Applicant Tracking Systems were built to solve a volume problem. When a job posting receives five hundred applications, something has to narrow the field before a recruiter gets involved. The solution the industry settled on was keyword matching: scan the resume for terms that match the job description, score each document, and filter out everything below the threshold.
For candidates with traditional civilian career paths, this system works tolerably. For veterans, it fails at a rate that should concern every hiring manager in the country.
Veterans are overrepresented in that 75 percent. Not because they lack the skills, but because the skills are written in a different language.
The Language Gap Is Not a Resume Problem
Military service produces a specific kind of documentation culture. After-action reports, fitness reports, and evaluation narratives are written for a military audience. They use rank, unit designations, MOS codes, and operational terminology that carries precise meaning within the military community and almost none outside it.
When a Marine Gunnery Sergeant writes "Led a twelve-person network operations cell responsible for communications infrastructure across a forward operating base," an ATS system scanning for "network administrator" or "IT manager" finds no match. The resume is rejected. The hiring manager never sees it.
That candidate managed a team, maintained critical infrastructure under operational pressure, and held responsibility for systems that people depended on for their safety. None of that information survives the filter.
Three Specific Examples of What Gets Lost
These are not edge cases. They represent the experience of hundreds of thousands of veterans who separate from service each year.
MOS codes and military occupational titles. "S6 NCO" maps directly to IT operations coordinator. "25U Signal Support Systems Specialist" describes a communications technician with hands-on infrastructure experience. ATS systems do not know this. They scan for "network technician" and "communications specialist" and find no match.
Security clearances. "Holds active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph" represents a hire that took the federal government three to five years and tens of thousands of dollars to vet. For any role involving government contracts or classified work, this credential is a premium differentiator. ATS treats it as a phrase with no keyword value and scores it accordingly.
Leadership at scale. "Managed logistics for a 500-person unit across three countries" is executive-level operational capability described in military language. The same experience at a civilian company would read "directed cross-functional operations for a 500-person organization with international scope" and pass every filter. The underlying capability is identical. The vocabulary is not.
The Cost to Employers
The veteran talent pipeline is significant. Approximately two hundred thousand service members separate from the military each year. They carry technical training, operational leadership experience, and in many cases, security clearances that represent years of federal investment. The defense contractor and government services market alone has persistent demand for cleared personnel that consistently outpaces supply.
The candidates getting through ATS are not always the most qualified. They are the ones who learned to write for the algorithm. That is not a hiring strategy. It is a filter that rewards resume writers and penalizes real experience.
A 2021 survey by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families found that 65 percent of veteran job seekers reported that civilian employers did not understand their military experience. A significant share of that gap is not human bias. It is the automated infrastructure sitting in front of the human.
What Veterans Can Do Right Now
The burden of translation should not fall entirely on the candidate. But until hiring infrastructure catches up, these steps materially improve the odds of getting through.
Translate every bullet before you submit. Do not assume the hiring manager will interpret "S6 NCOIC" as IT operations lead. Write it out in civilian language. "Led IT operations for a 500-person installation, managing network infrastructure, communications systems, and a team of eight technicians" is readable by both humans and algorithms. The military shorthand is not.
Surface your clearance early and clearly. "Active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph" belongs in the summary section of your resume, not buried at the bottom of a job entry. For any role touching government contracts, defense, or intelligence work, this is your highest-value credential. Treat it that way.
Mirror the job description language deliberately. If the posting says "project management" and your experience qualifies, use that phrase. If it says "stakeholder communication," find the equivalent in your background and use those words. You are not misrepresenting anything. You are translating your experience into a language the filter can read.
What Hiring Managers Can Do
The fix on the employer side is not to lower standards or add veteran hiring quotas. It is to evaluate resumes at the level of skill and capability rather than vocabulary.
That means either training recruiters to read military resumes with translation in mind, or using tools built specifically for this problem. TrueScan HR reads the full resume the way a senior hiring manager would. It identifies transferable skills, maps military experience to civilian equivalents through Veteran Translation Mode, and delivers a written assessment of whether the candidate can do the job.
The result is a screening process that does not throw out your best candidates because their career happened to take place in uniform rather than in an office.
Thabiti Adams is a CISSP and CCSP certified cybersecurity professional and founder of Adams Cloud & Cybersecurity.