A veteran candidate hands you a document called an NCOER. Or an OER. Or a FITREP. It is two pages of dense military shorthand, ratings, and boxes with checkmarks. You skim it, you nod, and you move on. You just walked past one of the best performance references you will ever get on a candidate.

These are military evaluation reports. Every service member gets them, often once a year. They are the military version of a performance review, except they carry far more weight. A service member''s entire career, every promotion, every school, every choice assignment, runs on these reports. The military spends enormous effort making them honest. The cost of getting them wrong is putting the wrong person in charge of people and equipment.

For a civilian recruiter, that is a gift. A candidate just handed you a third-party, supervisor-written, forced-distribution rating of how they actually performed. No resume can match that. The problem is that the document looks like a foreign language. This guide fixes that. By the end, you will know who wrote the report, what the boxes mean, and where the candidate ranked against their peers. You will also know how much weight to give it.

Why these reports beat anything on a resume

A resume is the candidate talking about themselves. A military evaluation is the candidate''s boss talking about them, in writing, on the record, under rules that punish inflation. That is a different kind of evidence.

Three things make these reports unusually trustworthy:

• They are written by the person''s actual supervisor. Not HR, not a peer. The leader who saw the work every day.
• They use forced distribution. A supervisor cannot give everyone a top rating. There are hard caps on how many people can get the highest mark. More on that below, because it is the single most useful thing for you to understand.
• They are permanent. The report follows the service member for their whole career. People take them seriously because the stakes are real.

So when you read one well, you are reading a candidate''s track record the way their own chain of command saw it. That is worth learning to decode. It also pairs with the other military documents a candidate may show you. For the basics on confirming service itself, see our guide on how to verify military service and read a DD-214.

The names: NCOER, OER, FITREP, and the Air Force forms

Each branch has its own evaluation. They do the same job under different names. Here is the quick map so you know what you are holding.

The labels differ but the structure is the same everywhere. There is a person who wrote the day-to-day assessment, a more senior person who ranked the candidate against peers, narrative comments, and some form of promotion or potential rating. Learn those four parts once and you can read any branch''s form.

Rater versus senior rater: who actually said what

This is the part most civilians miss. There are usually two evaluators on every report, and they are not the same.

The rater is the candidate''s direct supervisor. Think of this as the immediate boss who assigned the work and watched it get done. The rater writes about day-to-day performance. What the candidate did, how well, and in what role.

The senior rater sits one level up. Often the boss''s boss. The senior rater''s job is different and more important to you. The senior rater ranks the candidate against everyone else at the same rank that this senior rater evaluates. The senior rater answers one question. Out of all the people I see at this level, where does this one stand?

So when you read a report, separate the two voices. The rater tells you what the candidate is like to manage. The senior rater tells you how the candidate stacks up against their peer group. Both matter. The senior rater''s ranking is the harder number to earn, because of the caps we are about to cover.

The box check: where forced distribution does your work for you

Here is the most valuable thing in this whole guide. The senior rater cannot give everyone the top mark. The military caps it on purpose to stop rating inflation. When you understand the cap, a single checkmark tells you a lot.

Army NCOER and OER

On Army reports, the senior rater picks one box for overall potential. The boxes, from top to bottom, read like this:

• Most Qualified (top box)
• Highly Qualified
• Qualified
• Not Qualified

The key fact: a senior rater can only put a limited share of people in the top box. For the current NCOER, the senior rater profile holds Most Qualified ratings to no more than 24 percent of the people they rate at that grade. The Army built this cap to eliminate rating inflation. There is even an automatic enforcement step. If a senior rater checks Most Qualified after they have used up their allowance, the system downgrades the box to Highly Qualified on its own.

So a Most Qualified box is not a participation award. It means the candidate was in roughly the top quarter of everyone their senior rater evaluated at that rank. That is a real signal. Treat it like a strong manager telling you this person was one of the best on the team and meaning it.

Navy and Marine FITREP

The FITREP uses a 1 to 5 scale on individual traits and a promotion recommendation that puts the candidate in one of five buckets. From bottom to top:

• Significant Problems (lowest)
• Progressing
• Promotable
• Must Promote
• Early Promote (highest)

Same logic as the Army. The top buckets are capped. Reporting seniors can only mark a limited share of their group as Early Promote, and the combined Early Promote plus Must Promote share is also limited by pay grade. You can read the Navy''s own FITREP and EVAL reference materials on the MyNavyHR site.

So an Early Promote on a FITREP is the equivalent of the Army''s top box. It means the candidate beat out most of their peers for a scarce top slot. A Must Promote is still strong. Promotable is solid and steady. Significant Problems is a flag worth asking about.

