You found a great military spouse candidate. Sharp resume. Strong skills. Then your hiring manager asks the question that kills the offer. "What happens when they move?"

That one question stops a lot of good hires. Military families move often. A Permanent Change of Station (PCS) is a military relocation order. It sends a service member, and their family, to a new base. These moves usually happen every two to four years, according to Military OneSource.

So the worry is fair. If you hire a spouse and they move in 18 months, did you waste the hire? Most employers assume yes. They are wrong. The turnover is not caused by the spouse. It is caused by how the job was built. Build the role to survive a move, and the move stops being a problem.

This guide shows you how. Not the general business case for hiring spouses. The specific fix for the PCS objection. We will design roles that travel, so your best people stay even when their address changes.

Why does PCS relocation cause military spouse turnover?

The data is blunt. A PCS move in the past year raised a spouse's odds of being unemployed by 136%. That number comes from the 2024 Department of Defense Active-Duty Spouse Survey, conducted by the Office of People Analytics, with resources from the Department of Labor. About one in four spouses moved in just the last year. And 81% have moved at least once during a service member's career.

So a spouse losing a job after a move is not rare. It is the norm. But here is the part most employers miss. The spouse did not quit because they wanted to. They quit because the job could not move with them.

Think about a normal office job. It is tied to one city. The desk is there. The team is there. The role assumes you live nearby. When the family gets orders, that job ends. The spouse is now a great worker with no job, in a new town, starting over.

That is the real failure. Not loyalty. Not skill. The job was glued to a zip code. You can unglue it.

The turnover is a design problem, not a people problem

I am a Navy veteran. I have watched this from the family side and the hiring side. The spouse is often the most reliable worker on the team. They have to be. Their whole life runs on short notice and quick pivots.

The problem is never the worker. It is the assumption baked into the job. We assume work happens in one building. Once you drop that assumption, the move stops ending the job. It just changes where the laptop opens.

What makes a role "portable" for a military spouse?

A portable role is a job that does not break when the worker moves. The work, the pay, and the team stay the same. Only the location changes. And the location was never the point.

You do not need to remake your whole company. You need to look at each role and ask one thing. Does this job actually require a body in this building? For a lot of roles, the honest answer is no.

Here is how to tell a portable role from a glued one.

Most knowledge work fits the right side. Analysis, writing, design, coding, finance, marketing, support, project work. These roles only feel glued because of old habits. The work itself travels fine.

Roles that still need a body in one place exist too. A warehouse shift. A clinic floor. A repair bay. Those are harder to make portable. But even there, parts of the job can move, like scheduling, training, or planning.

How do you redesign a job to survive a PCS move?

You do not wait until the spouse gets orders. You build the role for movement on day one. That way the move is a non-event. Here is the order of operations.

That last step matters most. Tell the candidate during the interview that a PCS will not cost them the job. You just removed their biggest fear. And you just won a hire who knows they can stay.

This is also where good documentation pays off. The same write-ups that make a role portable also make it easy to cover during the move week. If you want a head start, our guide on onboarding veteran employees in 90 days shows how to build those handoffs early.

What about roles that cannot go fully remote?

Not every job can move. Someone has to be on the floor. So what do you do with a great spouse hire in a hands-on role?

You have three real options. Each keeps the person even when one base ends.

Even a clean rehire pipeline beats starting from scratch. You already know this person works. You skip the slow, costly search. For more on cutting that search time, see our guide on how to reduce time-to-hire for veteran candidates.

Why is a portable role worth the effort?

Redesigning a job takes work. So is it worth it? The math says yes. Look at what turnover actually costs you.

Every time a hire leaves, you pay again. You pay to post the job. You pay recruiters. You pay managers to interview. You pay for the weeks the seat sits empty. Then you pay to train the next person, who may also leave in a move.

A portable role breaks that cycle. The person stays through the move. You keep their skills, their context, and the money you already spent training them. You build a portable role once. It pays you back on every move after that.

There is also a quality angle. Military spouses learn skills most teams want. They adapt fast. They handle ambiguity. They keep a household running through deployments and short-notice moves. That is real operational skill, not a bumper sticker.

When you build a role they can keep, you get all that skill for years, not months. You also build a name as an employer who gets it. Word travels fast in the military community. That reputation brings you the next great hire.

How do you find military spouse candidates for these roles?

Once your roles are built to travel, you need people to fill them. This is where most midsize employers stall. They want spouse candidates but do not know where to look. Job boards bury them. General applicant pools do not flag them.

That is the gap I built BMR to close. We work with veterans and military spouses every day. Our pool grows by more than 1,000 new profiles every month. We have helped build more than 60,000 resumes. These are people already focused on careers that survive a move.

You do not have to guess who is a spouse or who is open to relocating with a portable role. You can reach people who are looking for exactly the kind of job you just designed.

If you want the full picture of standing up a repeatable motion, not just one hire, read our companion guide on how to build a military spouse hiring program that lasts. And if your roles are already remote, our guide on recruiting military spouses for distributed and remote teams covers how to source for them.

How do you talk about PCS in the interview?

The interview is where you win or lose a spouse hire. Most employers avoid the move topic. That is a mistake. The candidate is already thinking about it. Name it first, and you build trust.

Do not ask if they plan to move. That can cross legal lines, and it puts them on defense. Instead, tell them how your role handles a move. Make it your policy, not their problem.

The right side reads as a red flag to a spouse. It tells them the job will end when they move. The left side tells them the opposite. You just made staying easy. Spouses also bring strong skills you can spot fast. Our guide on how to evaluate a veteran resume helps you read those signals in the application.

What support helps spouses keep working through a move?

You design the role. The military and federal system fills in the rest. Knowing these supports helps you set the right expectations with your hire.

A spouse who moves for orders can get up to $1,000 to cover new license or certification fees in the new state, per Military OneSource. That matters if your role needs a state license. The cost of relicensing does not have to fall on you or stall the hire.

The federal side also moved this direction. The FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act included a remote-work hiring authority for military spouses in federal jobs. The message is clear. Remote and portable work is the proven fix for PCS turnover. Private employers can use the same playbook.

The point is simple. You are not solving this alone. There are real supports built around the move. Your job is to make sure the role itself does not break when the family relocates.

Build the role, keep the hire

The PCS objection is real. But it is not a reason to pass on a strong spouse candidate. It is a signal to build the job differently.

Define the work by output. Put the tools in the cloud. Write down how work flows. Promise the hire they keep the role through a move. Do that, and the next set of orders stops costing you a great employee.

The payoff is loyalty most employers never see. A spouse who knows their career is safe with you will stay through moves, through deployments, through the chaos. That is the kind of worker you build a team around.

When your roles are ready and you need to fill them, BMR can connect you with veterans and military spouses who are looking for portable careers right now. Reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool and find candidates built to stay.