Most staffing and RPO firms treat veteran hiring as a one-off. A client asks for "more military candidates," so the team runs a few keyword searches, posts to a veteran job board, and hopes. Then the req closes and the work stops. The next time a veteran-friendly client calls, you start from zero again.

A real veteran talent pool is built once and worked forever. It is a living list of qualified, pre-screened veteran candidates you keep warm so you can fill reqs faster than firms starting cold. For a staffing or RPO provider, it is also a service you can sell. Clients pay for speed and quality. A standing veteran pool gives you both.

This guide walks through how to stand up a veteran-sourcing practice your firm can offer clients. We cover where to find candidates, how to screen military backgrounds, how to keep the pool warm, and how redeployment turns one placed veteran into three more. I run a veteran talent platform, so I see the supply side of this every day. The firms that win treat the pool as infrastructure, not a scramble.

Why Should a Staffing or RPO Firm Build a Veteran Talent Pool?

The math is simple. Veterans are a large, skilled, and steady supply of talent. The all-veteran unemployment rate was just 3.5 percent in 2025, lower than the 4.2 percent rate for nonveterans, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That tells you something. Qualified veterans get hired fast. If you are not already holding a relationship with them, someone else is.

For a staffing firm, a veteran pool does three things at once. It cuts your time-to-fill because the candidates are already vetted and warm. It raises your fill quality because veterans bring structure, reliability, and clearances. And it gives your sales team a story. "We have a standing veteran pipeline" is a real differentiator when you pitch a client who wants to hire military talent but has no idea how.

RPO providers get an extra edge. When you run a client's whole recruiting function, a veteran pool becomes a built-in capability you bring to the table. The client does not have to build it. You already did. That is the kind of value that renews contracts.

Where Do You Source Veteran Candidates for the Pool?

You cannot build a pool from one channel. The best veteran sourcing blends a few sources so the pool stays full even when one channel goes quiet. Spread your effort across these.

The fastest way to fill a pool is a candidate database that is already veteran-only. You skip the work of filtering a general board for military backgrounds. That is where BMR fits. The platform adds more than 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, and over 60,000 resumes have been built on it. For a firm that needs fresh supply on demand, a steady inflow like that beats any one-time scrape.

If you want to lean on government programs, the Department of Labor keeps an employer hub for hiring veterans. Their VETS employer page covers tax credits, outreach, and compliance basics. DoD SkillBridge is worth a closer look too. It lets you put a transitioning service member to work for up to 180 days before they leave the military, at no labor cost to the host. For a staffing firm, that is a low-risk way to test a candidate and feed your pool.

How Do You Screen a Military Background You Do Not Understand?

This is where most recruiters stall. A resume comes in full of acronyms, rank titles, and unit names. The recruiter cannot tell if the person is a fit, so they pass. That is a mistake, and it is fixable.

First, stop screening on the job title. A military title rarely matches a civilian one. Screen on the work instead. What did the person own? How many people did they lead? What was the budget, the equipment value, the scope? A "92A Automated Logistical Specialist" reads like noise to most recruiters. Read it again as "managed a multimillion-dollar parts inventory for a 600-person unit" and the fit gets obvious.

Second, know how the resume got to you. If you pull candidates through an applicant tracking system, remember what an ATS actually does. It racks and stacks resumes by keyword match. It does not reject anyone. A veteran whose resume uses military words instead of your client's job-posting words will sink to the bottom of the stack, not because they are weak, but because the words do not line up. Search for both languages. Search the military term and the civilian term.

Third, lean on the proof veterans bring with them. Evaluations, awards, and certifications are real signals. A solid performance review or an award narrative shows scope and impact in a way a job title never will. If you want help matching codes to certs, our guide on finding veterans with specific certifications breaks down where to look.

How Do You Keep the Pool Warm Between Reqs?

A pool is only worth something if the people in it still answer your calls. A list of cold names from two years ago is not a pool. It is a graveyard. The work is in the upkeep.

Tag every candidate so you can find them again. Tag by role, by clearance, by location, by separation date, by certification. When a client opens a logistics req in Texas, you want to pull every cleared logistics veteran near Texas in one search, not scroll a giant undated list. Good tags turn a pile into a pipeline.

Automated alerts do a lot of heavy lifting here. Instead of running the same search every week, save it once and let new matching candidates come to you. We wrote a full walkthrough on setting up veteran sourcing alerts so talent comes to you. For a staffing firm running many reqs at once, that shift from chasing to receiving is the whole game.

Warm does not mean spam. A monthly note with a real salary range or a market trend keeps you top of mind. A weekly blast of job links you never tailored gets you muted. Be the recruiter who sends one useful thing, not ten useless ones.

What Is Redeployment and Why Does It Matter for Veterans?

Redeployment is the staffing word for placing the same person again. You put a veteran in a contract role, the contract ends, and you place them somewhere new. For a veteran pool, redeployment is the multiplier that makes the whole thing pay off.

Veterans are well suited to this. They are used to short, intense assignments and new teams. Many take contract and temp-to-hire work as a way to break into a new field. If you treat a veteran well on the first placement, they come back. And they talk. The veteran community is tight, and a good experience travels fast.

Build redeployment into how you run the pool. When a contract is winding down, do not wait for it to end. Start the next search 30 days out. Keep the candidate's tags current so the next match is fast. A pool that redeploys well turns one good hire into a steady stream of placements off a single relationship.

How Do You Stay Compliant When Targeting Veterans?

Targeting veterans for outreach is legal and encouraged. Veteran status is a protected characteristic in the good direction. You can run veteran-focused sourcing, attend veteran job fairs, and source from a veteran-only pool. What you cannot do is exclude people for protected reasons.

The clean way to think about it: a veteran pool adds reach, it does not subtract candidates. You are widening the funnel, not narrowing it. If your firm serves federal contractors, they may have affirmative outreach obligations under VEVRAA, which is one more reason a standing veteran pool is an asset to bring to the table. When in doubt on any specific rule, run it past your compliance team. Rules vary by client, state, and contract.

How Do You Package This as a Service for Clients?

The pool is the asset. The service is what you sell. Once you have a warm, tagged, redeployable veteran pool, you can offer it to clients three ways.

Lead with the outcome the client cares about. A midsize firm that wants military talent but has no veteran-sourcing motion will pay for the shortcut. You are the shortcut. Price it like a capability, not a one-off search. A dedicated veteran-sourcing retainer or an RPO add-on both work, depending on how you sell.

Be honest about what the pool can and cannot do. It will not magically fill a niche cleared role overnight if the supply is thin. Our piece on why cleared veteran talent is scarcer than you think is worth reading before you promise a client a clearance unicorn. Set the right expectation and you keep the account.

How Do You Start the First 90 Days?

You do not need a perfect system to begin. You need a starting pool and a habit of keeping it warm. Here is the short version of a first quarter.

The firms that win the veteran lane are not the ones with the slickest pitch. They are the ones who built a real pool and kept it warm while everyone else was starting cold. If you are evaluating two military candidates and want a fair way to choose, our guide on how to compare two veteran candidates fairly helps. And if you keep seeing inflated resumes, spotting resume inflation versus real military achievement will sharpen your screen.

Build Your Veteran Pool on a Pool That Is Already Full

You can spend months scraping general job boards for military backgrounds, or you can start with a database that is already veteran-only and growing. BMR adds more than 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, with over 60,000 resumes built on the platform. For a staffing or RPO firm, that means fresh, qualified supply you can search, tag, and warm without building the top of the funnel yourself.

If you want to stand up a veteran-sourcing practice and need a steady source of candidates to feed it, reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool. Build the pool once. Work it for years.