How to Run a 90-Day Veteran Hiring Pilot
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You want to hire more veterans. But you do not want to bet the whole year on a hunch. That is the right instinct. A 90-day pilot lets you test veteran hiring at a small, safe scale before you commit budget and headcount to it.
A pilot is not a full program. It is one team, a handful of roles, and a clock. You run it for 90 days. You measure what happens. Then you decide if it earns a bigger commitment.
This guide gives you the full playbook. Each phase has a goal, an owner, and a way to measure it. You will not find borrowed benchmark numbers here. You will set your own targets based on what your company already tracks. By day 90 you will have real data instead of a guess.
This article is the how. If you still need to win the budget for it first, start with our guide on making the internal business case for veteran hiring. This one assumes you already have the green light to run a test.
What Is a 90-Day Veteran Hiring Pilot?
A pilot is a small, time-boxed test of one new way of hiring. You pick a narrow scope. You run it hard for a set window. Then you grade it against goals you set up front.
The point is to learn fast without big risk. If it works, you scale it. If it does not, you stop. Either way you spent 90 days and learned something real. You did not sink a year into a guess.
Three things make a pilot different from just hiring some veterans. First, it has a clear scope. You name the team and the roles. Second, it has a clock. Ninety days, then a decision. Third, it has metrics you agreed on before you started.
This is different from a few other plays you may have read about. Keep the lanes straight.
- •Testing veteran hiring before you commit for real
- •One team, a few roles, a fixed clock
- •Proving it with your own numbers
- •Getting a clear go or no-go at the end
- •A 30-day sourcing sprint to fill reqs that are already open
- •An all-year volume program that runs forever
- •The 90-day onboarding plan for a new hire
A sprint is about speed on open roles. A volume program is the machine you build after a pilot proves it works. An onboarding plan is what you do with one person after you hire them. The pilot sits before all of those. It answers one question. Does veteran hiring work for us?
Why Run a Pilot Instead of Going All In?
Midsize companies do not have a spare veteran-sourcing team sitting around. You have a small talent crew, a budget you fight for, and leaders who want proof before they spend. A pilot fits that reality.
It keeps the risk low. You are not rewriting every job posting or training every manager. You touch one team. If the pilot flops, you learned a cheap lesson. If it works, you have proof to show the people who control the budget.
It also forces focus. When you try to fix veteran hiring everywhere at once, nothing gets real attention. A pilot makes you pick. One team. Three to five roles. One owner who actually cares about the result.
And it gives you a clean before-and-after. You can compare the pilot team's hires to your normal hiring on the same numbers. Time to fill. Cost per hire. How long people stay. That comparison is what turns a pilot into a budget approval.
Key Takeaway
A pilot trades a small, controlled test for a year of guessing. You spend 90 days, touch one team, and walk out with real numbers to make the next call.
Phase 1 (Days 1 to 30): How Do You Set Up the Pilot?
The first 30 days are setup. No hires happen yet. You are building the frame everything else hangs on. Rush this part and the whole pilot wobbles.
Pick the scope and the owner
Choose one team with real, near-term openings. Pick a team whose manager wants to be part of this. A reluctant manager kills a pilot faster than a bad candidate pool. Then name three to five specific roles to fill during the window.
Name one owner for the whole pilot. Usually that is a talent acquisition lead or an HR manager. This person runs the clock, keeps the tracker, and reports the numbers. Without one clear owner, a pilot drifts and nobody is accountable at day 90.
Set targets you will actually measure
Pull your own baseline first. How long does it normally take your team to fill these roles? What does a hire cost you now? How many new hires leave inside their first year? Those are your control numbers.
Then set pilot targets as ranges, not single magic numbers. You decide what good looks like. A few examples of metrics worth setting a target on:
Metrics to set a target on before you start
Roles filled
How many of the pilot roles you close in 90 days
Time to fill
Days from open to offer, compared to your baseline
Quality of slate
How many candidates the hiring manager rated as a strong fit
Manager satisfaction
A simple yes or no: would the manager do this again
Fix the job postings and brief the team
Read the pilot job postings the way a veteran will read them. Cut the inflated degree and experience demands that screen out good people who learned the skill in uniform. A clean job description widens your pool before you source a single candidate.
Then brief the hiring manager and interviewers. A veteran often undersells their record. They say "we" when they led the whole thing. They lean on acronyms a civilian will not catch. Tell your interviewers to ask "what was your specific role" and to translate, not to dock points for plain talk.
Do not skip the manager brief
Most pilots that fail do not fail at sourcing. They fail because a manager misreads a strong veteran in the interview and passes on them. Five minutes of prep fixes most of that.
Phase 2 (Days 31 to 60): How Do You Run the Hiring?
Now the pilot goes live. The middle 30 days are where you source, screen, interview, and start making offers. This is the busy stretch. The setup work from phase one is what makes it run smooth.
