As a general note, we acknowledge that many employers are heavily associated with the US government, thus, we set out to identify the firms that did not have a regulatory requirement for enhanced veteran disclosures to comply. Our goal is improve the trajectory of reporting in the private sector, thus, we have actively chosen to exclude companies with direct linkages to the government and/or recipients of government funding over a threshold amount that subjects them to greater disclosure requirements – but only to the government, not to the general public. Thus, this evaluation excludes both obvious and, in some cases, less obvious employers from consideration who operate with direct proximity to agencies and/or operate as contractors, and may already do a tremendous job of catering to veterans. Therefore, our aim was to create a new ranking methodology absent the confidentiality element embedded in many survey-based disclosure.

We have intentionally chosen to excluded the most obvious government, private and public companies (e.g. Accenture Federal, AECOM, Allegiant, Allied Universal, Amentum, BAE Systems, Bain & Company, BCG, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Homeland Security, Deloitte Federal, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, JB Hunt, KPMG, L3Harris, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, McKinsey & Company, Newport News Shipbuilding, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, PwC, Raytheon, SAIC, SEI, SpaceX, TEK Systems, Vectrus, Union Pacific, USAA, among others) that already do an admirable, or better, job of recruiting, hiring, and supporting veterans in favor of the other companies that are unconstrained from required reporting and still exemplify best practices. Our goal is to showcase the employers shifting the conversation toward greater, transparent disclosure. Thus, our list tends to encompass larger private sector, Fortune 500 publicly reporting companies as they tend to have greater disclosure and deserve both recognition for their work in the veteran community as well as the public credit for their historical record of transparency beyond their peers. 

Thus, our policy recommendations for public (and private) employers to be competitive on future rankings are:

• Detailed, veteran-specific breakouts of data with specific historical trends and a section dedicated to veterans in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)/Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) or Sustainability/Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reports, if publicly provided.
• Identification of veteran-specific Employee Resource Groups or Business Resource Groups and allies, as well as the number of members as a percentage of total employees.
• Retention rates of veterans in relation to both veteran and total employee counts.
• Disclosure of the dollar amount of annual grants and/or donations, and as a proportional percentage of total DEI funding.
• Disclosure of events hosted throughout the year which are designed to identify high achieving veteran successes, both sponsored and internally developed.
• Programs available and specifically designed for veterans.