Scaling the personal touch: How William & Mary Mason School of Business unlocked veteran hidden talent

The mission: Recruit high-potential veteran talent

Ranked the #1 graduate school in the nation in the 2026–2027 Military Friendly Schools survey, William & Mary's Raymond A. Mason School of Business has made veteran education a defining institutional commitment. The school's Center for Military Transition supports student veterans from applicant to alumni, connecting them with a world-class business education, mentorship, and meaningful career pathways.

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Jonathan "JD" Due brings more than 20 years of military leadership to his role as Executive Director of the Center for Military Transition. He has commanded soldiers in combat, managed a 5,000-person organization, taught at the United States Military Academy, and built transition programs for service members at every level. His mission is to recruit veterans at every stage of their civilian careers and develop them into the high-achieving leaders businesses need most.

"If we can connect the unique lived military experience of our students with a world-class education and meaningful connections among our alumni and corporate partners, that's the recipe for veteran talent recruitment success."

Veteran Talent Source scales recruitment strategy

Every talent team has a version of this story: a pool you know well, relationships that have always produced results, and a process that works until the business asks for more. For William & Mary's Center for Military Transition, that moment arrived when word-of-mouth and military installation relationships could no longer deliver the scale the school needed.

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The primary challenge was visibility: understanding where veteran talent existed, how it mapped to regions and industries, and which veterans were most likely to benefit from a graduate business education. With the school's part-time MBA program also preparing to shift its physical location by roughly 40 miles, the question was the same one any talent leader faces when the pipeline runs dry: where is the talent, and how do we reach it?

“Word-of-mouth and personal relationships can only scale so far. The Veteran Talent Source allowed us to see the full veteran talent landscape at scale.”

JD also saw a qualification problem hiding underneath. His coaching sessions with student veterans hinged on helping them translate military experience into civilian language, but without real data on how veterans in specific industries had made that translation, the coaching was guesswork. He needed the same thing every recruiter needs with a non-traditional candidate: a way to see past the resume and understand what the experience actually means.

VTS doesn't just find veterans — it tells you who's qualified and why

LinkedIn shows you who exists. Findem tells you who is actually qualified, and why. That difference matters most when you're sourcing a non-traditional candidate pool: veterans, career changers, or anyone whose background doesn't map cleanly to the job description you're filling.

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Veteran Talent Source, powered by Findem through the RecruitMilitary partnership, draws on Success Signals: expert-labeled patterns that translate military experience into civilian career intelligence.

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Rather than leaving interpretation to a recruiter's instinct, the platform encodes it, recognizing that leading a battalion's operations translates to cross-functional program management, or that managing a five-thousand-person organization's logistics is exactly the operational depth a hiring manager is looking for. The interpretive work that used to fall on human judgment is built into the data itself.

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For JD, VTS gave concrete data to coaching conversations that had previously relied on intuition, surfacing real-world examples of how veterans with comparable backgrounds moved into specific roles and industries.

"RecruitMilitary’s Veteran Talent Source, powered by Findem doesn't just surface veteran profiles. It tells you who is qualified and why, translating military experience into civilian career intelligence so recruiters can make faster, more confident decisions."

The early analysis also surfaced a question that reshaped the Center's entire outreach model: what if the next class of William & Mary MBA students wasn't primarily veterans about to exit the military, but veterans already in the workforce who just hadn't been asked?

VTS revealed a pipeline W&M didn't know existed: Veterans already in the workforce

The most valuable pipeline is rarely the one raising its hand. Using VTS, JD identified veterans already employed at regional companies: people who hadn't pursued a graduate business degree yet, but who still held veterans' benefits and whose schedules were compatible with a part-time MBA program. Qualified, reachable, and completely invisible to traditional sourcing methods.

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That shifted William & Mary's proposition to corporate partners entirely. Previously, the school approached companies with one pitch: hire our graduates. Now the conversation started somewhere different.

"The W&M team discovered an entirely new pipeline: veterans already employed in the civilian workforce who could increase their skills with additional education that’s deeply compatible with their requirements and schedule. A pool that was qualified, reachable, and invisible until VTS powered by Findem.”

The result was a multi-directional win. Veterans gained access to education and career development. William & Mary deepened its corporate relationships and expanded its enrollment funnel. And companies retained and developed talent they had already invested in. A sourcing strategy built on Findem data doesn't just fill a pipeline. It creates relationships and opens conversations that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

Powering strategy with insight

The moment a talent function becomes a strategic partner is usually the moment it shows up with data that directly answers a question leadership was already asking.

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When the Mason School's leadership evaluated whether to relocate the part-time MBA program roughly 40 miles away, JD used VTS Insights Reports to pull a geographic analysis of veteran talent concentrations in the new corridor. The analysis took fifteen minutes. The findings went to the dean and head of marketing the same day.

"Within 15 minutes, I was able to pull those Insights Reports, cross-reference the location, and put data-informed insight directly in front of the dean and our head of marketing. That's the moment I realized that VTS wasn’t just a sourcing tool — it’s a strategic asset."

The head of marketing's immediate follow-up, "Can we contact the individuals showing up in these results?," confirmed that the analysis had done more than validate a location. It had opened a new outreach strategy in a single conversation.

VTS gave the W&M Mason School of Business the data to coach better, recruit smarter, and lead strategically

The talent teams with the most influence today are the ones who confirm instincts with specifics: specific companies, specific talent concentrations, specific names. That shift from gut to evidence changes how recruiting is perceived inside any organization.

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What JD values most about VTS isn't any single feature. It's the confidence that comes from backing recommendations with data that leadership can act on, in strategic planning conversations, resource decisions, and the credibility that builds when talent leaders consistently arrive prepared.

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In coaching sessions, JD draws on VTS data to show students how their military experience maps to language that resonates in the industries they're targeting. Findem's Success Signals translate service-specific experience into verified civilian career markers, moving the conversation quickly from "here's what you did" to "here's how that reads in the market you're entering." The same engine that helps a veteran reframe their service record helps a TA team surface a non-traditional candidate as a qualified hire.

"Findem's combination of deep talent intelligence and personalized outreach gives recruiting teams the confidence to confirm instincts with specifics: the right organizations, the right talent pools, the right names. That's what changes how recruiting is perceived inside any organization."

His colleague, the vice dean for administration and finance, put it plainly: this is data used as a natural means of conversation that augments W&M's deeply personal educational approach. The data doesn't replace the relationship. It makes the relationship possible at scale.

W&M's veteran recruiting used to run on relationships. Now It runs on both.

The Center for Military Transition's reach was built on relationships, reputation, and the strength of a mission-driven community. Those foundations remain. What's changed is what they're built on top of.

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Today, JD can validate a program relocation in fifteen minutes, walk into a corporate partner meeting with a proposition that didn't exist before, and show a student veteran exactly how people with their background have translated their service into careers that matter.

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The full impact on W&M's enrollment is still taking shape, but the architecture is in place. For any organization that needs to find the right people in a non-obvious place, that is what Findem makes possible.