The Business Case Behind HX5’s Veteran Hiring Under Howard
Veteran hiring at HX5 is not purely about goodwill. CEO Margarita Howard, herself a service-disabled veteran, has structured the company’s participation in the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program around a practical argument: military experience often maps directly onto the demands of defense and aerospace contracting.
HX5 supports Department of Defense and NASA missions across more than 70 government locations, work that frequently requires security clearances and comfort operating inside government facilities. Those requirements line up closely with what many transitioning service members already have before they ever apply for a civilian job.
Two Fellows a Year, Every Year
Since 2021, HX5 has hosted eight fellows through the twelve-week Corporate Fellowship Program, a Department of Defense SkillBridge initiative. Howard has kept the number to two fellows annually, calling it a manageable pace for a company of about 1,000 employees compared with large contractors that can absorb dozens through dedicated military recruiting operations.
Fellows split their time between four days of hands-on project work and one day of professional development weekly, all while still receiving military pay and benefits during their final 180 days of active duty.
Clearance and Culture as Assets
Howard points to the difference between government and commercial experience as a key hiring consideration. “Experience in their respective fields, while supporting these agencies’ respective programs and missions, is very different from experience gained from working in the commercial world,” she says.
That distinction shapes who HX5 recruits and how it onboards them. By treating military background as a business asset rather than simply a hiring preference, Margarita Howard has positioned HX5 to keep drawing steady, if modest, numbers of veteran fellows year after year.
The fellowship also functions as a trial period for both sides. Fellows get a firsthand look at contractor life before committing to it, while HX5 gets twelve weeks to evaluate whether a given fellow fits the company’s culture and mission. That mutual evaluation period, Howard suggests, helps explain why the fellowship model has worked well for a company HX5’s size, even as it continues to hold at just two fellows per year. Read this article for more information.
More about Howard on https://www.f6s.com/member/margarita-howard
