Your veteran sourcing line came up in the budget review. The CFO points at it and asks one question. "What did this get us?" If your answer is "veterans are great hires," you lost the room. Finance does not fund values. It funds returns.

This is the part most talent teams get wrong. They build a great sourcing motion, then cannot defend it when the spend gets reviewed. The money looks like a cost with no receipt. So it gets cut first.

The fix is to translate your sourcing spend into the numbers finance already tracks. Cost per qualified hire. Retention value. Time-to-fill. Quality of hire. You do not need new data. You need to package the data you have in the language the CFO speaks. This guide shows you how to build that case and walk it into the meeting.

This is the defense side of the budget conversation. If you have not gotten the spend approved yet, start with how to make the internal business case for veteran hiring first. That piece wins the green light. This one defends the dollars after they are spent.

Why does the CFO see your sourcing spend as a cost?

Start with how finance sees the world. A CFO sorts every line into one of two buckets. Cost or investment. A cost is money that leaves and does not come back. An investment is money that returns more than it took.

Your veteran sourcing spend sits in the cost bucket by default. That is not unfair. It is just what an undefended line looks like. No return attached, no proof of value, so it reads as pure outflow.

Your job is to move it to the investment bucket. You do that with one move. Attach a return to the spend. The return has to be in dollars or in a number finance already watches. A feeling does not move the line. A modeled number does.

One trap catches a lot of teams. They reach for borrowed statistics to make the case. A report that says veterans cut turnover by some percent. Avoid that. A CFO can wave away a number that came from someone else's company. What they cannot wave away is your own data, run on your own roles, with your own assumptions stated out loud.

What four numbers does finance actually care about?

You could bring twenty metrics to the meeting. Do not. The CFO has minutes, not an afternoon. Bring the four numbers that connect sourcing spend to business value. Each one answers a question finance is already asking.

These four are the spine of your case. The rest of this guide builds each one. Pull the baseline number for each before you model anything. You cannot prove improvement without a starting point.

Notice what is not on the list. Number of applications. Career fair booth visits. Brand impressions. Those are activity, not return. A CFO does not fund activity. Leave the vanity counts at your desk.

How do you calculate cost per qualified hire?

Cost per hire is the number most teams already report. The problem is they report the wrong version. They count cost per application or cost per hire. Finance cares about cost per qualified hire. The person who actually cleared your bar and got an offer.

The formula is simple. Add every dollar you spent sourcing through that channel. Then divide by the number of qualified hires it produced. Spend over qualified hires. That is your real number.

The spend has two parts. External cost is money that leaves the building. Job board fees, agency fees, event costs, background checks. Internal cost is your team's time. Recruiter hours, manager interview hours, all priced at a loaded hourly rate. Most teams forget the internal half. Finance will not.

Here is why "qualified" changes the math. Say a cheap channel floods you with 200 applications but only one gets an offer. A pricier channel sends you 10 candidates and three get offers. The cheap channel looks cheap per application. Per qualified hire, it may cost far more. The expensive channel may be your best buy.

I have watched this play out for two years working with veterans and the companies that hire them. The teams that win the budget fight are the ones who can say "this channel costs us X per hire who clears the bar." For the full method on splitting this out by channel type, see how to calculate cost-per-veteran-hire by channel.

How do you put a dollar value on retention?

Retention is the strongest number in your case. It is also the one finance respects most. Turnover is expensive and the CFO already knows it. If you can show your veteran hires stay longer, you can show real money saved.

Start with your own turnover cost. Every company has one. It is the cost to replace a person who leaves. Recruiting again, onboarding again, training again, plus the productivity lost while the seat is empty and the new person ramps. Your finance team likely has this figure. If not, build it from your own inputs.

Now compare tenure. Pull the average tenure for your hires through this channel against your company average. If veteran hires through your sourcing motion stay longer, each extra retained head is one replacement cost you did not pay. Multiply the gap by your turnover cost. That is dollars saved.

Keep it honest. If you have only hired a handful through this channel, say so. A small sample is fine for a pilot. Just flag it as early signal, not proof. A CFO trusts a person who names the limits of their own data far more than one who oversells.

Retention is also where veterans tend to stand out. Many bring a habit of seeing a commitment through. For the deeper view on why these hires stay and how to keep them, see veteran employee retention and how to keep military hires.

How do you price time-to-fill in dollars?

Time-to-fill feels like an HR metric. It is actually a finance metric in disguise. Every day a seat sits empty is a day of work not getting done. That has a dollar cost. The CFO just has not seen it written down.

The math is simple. Take the role's value to the business per day. For a revenue role, that is the revenue or margin it generates. For an operations role, it is the output or the overtime you pay to cover the gap. Multiply that daily value by the number of days the seat stays open. That is the cost of the empty chair.

Now tie it back to your sourcing spend. If your veteran channel fills roles faster than your other channels, the spend bought you fewer empty-seat days. Fewer empty days is real money. Show the day count, show the daily value, and the savings appears in dollars.

This is the number that surprises CFOs the most. A role open 30 days longer than it should be can cost more than the entire annual sourcing budget for that team. When you price the empty seat, slow sourcing stops looking free. For the tactics that shorten this clock, see how to reduce time-to-hire for your veteran candidates.

