St. Louis sits next to one of the deepest pools of trained talent in the Midwest. Most local employers walk right past it. The talent comes from Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois. It is about 25 miles east of downtown St. Louis. People here call it the metro-east.

Scott is not a small base. It hosts the headquarters of US Transportation Command, Air Mobility Command, and the 18th Air Force. A 2025 study put its yearly economic impact at $12.9 billion. It is the largest employer in southwestern Illinois. It is the fifth largest employer in the whole St. Louis metro area.

That means a steady stream of people leave the military right in your backyard. They know logistics, IT, cyber, and aircraft work. Most of them want to stay near St. Louis. Their spouse has a job here. Their kids are in school here. They are not looking to move across the country. They just need a civilian employer who sees what they can do.

This guide shows you how to find them, read their resumes, and hire them before someone else does. I am Brad Tachi, founder of Best Military Resume. I work with separating service members every day, and I know what their experience looks like up close.

What kind of talent does Scott AFB produce?

Scott is a logistics and tech base. It moves people and cargo all over the world. It runs the networks that make that happen. That shapes the skills its people walk away with.

Air Mobility Command is the air arm of military logistics. It handles airlift, air refueling, and medical evacuation. The 375th Air Mobility Wing runs those missions out of Scott. US Transportation Command sits one level up. It plans and synchronizes global movement of troops, gear, and fuel for the whole Department of Defense.

The base is also a major communications and cyber hub. The Defense Information Systems Agency has a large presence there. So does the Cyberspace Capabilities Center, formerly the Air Force Network Integration Center. It runs and defends Air Force networks worldwide.

Not every person at Scott does one of these jobs. The base has cooks, finance clerks, and security forces too. So read the resume, not the unit name. A logistics base does not mean every applicant is a logistics expert. But the odds are good, and the depth is real.

If you want to go deeper on one of these areas, our guide on hiring veterans for dispatch and transportation roles breaks down what the logistics experience really maps to.

Why should a midsize St. Louis employer care?

Big national firms already run veteran hiring programs. They have recruiters who only chase military talent. You may not. That is fine. You do not need a program. You need a clear plan and a place to look.

Midsize companies have one big edge over the giants. Speed. A veteran near Scott AFB has a choice. A slow corporate process, or a real conversation with a local employer. You can move faster. You can give them a name, a person, and a clear next step. That wins more often than people think.

You also get someone who is used to structure and ownership. These are people who showed up early, finished the job, and trained the next person to do it. That habit does not disappear when they take off the uniform. It is the kind of thing that keeps a small team running.

Veterans are not sitting around waiting. The 2025 veteran jobless rate was 3.5%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was lower than the 4.2% rate for nonveterans. So the good ones get hired quickly. If you wait, you lose them. Local employers who treat St. Louis veteran talent as a backup plan keep missing out.

How do you read a Scott AFB resume?

Military resumes look strange at first. They are full of rank, unit names, and codes. None of that tells you what the person actually did. You have to look past the labels and find the work.

Start with three questions. How many people did they lead? How much gear or budget did they own? What did they decide on their own? The answers tell you the real scope. Take a staff sergeant who ran a 12-person section. They made calls every day that a civilian title would call management.

The codes are not the point. NCOIC means the person in charge. LRS is a logistics squadron. ULLS is just an inventory system. Behind all of it is a person who ran a real operation. Your job is to translate, not to memorize military terms.

One more tip. The applicant tracking system does not throw these resumes out. It ranks them. A resume packed with military words still sits low on the list. It does not match the words in your civilian job posting. So search your own pool with both sets of words. Look for "logistics" and "supply" and "operations," not just the exact title you wrote.

For a fuller picture of how to read a military background, see what a veteran's service record tells you as an employer.

Where do you actually find these candidates?

You do not need a giant budget. You need to be in the right places and reach people at the right time. The metro-east makes this easier than most markets because the talent is concentrated.

The smartest move is to reach people before their last day. A veteran who already signed somewhere else is gone. Our guide on sourcing veterans before their separation date walks through the timing in detail.

SkillBridge deserves a closer look. It lets you test someone for weeks at no payroll cost. You learn how they work before you commit. The only catch is that the offer happens once they leave service. You can read the official rules at the DoD SkillBridge site.

What does the St. Louis market look like for these hires?

The St. Louis metro is a logistics and tech town. That lines up almost perfectly with what Scott produces. River barges, rail, trucking, and air freight all run through here. Health systems, banks, and defense contractors fill out the rest.

So a logistics NCO from the 375th is not a hard sell to a local distribution center. A network admin from DISA fits a St. Louis IT shop without much retraining. The match is already there. You just have to make the connection.

Pay matters too. A veteran with no civilian job history can be tricky to price. You cannot anchor on a past salary because there is not one. Look at the scope of what they ran instead. If you want help with this, read our piece on spotting project management experience on a military resume.

What worries employers about veteran hires, and is it fair?

A few worries come up again and again. Most do not hold up once you look at them. Let me walk through the big ones.

The first is that veterans move around too much. That is true on active duty. The military moves people every few years. But that ends when they get out. A veteran who chose to settle near St. Louis is done moving. They picked this place on purpose.

The second is that they will be too rigid for a civilian team. The opposite is closer to the truth. These people adjusted to new bosses, new units, and new countries on short notice. They adapt for a living. They just want to know the rules of your shop.

The third worry is that skills will not carry over. Some do not, sure. But moving cargo on a deadline is the same problem at a base or a warehouse. Running a network is the same job in uniform or out. The setting changes. The skill does not.

How do you keep a veteran hire once they start?

Getting the hire is half the job. Keeping them is the other half. Veterans tend to be loyal, but only when the work makes sense and the path is clear.

The first 90 days set the tone. Give them a real onboarding plan, not a stack of forms and a desk. Tell them what good looks like in the first month. Tell them who to ask when they get stuck. They are used to a clear chain and clear standards.

One common miss is treating the veteran like they need to be fixed. They do not. They need context. Your acronyms are as strange to them as theirs were to you. Explain the why behind your processes and they will run with it.

If retention is on your mind, our guide on keeping a veteran new hire past the one-year mark goes deeper on the onboarding plan.

How does Best Military Resume help St. Louis employers?

Best Military Resume is a platform built for veterans and the companies that want to hire them. Veterans use it to turn their military experience into clear civilian resumes. That same work makes them easy for you to find and read.

The pool keeps growing. Over 1,000 new profiles are added every month. More than 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. A lot of that talent sits in logistics, IT, cyber, and operations. That is the exact profile coming out of Scott AFB.

You do not have to learn military codes or wait for a job fair. You can reach veterans who already wrote their resumes in plain civilian language and want to be hired. If you are a St. Louis employer who wants in, reach out to access the veteran talent pool and start finding people near Scott AFB.

You can also look at how other regions run the same play. Our guide on hiring veterans near Travis AFB in Sacramento covers a similar air mobility base, and our Colorado Springs hiring guide shows the approach in another base-heavy market.