You posted a role that needs an active Secret clearance. Three weeks later, your pipeline has four names. Two have lapsed clearances. One wants a remote schedule you cannot offer. The last one took another offer on Friday. Sound familiar?

Most hiring teams treat cleared talent like any other skill set. Post the job, wait for resumes, screen the stack. That works for a marketing coordinator. It does not work for cleared roles. The math is different, and the math is brutal.

The pool of people who can legally do classified work is small. It is shrinking in places. And every defense contractor, agency, and midsize firm that touches a government contract is fishing the same pond. If you understand why the pool is this tight, you stop competing on speed alone. You start sourcing where the talent actually lives.

This is a look at the real numbers behind cleared talent scarcity, why your current approach keeps coming up empty, and what midsize employers can do about it without a Fortune 500 recruiting budget.

How Small Is the Cleared Talent Pool Really?

Start with the ceiling. The total number of Americans who hold an active or current security clearance eligibility is roughly 3.7 million. That figure comes from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in its annual report on security clearance determinations for fiscal year 2023.

That sounds like a lot of people. It is not.

Of those 3.7 million, a large share are already employed in cleared work. They are not on the market. They are sitting in billets at agencies and contractors who fight hard to keep them. The pool of cleared people who are actually open to a new role at any given moment is a fraction of the headline number.

Now narrow it further. You do not need just any clearance. You need a clearance at the right level, with the right scope, often with a specific skill stack on top. A Secret-cleared logistics planner and a Top Secret SCI cyber analyst are not interchangeable. When you filter for level, skill, location, and availability all at once, that 3.7 million collapses into a very thin slice.

Veterans are the deepest vein in this pool. Many service members held a clearance on active duty. They cleared the background work the military and government already paid for. But a clearance does not follow a veteran around forever. That is where the second problem starts.

Why Does a Clearance Disappear So Fast?

A clearance is not a lifetime credential. It is tied to a need. When a veteran separates and stops doing cleared work, the clock starts.

In general, an active clearance stays usable for a window after the person leaves cleared work. After that window passes without being picked back up, the clearance goes inactive. Reinstating it later is faster than starting from zero, but it still takes a sponsor, paperwork, and time. This is a general rule, not legal advice. The exact window depends on the level and the agency.

So the timing is everything. A veteran who separated last month with a current Secret is a different candidate than the same veteran 30 months later. Same person. Same skills. One can start cleared work fast. The other needs a sponsor and a wait.

Most employers find veterans too late in that window. They wait until the candidate looks like a finished product on paper. By then the clearance has often gone cold. The early window, right around separation, is when cleared veterans are most valuable and most overlooked.

Why Is It So Hard to Refill the Pool?

You might think the answer is simple. If the pool is tight, push more people through the clearance process. The government has been trying to do exactly that. It is hard.

The background investigation system runs through the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. For years the backlog of pending investigations was the story. The agency has made real progress. By April 2025, DCSA had cut its case inventory by 24 percent, down to about 222,700 cases, according to a DCSA report on its personnel vetting initiative. That is good news.

But progress on the backlog does not mean the wait is short. End of fiscal 2024, that same inventory had climbed to nearly 300,000 cases, the highest since 2019. The system swings. A new contract surge, a hiring push, or a staffing dip at DCSA can grow the queue again fast.

For your hiring plan, the takeaway is plain. Sponsoring a brand-new clearance is slow and unpredictable. You cannot run a delivery schedule on a process that takes many months and varies with forces outside your control. That is why a candidate who already holds the clearance is worth so much more than one you have to clear from scratch.

Why Does Everyone Want the Same Few People?

Scarcity is only half the story. Demand is the other half.

The veteran labor market is tight on its own. The unemployment rate for all veterans was 3.5 percent in 2025, lower than the 4.2 percent rate for nonveterans, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation of Veterans release. Gulf War-era II veterans, the largest veteran group, sat at 3.6 percent. Low unemployment means most of the talent you want already has a job.

Now add the cleared filter on top of an already tight market. Every government contractor needs cleared people to staff contracts. The agencies need them. So do the midsize firms winning subcontracts for the first time. They all chase the same thin slice of cleared, available, skilled candidates.

This is why a posted job rarely works for cleared roles. The best cleared candidates are not browsing job boards. They are getting tapped on the shoulder by recruiters who already know where they are. If your only move is to post and wait, you are showing up to a fight that ended before you arrived.

Why Do Midsize Firms Lose This Race?

Big primes have a head start here. They run veteran-hiring programs. They keep bench staff. They have recruiters whose only job is cleared sourcing. A midsize firm winning its first cleared contract has none of that.

So the midsize firm does what it knows. It posts the role on a general job board. It waits. It gets a thin stack of lapsed clearances and mismatched skills. Then it panics and pays a contract recruiter a huge fee to find one person.

Budget is not what holds you back. The channel is. A general job board is built for high-volume civilian hiring. It is the wrong tool for a low-volume, high-stakes cleared search. You need a place where cleared and clearable veterans actually gather, and a way to search them by the filters that matter.

This is the same lesson I learned the hard way after the Navy. The roles I wanted were not on the boards everyone else used. They were filled through channels I did not know existed yet. The employers winning cleared talent are the ones who found the right pond, not the ones who fished hardest in the wrong one.

What Should You Do Differently?

Once you accept that the pool is small and everyone is fishing it, your strategy has to change. Here is what works for midsize employers without a giant recruiting team.

The single biggest shift is timing. The DoD SkillBridge program lets you bring on a transitioning service member for an internship in their final months of service. You see the person work. They keep the clearance current. By the time they separate, you already know if it is a fit. That beats a cold resume every time.

You can read more on the early-window play in our guide on recruiting recently separated veterans, and on the search approach in how to find cleared veteran talent for defense roles.

How Do You Build a Pipeline Instead of Reacting?

Reacting to an open req is the losing game. A pipeline is the winning one. The firms that staff cleared roles fast are not faster at the same process. They have a different process. They are always sourcing, not just when a seat opens.

That means having a steady stream of cleared and clearable veterans you can search the day a contract lands. It means knowing how to read a clearance line on a resume so you do not waste a screen. And it means understanding the difference between an active, inactive, and reinstatable clearance before you make an offer.

If you want help reading what a candidate brings before the first call, our piece on reading a security clearance on a resume breaks down what each line actually means for your timeline. And if a candidate's clearance has gone cold, the clearance reinstatement guide covers what reactivation involves.

A quick word on the ATS. A general applicant tracking system racks and stacks candidates against the job text. For a cleared role, the keyword match is weak and the system buries strong veteran resumes that use military terms. Do not let your ATS make the call on cleared talent. The clearance and the underlying skill matter more than how well the resume parses.

Where BMR Fits for Cleared Sourcing

Best Military Resume is a veteran candidate database built for exactly this problem. Instead of posting and waiting, you search a pool of veterans by the filters that matter for cleared work.

The pool stays fresh. More than 1,000 new veteran profiles are added every month, and over 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. That is a steady, growing supply of veteran talent, including people near separation whose clearances are still current. That early-window timing is the hardest part to catch on your own.

You do not need a Fortune 500 program to win cleared talent. You need to fish where the talent is and move before your competitors do. The pool is small. The demand is high. The advantage goes to the employer who sources early and searches smart.

Ready to stop fishing the wrong pond? Reach out to access BMR''s veteran talent pool and search cleared and clearable veterans by clearance level, skill, and location.