Source from more than one channel
Do not lean on a single source. Run two or three at once so you can see what works. A few channels worth testing in a midsize pilot:
- A veteran talent database, where you search candidates whose military experience is already written in civilian terms
- Your local base transition office, which connects you to service members leaving nearby. The Department of Labor VETS employer guide lists more of these channels
- Veteran service organizations and their job boards
- Referrals from any veterans already on your staff
Search in both languages. A veteran's background might show up as a job code like "92A" or as the skill "inventory management." If you only search civilian terms, you miss strong people whose resume still reads military. Search both and your pool gets deeper fast.
Track every candidate in one place
Keep a simple tracker. One row per candidate. You do not need fancy software for a pilot. A shared sheet works. The point is that nobody falls through the cracks during the busy weeks.
Columns your pilot tracker needs
Candidate and role
Who they are and which pilot role they are up for
Source
Which channel they came from, so you know what works
Stage
Where they are: screen, interview, offer, hired
Next action
If a candidate has no next action, you dropped the ball
Write outreach that gets a reply
Veterans get a lot of generic spam. A specific note beats a mass blast every time. Name the skill you saw and the role you have. Keep it short and ask for one small thing.
"Hi, we have an exciting opportunity at a growing company and would love to connect about your background."
"Saw your Army supply background. We have a logistics lead role here in Dallas, 75 to 82K. Open to a 15-minute call this week?"
Move fast once someone replies. The veteran job market is tight. Strong people get pulled off the board quickly. Post-9/11 veteran unemployment sat at 3.6% in 2025, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A slow process during the pilot will cost you good candidates and skew your results.
Phase 3 (Days 61 to 90): How Do You Measure and Decide?
The last 30 days close the loop. You finish any open offers, you onboard the people you hired, and you pull the numbers together. Then you make the call that the whole pilot was built to inform.
Onboard the hires well
A veteran who gets hired and then drifts in their first month makes the pilot look worse than it is. Give each new hire a clear first task, a peer to ask questions, and a plain-language picture of how the role fits the mission. Our 90-day onboarding plan walks through this in full.
Pull the numbers and compare
Put the pilot results next to your baseline. Did you fill the roles? Was time to fill better, worse, or the same? What did each hire cost? How do the new hires look so far against your normal hires? Let the data talk.
Add the soft signals too. Ask the hiring manager the simple question: would you do this again. Ask the new hires how the process felt. Those answers matter as much as the hard numbers when you pitch the next phase.
Days 1 to 30: Set up
Pick the team and roles, name an owner, set targets, fix postings, brief interviewers.
Days 31 to 60: Run
Source from a few channels, track every candidate, send specific outreach, move fast on offers.
Days 61 to 90: Measure and decide
Onboard the hires, pull the numbers, compare to baseline, make the go or no-go call.
Make the call
At day 90 you decide. There are three honest outcomes. The pilot worked, so you scale it into a real program. It half-worked, so you run a second round and fix the weak spot. Or it did not work for your roles, so you stop and you know why.
All three are wins. You replaced a guess with data. If you scale, our guides on building a veteran talent pipeline and running a volume hiring program are the next step. And keeping the people you hire is what makes the whole effort pay off long term.
What Mistakes Sink a Pilot?
Most failed pilots fail for the same few reasons. None of them are about the candidates. They are about how the pilot was run.
1 No clear owner
2 No baseline to compare against
3 Scope creep
4 A slow, untrained interview
Where Do You Find the Candidates for the Pilot?
A pilot lives or dies on the candidate pool. If you cannot put strong veterans in front of the hiring manager, the test is rigged before it starts. So the channel you pick matters.
This is where a veteran talent platform earns its keep. Best Military Resume runs a pool that gets over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month. These are people actively building their next move, not a stale list. Their experience is already written in civilian terms, so your manager does not have to decode a job code to see the fit.
That pool sits on top of more than 60,000 resumes built on the platform. For a 90-day pilot, that means you can fill your slate fast instead of waiting weeks for a job posting to draw applicants. You spend the pilot measuring results, not chasing a thin pipeline.
Ready to run your pilot?
Reach out through the BMR hire page to access the veteran talent pool and staff your 90-day pilot with candidates whose experience is already in civilian terms.
Run the pilot. Set your targets. Measure against your own numbers. At day 90 you will know, with data, whether veteran hiring belongs in your plan for the year. That is a far better place to make the call from than where you started.
Frequently Asked Questions
QWhat is a 90-day veteran hiring pilot?
QHow is a pilot different from a sourcing sprint?
QWhat metrics should I measure in a veteran hiring pilot?
QHow many roles should I include in the pilot?
QWho should own a veteran hiring pilot?
QWhere do I find veteran candidates for the pilot?
QWhat if the pilot does not work?
About the Author
Brad Tachi is the CEO and founder of Best Military Resume and a 2025 Military Friendly Vetrepreneur of the Year award recipient for overseas excellence. A former U.S. Navy Diver with over 20 years of combined military, private sector, and federal government experience, Brad brings unparalleled expertise to help veterans and military service members successfully transition to rewarding civilian careers. Having personally navigated the military-to-civilian transition, Brad deeply understands the challenges veterans face and specializes in translating military experience into compelling resumes that capture the attention of civilian employers. Through Best Military Resume, Brad has helped thousands of service members land their dream jobs by providing expert resume writing, career coaching, and job search strategies tailored specifically for the veteran community.
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