How HX5’s Margarita Howard Built a Veteran Workforce Around What the HIRE Vets Gold Medallion Actually Measures
The Department of Labor doesn’t hand out its Gold Medallion for flashy hiring announcements, but rather for concrete hiring numbers.
To qualify at the large-employer tier, a company must show that veterans accounted for at least 7% of new hires the previous year — and that it retained at least 75% of the veterans it hired the year before that, for a minimum of 12 months. It must maintain a veteran employee organization providing integration support and coaching. It must run programs designed specifically to develop the leadership skills of veteran employees.
HX5, the defense and aerospace contractor founded by Margarita Howard, earned the award in 2025. Its veteran workforce stands at roughly 30% of approximately 1,000 employees, more than four times the national private-sector average, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts at around 6%.
The Retention Requirement
The 75% threshold measures retention against veterans hired two years prior. Sustaining a 75% 12-month retention rate means the underlying conditions — career paths, culture, mission alignment — were already built before anyone began counting. Veteran resource groups and coaching programs take years to build. They require people who understand what the military-to-civilian transition actually involves.
“Much of our success has been because of the people that we’ve hired,” Howard, an Air Force veteran, said. Since 2021, the company has hosted transitioning service members through DoD’s SkillBridge network and the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program. Fellows work in operational roles, evaluated against the same performance standards as permanent staff. The conversion decision gets made on evidence, not impressions.
The Operational Logic of Veteran Hiring
Margarita Howard has consistently framed veteran hiring as a solution to a specific workforce problem: finding candidates who already know how to operate inside the government.
That framing cuts against how corporate veteran programs are often positioned, as service and social responsibility. U.S. veteran unemployment averaged 3.5% in 2025, below the 4.2% rate for nonveterans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Veterans are not, as a group, a population that struggles to find work. Companies building structured veteran programs are competing for a sought-after segment of the workforce, not simply filling a gap.
“Experience in their respective fields, while supporting these [government] agencies’ respective programs and missions, is very different from experience gained from working in the commercial world,” Howard said. For a company supporting classified defense programs and NASA contracts where candidates need to understand government program culture from day one, that difference is the point.
Consideration of security clearances adds another dimension. A Top Secret clearance takes 12 to 24 months to obtain for a candidate without prior government service, per Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency processing timelines. A year of clearance wait time is a year of carried salary and constrained deployment. The cleared veteran hire avoids that problem.
Veterans also bring familiarity with how DoD and NASA program offices function, and often professional networks inside the agencies they’ll be supporting. Those characteristics reduce onboarding friction in ways that show up in retention data.
“The work we do is very exciting,” Howard has said. “Some of it is not being done anywhere else in the world.” That pitch lands differently with candidates whose prior service gave them a frame of reference for mission-driven environments. Retention holds when the work itself is what veteran hires came for.
The Defense Workforce Context in 2025
HX5 earned the Gold Medallion when the cleared labor market was under pressure from two directions at once. The Trump administration began reducing DoD’s civilian workforce in February 2025: a department-wide civilian hiring freeze took effect Feb. 28, mass terminations of probationary employees followed in early March, and DoD’s Deferred Resignation Program required participating civilians to leave federal service by Sept. 30, 2025.
For defense contractors, the near-term effect was disruption to contracting timelines and agency coordination as experienced personnel departed. For contractors absorbing functions those civilians had handled, the premium on candidates who could operate in government environments without a long adjustment period has sharpened.
ClearanceJobs reported that the year’s disruptions were broader and less cyclical than prior contractions, noting that a security clearance alone is no longer enough — employers demand immediately billable skills and program-specific experience. That is precisely what a SkillBridge fellow carries on arrival: pre-cleared, technically trained, with direct exposure to the kinds of government programs they would be joining.
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