A veteran's resume lands on your desk. Near the bottom you see a line like this. "Navy Achievement Medal. Joint Service Commendation Medal. Two Army Good Conduct Medals." Most recruiters skim right past it. That is a missed signal.

Those awards are a performance record. Someone in that veteran's chain of command wrote a justification. They routed it for approval and put it on paper. That is third-party proof of how they performed under a real boss. You do not get that on a civilian resume.

The problem is that awards read like a foreign language. The official sources are no help. Search any medal and you land on Wikipedia, a regulation written for award boards, or a vendor trying to sell you a display case. None of them tell a recruiter what the award actually signals about the candidate.

This guide fixes that. You will learn the three broad types of awards, what each one tells you about performance, and the nuance that keeps you from drawing the wrong conclusion. This is a reading skill, not a code lookup. By the end you will read an awards line the way the candidate's old command did.

Where Do You Even Find a Veteran's Awards?

Two places. The resume and the DD-214.

On a resume, awards usually sit in their own short section near the bottom. Some veterans list every ribbon. Some list only the top two or three. Some leave them off because a transition coach told them civilians do not care. So the resume is a starting point, not a full picture.

The DD-214 is the official record. It is the separation document every veteran gets when they leave service. It summarizes their service and includes a list of awards and decorations. The VA confirms that medals and decorations are part of a veteran's official military records.

You should not ask for a DD-214 to screen a resume. That comes later, usually at the offer or onboarding stage. But know that it exists. It is the document that verifies what a candidate claims. We cover that whole process in our guide on how to verify military service and read a DD-214.

What Are the Three Main Types of Awards?

Awards fall into a few broad buckets. You do not need to memorize hundreds of medals. You need to know which bucket an award sits in. That tells you what it signals.

The three buckets that matter most to a recruiter are valor, achievement, and service. Each one answers a different question about the candidate.

Valor Awards Signal Nerve Under Risk

These are the rarest. They are given for heroism, usually in combat. The Medal of Honor sits at the top. Below it sit awards like the Silver Star and the Bronze Star with a "V" device.

That "V" is the key detail. The "V" stands for valor. The Army's guidance on valor devices explains that the "V" is added when a medal is earned for an act of heroism. A Bronze Star with a "V" was earned in a fight. A Bronze Star without one was earned for strong work.

If you see a valor award, you are looking at someone who kept their head when things went very wrong. That trait travels well into any high-pressure job. Do not over-read it either. A candidate without a valor award is not less brave. Most roles never put a person in a position to earn one.

Achievement Awards Signal Results

This is the bucket you will see most often. Achievement and commendation medals are given for doing the job well or pulling off a specific win. Names vary by branch but the pattern is the same.

Common ones include the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Joint Service Achievement Medal, and the matching Commendation Medals. A Commendation Medal generally outranks an Achievement Medal. Both mean a supervisor decided this person's work stood out enough to write it up.

Multiple achievement awards over a few years tell you something useful. This person performed well across more than one assignment, under more than one boss. That is a consistency signal civilian references rarely give you this cleanly.

Service and Campaign Awards Signal Where They Have Been

Most awards on a veteran's record sit here. These are given for serving in a role, a unit, a time period, or a deployment. The National Defense Service Medal and the Global War on Terrorism medals are examples.

Almost everyone who served in a given era has some of these. So they tell you less about standout performance. They are still useful. They confirm deployments, overseas time, and the eras a candidate served in. That helps you understand the scope of their background.

One service award to watch for is the Good Conduct Medal. It is given for a set period of clean, reliable service. It is a basic signal, not a top honor. But several of them in a row tell you the person showed up and stayed out of trouble for years.

How Do You Read a Whole Awards Line at Once?

You will rarely see one award. You will see a stack. The skill is reading the stack as a story, not as a list of trophies.

Start with the top award. Awards are listed in order of precedence, highest first. The National Archives verifies which awards a veteran earned and can reissue medals that are missing from the record. So the first award you read is usually the most telling.

Then count the achievement awards. Then note the service awards for context. Here is the same record read two ways.

That second read takes ten seconds and tells you more than half the resume. You are not grading the medals. You are using them to confirm performance the candidate may have undersold elsewhere on the page. For the full first-pass method, see our recruiter checklist for screening veteran applicants.

What Should You Avoid Reading Into Awards?

Awards are useful. They are also easy to misread. A few traps will steer you wrong if you let them.

The biggest trap is treating the award order as a candidate ranking. Precedence ranks the medals. It does not rank the people. A logistics manager with no valor award can be a far stronger hire. A combat veteran with a valor award is not automatically the better candidate. The awards tell you about specific moments, not the whole person.

The second trap is the missing award. A DD-214 is not always complete. The National Archives points out that typos and missing awards are common, and that records get updated over time. So a short or thin awards line is not a red flag. It often just means the paperwork never caught up.

The third trap is comparing across branches and eras. Award names and rules differ between the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and Space Force. A medal that is common in one branch may be rare in another. Read each candidate's awards against their own branch and time in service, not against the last veteran you screened.

Should You Verify Awards a Candidate Lists?

Usually yes, but only at the right stage. You do not need to verify awards to decide whether to schedule a phone screen. Awards are one input among many on the resume.

Verification matters when an award is doing real work in your decision. If a candidate is leaning on a high valor award as a top selling point, confirm it before you make it part of an offer. Most veterans list their awards honestly. A small number inflate or invent them, and that is worth catching.

The DD-214 is your first check. It lists the awards and is the document a candidate provides at the offer stage. For official confirmation, the National Personnel Records Center verifies a veteran's awards for Army and Air Force records. From there it forwards confirmation to the service branch. You will rarely need to go that far. The DD-214 settles most questions.

How Do Awards Fit the Rest of Your Veteran Screen?

Awards are one signal. They work best next to the other signals on a military background. On their own they can mislead. Read together with rank, role, and scope, they sharpen the whole picture.

Pair the awards with the candidate's responsibilities. A stack of commendation medals plus a record of leading a team and managing equipment is a strong, consistent story. The awards confirm what the duties already suggested. Our guide on the leadership skills veterans bring employers breaks down how to read that responsibility on a resume.

Awards also help when a candidate has no civilian degree. A degree screen quietly cuts strong people. An awards record gives you a different, performance-based way to judge capability. We cover that in how to evaluate a veteran candidate with no civilian degree.

And awards mean more once you can map the military role to your own openings. A medal earned in a logistics job matters most when you can see how that job maps to your supply chain req. See how to map a military career field to your open reqs and how to do a full veteran resume evaluation.

Reading Awards Is Just the Start of Sourcing Veterans

Once you can read an awards line, you read veteran resumes faster and judge them more fairly. You stop skimming past a built-in performance record. That is a real edge over recruiters who treat the awards section as decoration.

But reading resumes only helps if you have veteran resumes coming in. Most midsize companies do not run a dedicated veteran sourcing program, so the strong candidates never reach the pile. That is the gap Best Military Resume fills.

Our platform adds over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, and more than 60,000 resumes have been built on it. These are transitioning service members and veterans writing out their full records, awards included, in language a civilian recruiter can read. When you partner with us, you get access to that talent pool instead of waiting for it to find you.

Learn to read the awards. Then make sure the resumes carrying them are landing on your desk. The combination is how you hire the performers other employers keep overlooking.