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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.