How do you measure quality of hire?

Quality of hire is the hardest of the four to pin down. It is also the one that closes the case. Cost and speed prove you hired efficiently. Quality proves you hired well. The CFO wants both.

You do not need a new system. Use the performance data you already collect. First-year performance review scores. Ramp time to full productivity. Whether the hire passed probation. Promotion rate. Manager satisfaction surveys, if you run them. Pick two or three you already track and compare your channel against your company average.

Score it the same way for every channel. The goal is a fair comparison, not a flattering one. If your veteran hires post higher review scores or ramp faster, that is a quality signal you can defend. If the numbers are flat, that is fine too. Flat quality at a lower cost per hire is still a win you can present.

Tie quality back to the dollars where you can. A faster ramp means the new hire reaches full output sooner. That is value the company captures earlier. A higher promotion rate means you are building your own bench instead of buying it later. Both connect to spend the CFO already approves elsewhere.

What about WOTC and other hiring incentives?

Tax credits can sweeten the case, but handle them with care. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) has long offered a credit to employers who hire from certain groups, including some veterans. It is a real lever when it is active.

Here is the part you must get right. WOTC expired at the end of 2025 and is not available for 2026 hires unless Congress renews it. The program has lapsed before and been renewed later, sometimes with retroactive coverage. Hires made in 2025 still qualify. But do not put a present-tense dollar figure in your CFO deck for a 2026 hire. That number is not live right now.

So how do you use it? Frame it as upside, not as base case. Build your ROI case on the four numbers above, which stand on their own. Then note that if WOTC is reauthorized, qualifying veteran hires could add a tax credit on top. The case has to win without the credit. The credit is a bonus that makes a winning case better.

For the current status and the dollar amounts that apply when the credit is active, see WOTC processing time and the 2026 hiatus and the other veteran hiring incentives beyond WOTC.

How do you present the case to the CFO?

You have the four numbers. Now you have to deliver them. The meeting is short. The structure matters as much as the math. Lead with the return, not the story.

Build a one-page summary. Not a deck. One page the CFO can read in two minutes. Put the headline number at the top. Cost per qualified hire versus your company average, or dollars saved through retention and faster fills. Then the supporting math underneath, with every assumption stated.

Speak finance, not HR. Say "return" and "cost avoided" and "dollars per hire," not "engagement" and "pipeline health." Translate every metric into money or into a number on the CFO's own dashboard. When you use their language, you stop being a cost center asking for budget. You become a function reporting a return.

One more move. Anchor to numbers leadership already trusts. If finance tracks company-wide cost per hire, benchmark your channel against it. If you want a peer comparison to back your figures, see how to benchmark veteran hiring against peers. And for the wider scoreboard of what to track all year, see the veteran hiring program metrics that matter.

What if you do not have enough data yet?

Maybe you are reading this before your first full cycle. You have spent some budget but you do not have a year of retention data or a clean cost per qualified hire. That is common. It does not mean you walk in empty-handed.

Run a small, time-boxed pilot and measure it tightly. One role family, one channel, a fixed window. Track the four numbers from day one. A clean 90-day result on one role beats a vague claim across the whole company. For the full playbook, see how to run a 90-day veteran hiring pilot.

When you present a pilot, frame it as a test, not a verdict. Tell the CFO you are asking for a small spend to generate the data that will prove or kill the larger investment. Finance respects that. It is how they think about every bet. You are not asking them to believe. You are asking them to let you measure.

The lowest-cost place to start is a channel where the candidates come to you already organized and ready to source. That keeps your cost per qualified hire down while you build the proof.

Where does a veteran candidate pool fit your budget case?

Every number in this guide gets better when your sourcing channel is efficient. A high cost per qualified hire sinks the whole case. A channel that delivers ready, relevant candidates keeps that number low and your math strong.

That is where Best Military Resume fits. BMR adds over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, drawn from a pool of more than 60,000 resumes built on the platform. For a midsize team without a dedicated veteran-sourcing function, that is a direct line to qualified candidates. No agency markup per hire, no career-fair travel, no waiting for a referral to trickle in.

A steady, growing pool is what keeps your cost per qualified hire defensible quarter after quarter. It is the kind of fixed-cost channel whose value spreads across every hire you make through it. The more you hire, the better the math you bring to the CFO.

Walk in with the receipt

The CFO question is not a trap. It is a fair question. Money went out. What came back? When you can answer in dollars and in the numbers finance already tracks, the conversation changes. You stop defending a cost. You start reporting a return.

Build the four numbers on your own data. Cost per qualified hire, retention value, time-to-fill, quality of hire. State every assumption out loud. Lead with the return, name your limits, and end on the ask. Treat tax credits as upside, not as the base case, since the program is lapsed for now.

Veterans are a tight, in-demand pool, with unemployment under the national rate. Sourcing them well is a smart use of budget. Your job is to prove it the way finance measures everything else. With a number, not a feeling. When you are ready to feed that case with a steady supply of qualified candidates, reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool.