Niagara County’s largest employer is a military base.

Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station sits off Lockport Road, north of Buffalo. Two flying wings share that runway. Neither one is a full-time active duty wing.

That detail changes everything about how you hire here. At an active duty base, your best candidate gets orders and leaves. At Niagara, the airman on the flight line already lives in West Seneca or Lockport. They already hold a civilian job. Many of them are looking for a better one.

The 914th Air Refueling Wing fact sheet counts 1,454 people assigned. That is the Air Force Reserve side alone. Of those, 894 are traditional reservists. Traditional means part time. They work somewhere else in Western New York the rest of the month.

If you hire in Buffalo, they are probably not in your applicant pool. This guide fixes that. You will get the two talent streams the base produces. You will get how to read the resumes. You will get what New York State pays you for the hire. And you will get the steps to start this month.

What is Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station?

It is a shared installation with two flying wings on it. The two wings do completely different work. That matters when you plan a hire.

The 914th Air Refueling Wing

The 914th is the Air Force Reserve host wing. Its own fact sheet describes it as one of Air Force Reserve Command’s nine reserve host base installations. The wing runs three groups, 12 squadrons, and a wing staff agency.

On June 3, 2017, the 914th Airlift Wing became the 914th Air Refueling Wing. Eight KC-135 Stratotankers replaced the C-130 Hercules fleet. In November 2023 the wing passed an Air Mobility Command inspection and became certified nuclear ready.

So the 914th is a heavy aircraft operation. Big airframes and long maintenance cycles. Strict record keeping. A cargo and passenger mission on top of the refueling job.

The 107th Attack Wing

The 107th is New York Air National Guard. Its aircraft are flown remotely, not by a pilot on board. The New York Division of Military and Naval Affairs announced the re-designation on March 15, 2017. The 107th Airlift Wing became the 107th Attack Wing. The mission moved from the C-130 to the MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft.

The wing began converting crews in 2014. It also commands two squadrons elsewhere in the state. One is in Syracuse and one is in Rome. The state unit page for the 107th also shows a medical group. There is a security forces squadron and a mission support group too.

An MQ-9 wing means aircrew who fly remotely. It also means sensor operators and intelligence analysts. Add the network and satellite people who keep the link up. That is a technology workforce sitting in Niagara County.

Why is a part-time base a better hiring market than an active duty base?

Because nobody leaves.

At a big active duty base, you hire a great person and lose them. Three years later, orders move them. Their family goes with them. Your onboarding spend walks out the door.

Reserve and Guard members work differently. They enlist near home. They drill near home. They buy houses in Amherst and Tonawanda and Grand Island. When they finish a contract, they usually stay put. Their kids are already in school here.

The 914th fact sheet lists an 89 percent retention rate. Retention that high tells you the people are rooted, not transient.

You also get a second benefit that most employers never think about. A reservist is already being trained on somebody else’s budget. Every drill weekend, someone else pays for their leadership school, their safety qualification, and their annual recurring training. You get the trained version for free.

The trade is that you plan around a drill schedule. That is a solved problem. We cover it in our guide to scheduling around reserve drill weekends. The rest of the picture is in the employer guide to hiring Guard and Reserve members.

What jobs do these two wings actually train people for?

Two wings means two very different talent pools. This is the map.

Deep guides for the two most in-demand streams live on this site. Start with hiring veterans for aircraft MRO roles. Then read hiring veterans for drone and UAS operations.

Want to see what one of these careers looks like on paper? Our career pages cover Refuel and Bomber Aircraft Maintenance (2A5X4) and RPA Sensor Operator (1U0X1). There are also pages for All Source Intelligence Analyst (1N0X1) and Air Transportation (2T2X1).

How do you read one of these resumes without guessing?

The resume is the part where most Buffalo hiring managers stall out. They see squadron names and job codes and set it aside. That is a mistake that costs you a good hire.

Applicant tracking systems make it worse. They rank candidates by keyword match against your posting. A resume full of Air Force terms sinks to the bottom of the list. It does not get thrown out. It just never gets seen.

The fix is small. Ask what the person was responsible for. How many people. How much equipment. And what happened when they got it wrong.

Same person. Same work. The second version is the one your hiring manager can score.

One more translation, because the MQ-9 side confuses people even more than the maintenance side.

Which Buffalo and Niagara Falls employers should be competing for this talent?

Buffalo is the second largest metro area in New York State. The regional economy gives this talent pool more than one landing spot.

The cross-border piece deserves a note. An air transportation airman already knows load planning, hazmat paperwork, and chain of custody. That work lines up closely with what a freight forwarder or customs broker does. The ramp-up is shorter than you would expect.

Manufacturers get a similar edge. A maintainer who kept an aging airframe flying can keep an aging production line running. The habits transfer before the specific machine does.

Does New York State pay you to hire a veteran?

Yes, and this is where Buffalo employers have a real advantage over most of the country.

New York runs a Hire a Veteran Credit. The Department of Taxation and Finance page lays out the terms. A business may claim it for a qualified veteran who starts work before January 1, 2028. The veteran has to be employed in New York State for a twelve-month period.

The amounts are not small. For a veteran who is not disabled, the credit is 15 percent of first-year wages. It is capped at $15,000 for a full-time position and $7,500 for part time. For a disabled veteran the credit is 20 percent of wages. That one caps at $20,000 full time and $10,000 part time.

It is a nonrefundable credit and may be claimed once per veteran. The employee signs Form DTF-75. You file Form CT-643 for a corporation or Form IT-643 for everyone else. Confirm the current hour and duration rules on the state page first.

The practical read is simple. The New York credit is live through the 2028 tax year. The federal one is not live today. Plan on the state credit and treat the federal one as upside.

How do you meet this talent before somebody else does?

Four channels work in the Buffalo and Niagara Falls region. None of them need a big recruiting budget.

Fly with them

Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve runs a program called a Bosslift. Civilian employers get taken along on a real mission so they can see what their employee actually does. The 914th ran one on August 1, 2024, refueling an F-16 over the Northeast with employers on board. Start at the ESGR site, then read our walkthrough of what ESGR does for employers.

Talk to the units directly

Wings have family readiness staff, retention offices, and transition support. They are allowed to share civilian job openings with their members. Units generally want their people employed, because an employed reservist stays in. Our guide to partnering with Reserve and Guard units covers who to call and what to ask for.

Host a SkillBridge intern

DoD SkillBridge lets a service member work at a civilian company in their final months. The military keeps paying them. You pay no wage and no stipend. Details are at the DoD SkillBridge site.

Two limits matter before you get excited. First, a company must be established as a business for at least three years to host. Federal, state, and local government are exempt from that rule. Second, the Air Force caps program length by rank. Junior enlisted and junior officers max out at 120 days. Mid-grade caps at 90. Senior enlisted and O-5 cap at 60. It is not the full 180-day eligibility window, and other services set their own caps.

Acceptance into SkillBridge is competitive, and it is not a job offer. The service member is still on active duty pay with no obligation to you. If you clear the three-year gate, our guide to becoming a SkillBridge host company walks the application.

Go find them in a candidate database

Job boards make you wait for the right person to notice your posting. A candidate database lets you go find people who match today.

That is what Best Military Resume does on the employer side. More than 65,000 resumes have been built on the platform. Over 1,000 new profiles are added every month. The pool runs deep in project and program management and in IT and cyber. It also runs deep in logistics, supply chain, aviation, and security work. Those are the same lanes Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station produces.

What should a Buffalo employer do this month?

Start with the base in your own county

Most employers in Western New York drive past Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. They never think about it as a hiring channel. It is the largest employer in Niagara County. The 914th fact sheet counts a total economic impact of $162.9 million. It also counts 1,308 indirect jobs supported.

The people inside it are already your neighbors. They fix large aircraft, run remote sensors, move freight, and secure sites. They are trained on someone else’s budget and they are not moving away.

Two other base-region guides on this site may help you see the pattern. The Westover Air Reserve Base guide covers a reserve airlift base in western Massachusetts. The Detroit and Selfridge guide covers a Great Lakes Guard base with a manufacturing economy around it. Downstate is a different market entirely, and the Fort Hamilton guide for New York City explains why.

Want federal guidance on building a veteran hiring program? It is on the Department of Labor VETS employer page.

When you are ready to look at real candidates, reach out through the BMR hire page. Ask to access the veteran talent pool. You can also partner with us for a longer-term hiring relationship.