Your local Army Reserve center sits ten minutes from your office. So does a National Guard armory. Inside both, one weekend a month, there are skilled people in uniform who hold a civilian job the rest of the time. Many of them are looking for a better one. Most employers never think to walk in the door.

This is a sourcing channel, not a hiring law. There are good reads on what you owe a Guard or Reserve employee once you hire one. This article is the step before that. It covers how to build a real recruiting relationship with the units near you, how the ESGR program plugs into that, and the rules you should know going in. The goal is simple. Turn a building full of trained people into a place that sends you candidates.

If you want the legal side first, start with our guide to USERRA employer obligations for Guard and Reserve. That post covers what you owe a drilling member you employ. This one stays in the sourcing lane.

Why partner with Reserve and Guard units at all?

A drilling Guard or Reserve member is a strange and useful candidate. They hold current military training. They also hold a civilian job, or want one. So they think like both sides at once. You get the discipline and the skills without waiting for someone to fully separate.

The talent is already employed somewhere most of the time. That means you are not fishing in a pool of people sitting at home. You are reaching people who show up, do the work, and drill on the weekend. The unemployment numbers back this up. Gulf War-era II veterans had a 3.6 percent jobless rate in 2025, lower than many civilian groups, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Good people move fast. A warm channel gets you to them earlier.

I am a Navy veteran. The last couple of years I have watched thousands of service members and Guard and Reserve folks move into civilian work. The ones who land fast almost always go through a person, not a job board. A unit relationship gives you that person.

How is this different from just hiring a Guard or Reserve member?

Two different plays. One is the hiring decision for a single person. The other is building a channel that feeds you many over time.

If you have one drilling reservist in front of you and you are deciding whether to make the offer, that is a hiring call. Our Guard and Reserve hiring guide walks through that decision and the drill-schedule math.

Partnering with a unit is the layer above that. You build a relationship with the people who run the unit and the ESGR volunteers near you. Over months, that relationship sends you candidates, lets you brief their members, and earns you goodwill. You do both. The hiring call happens one person at a time. The channel runs in the background and keeps refilling.

What is ESGR and how does it fit?

ESGR stands for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. It is a Department of Defense program, started in 1972. Its job is to build understanding between civilian employers and the people they employ who serve in the Guard and Reserve. You can read its full mission on the ESGR site.

More than 4,500 volunteers sit on ESGR state committees across the country. They run briefings, recognition programs, and events that connect employers to the Guard and Reserve community. For a recruiter, ESGR is a warm front door to that community. The volunteers know the local units. They know the commanders. And they want employers engaged.

We cover the ESGR program in depth in our ESGR explainer for employers. The short version for sourcing: ESGR will not run your hiring for you, but it will open doors, vouch for you, and put you in rooms full of the people you want to reach.

What ESGR programs help with sourcing?

A few of them matter for recruiting. The Statement of Support is the cornerstone program. Signing it is a public pledge to support your employees who serve. It is free, it signals you are a safe place to work, and it gets you on ESGR's radar.

Bosslifts are events where ESGR takes employers to see the Guard and Reserve up close. You spend a day with the unit. You meet members. You build the kind of trust that turns into referrals. ESGR also runs employer briefings and supports local job fairs. Each one is a chance to be in front of trained candidates.

How do you actually build the relationship with a unit?

You start small and you give before you ask. A unit will not hand you candidates because you showed up once with flyers. They will refer people to you because they trust you. Trust takes a few visits and a real reason for them to believe you treat their people well.

Run it in this order. Find the right unit and the right person. Lead with value. Ask for the specific thing. Then close the loop so they keep sending you people.

Who do you talk to first?

Do not cold-call a battalion commander. Their job is the mission, not your reqs. Start with ESGR. The state committee is built to connect you. They will point you to the right unit and the right contact.

Inside a unit, the people who help with this are often the readiness or family support staff and the senior enlisted leaders. They know who is job hunting. They care about their people landing well. Treat them as the gatekeepers they are. Earn their trust and the referrals follow.

What should you offer the unit so they want to work with you?

The wrong outreach to the right unit still gets you nothing. Walking in and asking for resumes is taking, not giving. Flip it. Show up with something their members actually need.

Run a free resume workshop for members coming off active orders. Host a mock interview night. Bring a one-page list of your open roles with real titles, pay ranges, and locations. Offer to speak at a pre-separation event. Every one of these helps a member whether or not they ever apply to you. That is the point.

What rules should you know going in?

This is not legal advice. But you should walk into a unit relationship knowing the basics, because the people you talk to will ask. The law that governs employing a Guard or Reserve member is USERRA, the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. You can read the plain-language version from the Department of Labor.

The core idea is reemployment. A member who leaves a civilian job to serve generally has the right to come back to the job they would have had if they never left. There is a cumulative five-year service limit with a single employer, with several exceptions for drills, training, and emergency call-ups. USERRA also bars discrimination because of past, current, or future military service.

Federal hiring law is contextual, so do not treat any of this as a flat rule. The exceptions matter. If you are weighing the specifics, our guide to the USERRA escalator principle and five-year rule breaks the details down. For drill-schedule planning once someone is on your team, see our piece on reserve drill weekend scheduling.

Worried that drill weekends and deployments make a Guard or Reserve member harder to manage? A Guard or Reserve member is not harder to manage. The job is just a little different. Plan for the schedule up front and most of it disappears. If you want the full picture of what to do when a member gets activated, read managing an employee called to active duty.

How do you turn a unit relationship into actual hires?

A relationship is not a pipeline until candidates move through it. The trick is to make referrals easy and to follow up fast. When a senior NCO mentions someone who is job hunting, you should be able to act that day.

Keep your asks concrete. Do not say "send me anyone good." Say "I need two warehouse supervisors near our north plant, and they pay 28 to 32 an hour." That is a referral a unit can act on. Then treat every referred candidate like a warm lead, because they are. A referral from a trusted source already comes pre-vetted on character.

Then watch the ATS. A referred veteran or reservist often writes a resume that reads like a mission, not a job description. The automated system ranks it on keyword match, so a strong candidate can sink to the bottom of the list if the words do not line up. Pull referred candidates out of the stack and read them yourself. Our piece on why your ATS buries qualified veteran applicants covers the fix.

What if the local units are slow or thin?

Unit relationships are slow to build and they are tied to where your sites are. Some markets have a big Reserve center down the road. Some have one small armory and not much else. A unit channel is a long-game play. It pays off in months, not weeks.

So run it alongside a faster channel. The relationship work fills your pipeline over time. A live candidate pool fills a req this week. That is where a platform like BMR fits. We add over 1,000 new profiles every month, and we have built more than 60,000 resumes. You can search that pool today while your unit relationships warm up.

You do not have to choose between the slow channel and the fast one. The best veteran recruiters use both. The unit work earns you a reputation and a steady drip of warm referrals. The pool gives you reach the day a req opens. Stack them and your sourcing stops depending on luck.

Start with one unit and one offer

Do not try to partner with every unit in the region at once. Pick one. Find the ESGR contact for your state. Sign the Statement of Support. Then go offer the nearest unit something their members can use, with no strings attached.

That one relationship teaches you how the whole channel works. From there you scale to the next unit and the next. The recruiters who win at this are not the ones with the biggest budget. They are the ones who showed up, gave first, and kept showing up.

While that channel warms up, you can start sourcing trained candidates today. Reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool and put real candidates in front of your open roles this week.