecard, sourcing runs on memory and vibes. A recruiter remembers the one veteran who came from a job fair, so the team keeps doing job fairs. They forget the four good ones who came from a direct search, because that work is quiet and slow. Memory is a bad way to spend a budget.

The veteran talent is out there. In 2025, the unemployment rate for Gulf War-era II veterans was 3.6 percent, lower than the rate for nonveterans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are people working, or close to it. You are not fishing in an empty pond. The question is whether your sourcing reaches them and keeps them moving. A scorecard tells you that. A gut feeling does not.

There is a second win. A scorecard ends the blame game. When a hire stalls, people point fingers. Sourcing blames the managers. Managers blame the candidates. The sheet replaces opinions with numbers. You can see if the problem is too few candidates, the wrong channel, or a stage where everyone drops out. You fix the real leak, and you stop arguing about it.

Which sourcing metrics actually matter?

You can track twenty numbers and learn nothing. Track four and you learn a lot. These four cover the whole sourcing job. Where veterans come from, what they cost you, where they fall out, and how fast you fill the top of the funnel.

Channel yield: count the right thing

Channel yield is the most misread number on most teams. People count applications. Applications are easy to get and easy to fake yourself out with. A job board can send you 200 applications and zero people worth a call. Count qualified veterans instead. People who match the role and would pass a screen.

Tag every candidate with where they came from. Job board. Direct search. Referral. Veteran service organization. Base transition office. A candidate database. The Department of Labor VETS office lists employer hiring channels worth tagging if you are still mapping yours. Then at review time you can see, in plain numbers, which channels fed the funnel and which ones just made noise.

Conversion by stage: find the leak

A funnel leaks at one stage more than the others. Conversion by stage shows you which one. If you contact 100 veterans and 5 reply, the problem is your outreach, not your screening. If 50 reply but only 3 reach the handoff, the leak is later. You fix the stage that is actually broken, not the one you assume is broken.

One leak hides where you may not look. The applicant tracking system. An ATS does not reject a veteran. It ranks them. A strong veteran whose resume reads in military words can sink low in the stack while a weaker civilian rises to the top. The same person written as "platoon sergeant" sinks, and as "operations team lead" rises. Count how many strong veterans you find by hand that your ATS buried. That gap is a leak too.

How do you set targets your team will own?

Here is the mistake that kills scorecards. A leader reads an article, finds a benchmark, and writes it on the sheet as a target. "Our reply rate should be 30 percent." Says who? That number came from a different company, a different role, a different market. Your team did not pick it, so they do not own it. They ignore it.

Set your own targets, and set them as ranges. Start by pulling a baseline. Run your sourcing for a few weeks and write down what actually happens. Maybe your reply rate is 18 percent. Now you have a real floor. Set a target range a step above it, like 22 to 28 percent. The team can see the line is reachable, because it is built from their own numbers.

Treat the first quarter of any new metric as a measuring quarter, not a passing quarter. You are learning what normal looks like for your roles and your market. Once you have two or three quarters of data, your ranges get sharper. Set targets too early and you are just guessing in a nicer font.

How do you build the scorecard sheet?

The sheet itself is plain. A spreadsheet does the job. You do not need software. You need columns that map to the four metrics and a row for each channel or each open req, depending on how you want to slice it.

Two layouts work. One sheet by channel, so you can see which sources earn their keep. One sheet by req, so you can see which roles are starving. Most teams keep both, because they answer different questions. The channel view tells you where to spend. The req view tells you where to panic.

Add one column most teams skip. The next action. Every row should end with what happens next and who does it. A scorecard with no next-action column is a report. A scorecard with one is a plan. If a row has a bad number and no next action, that is a dropped ball, and the sheet just showed you.

When you build channel yield rows, make sure you are searching both languages. A veteran writes their experience in military words and sometimes in civilian words on the same profile. Search "92A" and you miss the one who wrote "inventory management." Search both and your qualified count climbs. The yield number is only as honest as your search.

How often should you review it, and who runs it?

A scorecard you build once and never open is wasted work. The review cadence is what makes it real. For an active team filling open reqs, weekly is right. The numbers are small enough to read fast and fresh enough to act on. Monthly is fine for a slower pipeline.

One person owns the sheet. Not a committee. Usually the lead sourcer or the recruiting manager. They update it, run the review, and make sure every bad row gets a next action. Shared ownership means nobody owns it, and it rots.

Keep the meeting short. Fifteen minutes for a weekly review is plenty once the rhythm sets in. The owner walks the off-range rows, the team picks the fix, and you move on. A scorecard review that turns into an hour-long debate is a sign the sheet has too many numbers on it.

What mistakes kill a sourcing scorecard?

Scorecards fail in predictable ways. Most of the time the data is fine and the habit is broken. Watch for these.

One more trap, and it is a quiet one. Measuring sourcing but never measuring the handoff. If your qualified veterans look great on the sheet but managers keep passing on them, the leak is past your scorecard. That is a sign to widen the lens. Read why veterans drop out of your hiring process to chase leaks past the handoff.

Where does a deep veteran pool change the math?

A scorecard shows you which channels earn their keep. Run it for a quarter and one pattern shows up almost every time. The channels that throw volume at you cost the most per qualified candidate, because your team burns hours sorting noise. The channels that start with veterans who already fit cost the least.

That is where a candidate pool built for this changes the cost-per-qualified line. When you start from a place where the people are already veterans and their experience is already written in plain civilian language, your channel yield climbs and your sourcing hours drop. The qualified count goes up without the sort.

BMR keeps a deep pool of exactly that. Over 1,000 new veteran and military spouse profiles get added every month, and more than 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. A fresh, growing supply means your scorecard does not have to fight a dry channel. You can reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool and feed the top of your funnel with people who already fit.

You can also use the scorecard to compare a database against your other channels head to head. Tag the candidates, track the yield, and let the cost-per-qualified number make the call. If you want help thinking through that build-versus-buy choice, read staffing agency versus direct sourcing for veteran hiring.

How do you put this to work this week?

Do not boil the ocean. Open a spreadsheet today and build the channel view with the four metrics. Tag every candidate you touch this week with their source. Pick one person to own the sheet. That is the whole start.

Give it three weeks before you set a single target. You are pulling a baseline, not grading anyone yet. Once you can see your real reply rates and channel yields, set ranges a step above them and run a fifteen-minute weekly review with one rule. Every weak row gets a next action.

The teams that source veterans well are not smarter. They just stopped guessing. A simple sheet, four numbers, a weekly look, and a fix on every weak row will tell you more than a year of feeling busy. If you want to start by feeding that funnel with veterans who already fit, you can tap BMR's veteran talent pool here.