Air Force and Space Force

The Air Force overhauled its evaluation system in recent years, so the forms a candidate shows you depend on when they served. Older reports may be called EPRs for enlisted and OPRs for officers. Newer ones run under a revised system. For officers facing a promotion board, the key document is the promotion recommendation form, where a senior rater gives a top recommendation like Definitely Promote. That top recommendation is also allocation-controlled, meaning only so many can be given out. The Air Force has simplified these promotion recommendation forms in recent updates.

If you are not sure exactly which form era you are looking at, do not guess. Ask the candidate to walk you through it. They know their own paperwork, and a good candidate will explain it clearly. The ability to explain their own record is itself a useful signal.

Potential versus performance: read both, weight them differently

Military evaluations split two ideas that civilian reviews often blur together. Performance is what the person did in the job they had. Potential is how far the chain of command thinks they can go.

The rater narrative leans toward performance. The senior rater''s box or promotion recommendation leans toward potential. A candidate can have strong day-to-day performance and still get a middle potential box. That happens when the peer group is loaded with high performers and the caps left no room. That is not a knock on the candidate.

For your purposes, weight performance heavily for the role you are filling right now. Weight potential heavily if you are hiring for a track that grows into leadership. A consistent string of top potential boxes across several years tells you the candidate''s own organization kept betting on them. That pattern is hard to fake.

How to actually weight these in your decision

Now the practical part. You have decoded the document. Here is how much to lean on it.

• Read the trend, not one report. One top box is good. Three or four top boxes in a row, across different jobs and different bosses, is a pattern. Patterns beat single data points every time.
• Pair the box with the narrative. A top box backed by specific accomplishments in the comments is the real thing. A top box with vague comments is worth a follow-up question.
• Do not over-penalize a middle rating. Forced distribution means plenty of strong people land in the middle. A Highly Qualified or Must Promote is still a candidate their boss valued. Context matters.
• Ask about any low rating directly. A Significant Problems mark or a Not Qualified box deserves a calm, direct question. Sometimes there is a real issue. Sometimes it is a one-time personality clash or a paperwork situation. Let them explain.
• Use it to confirm the resume, not replace it. The evaluation tells you how the person performed. The resume tells you what they did. Read them together. Our guide on how to evaluate a veteran resume walks through the resume side.

One more note on how these documents reach your hiring process. Most applicant tracking systems rack and stack resumes by keyword match, so a candidate''s evaluation reports almost never surface to the top on their own. A strong evaluation that the system ranked low is worth a manual look. If a veteran clears your screen and brings these documents to the interview, that is your moment to use them.

Questions to ask once you have read the report

Decoding the boxes is step one. The real value comes when you use the report to drive a sharper conversation. Try these:

• "Your senior rater put you in the top box here. What did you do that year that earned it?"
• "This report covers a team of how many people, and what was your role with them?"
• "You moved from a Must Promote to an Early Promote between these two reports. What changed?"
• "Walk me through the project your rater singled out in the comments."

These questions do two things. They confirm the candidate actually did the work the report credits them with. They also let a strong candidate tell the story behind the rating. That is usually where the best hiring signal lives. For more on running these conversations well, see our guide on how to interview a veteran candidate.

Where evaluations fit in your full screening flow

Evaluation reports are one piece of a complete picture. They tell you how a candidate performed and how their leaders ranked them. To size the scope of responsibility behind the rank itself, see our guide on reading military rank as a civilian recruiter. Other military documents fill in the rest. Medals and ribbons tell their own story about what a candidate accomplished, which we cover in what military awards and decorations tell a recruiter. And experience without a four-year degree is common and often understated, which we break down in how to evaluate a veteran candidate with no degree.

Put it all together with a repeatable process so every veteran applicant gets read the same way. Our recruiter checklist for screening veteran applicants ties these pieces into one workflow your whole team can run.

The bottom line for recruiters

An NCOER, OER, or FITREP is a supervisor-written, forced-distribution performance rating that follows a candidate for their whole career. Once you know to read the senior rater''s box and understand that the top marks are capped, a single checkmark tells you whether the candidate''s own organization put them in the top tier of their peers. That is stronger evidence than almost anything else in a candidate''s file.

Learn the four parts. Read the trend across reports. Pair the box with the narrative. Then use the report to ask sharper questions. Do that and you will make better hiring calls on veteran candidates than recruiters who skim past these documents.

BMR keeps a steady, growing pool of veteran talent ready to hire. We add over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month and have built more than 60,000 resumes for the military community. If you want access to candidates who bring this kind of documented track record, reach out to access BMR''s veteran talent pool.