Emmanuel Noel, Chief Revenue Officer at STEAMe, presents with Sharri Justice, Director of Military Recruiting at Semper Forward (a division of Fastport), at the 2026 RoleCall Summit in Buffalo, New York.
Attracting veterans isn't simply a workforce challenge, it's an economic development opportunity. Learn how coordinated regional partnerships can transform predictable military transitions into long-term community growth.
Every year, more than 200,000 service members leave the military and reenter civilian life. They arrive with leadership experience, technical training, and — unlike almost any other segment of the workforce — a known transition date. That predictability should make veterans the easiest talent pipeline a community ever builds. Instead, most communities treat it like a one-off hiring push: an annual job fair, a single employer's recruiting drive, or a scramble when seats go empty.
That's the gap Emmanuel Noel (STEAMe) and I talked through at the RoleCall Talent Attraction Summit in Buffalo this June.
"The problem isn't a shortage of veteran talent. It's coordination."
- Sharri Justice presents at the 2026 RoleCall Summit in Buffalo, New York.
Talent exists and arrives on a known schedule. Employers exist and are hungry for skilled hires. Communities want the growth that comes with both: population, payroll, and tax base. What's missing is the connective tissue between the three.
Communities that get this wrong treat veteran recruiting as an HR problem. It's actually an infrastructure problem, closer to building a utility than running a hiring campaign. And the stakes are real: every veteran hire is the start of a cash flow that runs from that first job to a family relocating, to a house bought, to money spent locally, and to a stronger tax base.
"Miss the veteran pipeline, and a community isn't just missing workers; it's missing the population growth and reinvestment that follow them."
Three things have to be in place before a single resume shows up:
Housing inventory that a family can actually afford and move into on a known timeline.
An employer coalition aligned around shared pipeline targets rather than competing for the same five candidates.
Family support (spouse employment pathways and schools), because if a community can't answer "will my family land well here," it loses the candidate regardless of the job offer.
Increasingly, there's a fourth piece: a coordination layer, like STEAMe, that gives employers, communities, and transitioning service members shared visibility into the pipeline instead of siloed, one-off efforts.
None of this requires a major installation nearby to get started. The first move is picking one front door: a single intake where employers, talent, and community resources actually talk to each other. The second is aligning five to ten of the most motivated employers in a region around a shared pipeline instead of a shared candidate pool. From there, defining relocation readiness and securing funding (Talent grant-style backing through a regional economic development partner) turns a good intention into a working pipeline.
Northeast Wisconsin's New North is early, replicable proof that this works when a region commits to building the system rather than running another job fair. It's a regional economic development organization addressing a real workforce challenge across eight counties, no different from dozens of regions represented at the summit. A talent grant-backed partnership stood up the coordination layer, bringing employers, community stakeholders, and STEAMe together. Emily Peacock led the execution: employer alignment, pipeline creation, and coordinated engagement instead of job postings.
Mission readiness, a few years into a coordinated veteran pipeline, looks less like a hiring metric and more like an economic one: predictable, named talent inflow instead of a scramble every quarter; an aligned employer network instead of competitors chasing the same five people; shared data visibility instead of siloed spreadsheets.
Communities that get there aren't just hiring veterans. They're building an economic flywheel (population, workforce stability, family retention, and tax base) that keeps turning long after the ribbon-cutting.
Our friend and colleague Steve Janke used to say his second mission, after the military, was making this country worth serving: "A community ready for veterans and their families, with housing, employers, and technology working together, is what 'worth serving' looks like."