43% of Veteran Hires Leave Within Year One. Not Capability. Misalignment.

The Challenge

An organization decides to hire Veterans. The intent is real. Leadership signs off, HR builds a pipeline, good people get hired, and everyone feels good about it.

Then, over the next two years, more of them leave than anyone planned for.

The postmortem usually blames the candidates. It shouldn't. The people who left led teams before they could legally rent a car. They were accountable for equipment worth more than most of the managers evaluating them will earn in a decade. They made decisions under conditions that would flatten a corporate career.

They did not fail. The process failed. Those are different problems with different solutions, and confusing them is why organizations repeat the cycle.

A failed hire is rarely a talent problem. It's a translation problem.

The Data

43% of Veteran hires leave within the first year. Over 80% do not last two.

Now read that against a third number: 70% of employers who have hired Veterans report they perform as well as or better than their non-Veteran peers.

The population that outperforms is the population that leaves. Performance is not the variable. Something else is.

Here is where the research points.

The training exists. It was not built for this candidate. Most organizations have hiring-manager training and onboarding, and much of it is good. It was simply never designed to read a military background. Seven in ten provide no Veteran-specific evaluation training at all. Not because they are unwilling. Because it did not occur to anyone that it was necessary.

So evaluators misread candidates without knowing it. A study across roughly 3,000 participants found hiring managers consistently misjudge Veterans regardless of their actual qualifications. The bias is not hostile. It is structural. A Platoon Leader who ran thirty people and millions in equipment at twenty-four reads, on paper, like someone with no corporate experience.

And so the candidate gets under-leveled. Veterans are far more likely than civilians to accept a role beneath their real seniority, and under-leveled people leave. Not immediately. Around month four, quietly, when it becomes clear the ceiling was set before they walked in.

Then nobody catches it. Most organizations offer little or no transition support after the offer. The gap that opened in the interview never closes, and the year runs out.

These are not candidate problems. They are infrastructure problems, and infrastructure is fixable before the hire, not after.

Why Always Forward VTA

It would be easy to read all of that as a list of things you got wrong. It is not.

The intent in most of these organizations is real. The problem is that very few people in the building speak both languages, and goodwill does not substitute for that. This is not a failure you should be expected to solve alone, and it is not one the Veteran can solve alone either. Both sides are trying. Neither side has a translator.

That's the role I play. For both of you.

I know it works because it was done on me. I came out of a tank. Account Executive. Director. Senior Vice President. Chief Operating Officer. Same person, same skills, read correctly.

So we start with the role, not the resume.

Before we look at a single candidate, we go deep on the job: what the last person in that seat actually did all day, what the team is like, what a good first ninety days would mean, and what would quietly make this hire fail. That work is the method. Skipping it is most of why the failure rate exists.

Then we work both directions. We prepare the Veteran to present their experience in terms your team can evaluate, and we help your team read what is in front of them, so the caliber they are looking at is the caliber they see.

Then we stay. Six to twelve months after the start date, with the Veteran and in contact with the hiring manager, because month four is where this breaks and month four is after everyone else has gone home.

And we carry part of the risk. Half our fee is not owed if the hire is not still there at ninety days. A firm that only gets paid when the hire holds has its interests in the same place yours already are.

Veteran hiring is not a charitable act. It's a Strategic Advantage — when done right.

Start the conversation. Tell us a bit about the role and the team it sits in, and we'll set up thirty minutes. If there's not a fit, we'll both know it and move on.

Always Forward.

Sources

43% first-year departure: Korn Ferry / VetAdvisor / IVMF, Syracuse University. Two-year attrition: Peters (2023), Walden University; Brockelmeyer (2022), ProQuest. 70% employer performance rating: Syracuse University IVMF. Seven in ten with no Veteran-specific evaluation training, and minimal onboarding: Korn Ferry. ~3,000-participant misread study: Duke Fuqua School of Business, 2024. Under-leveling: LinkedIn Veteran Opportunity Report.