Workday is taking a direct swing at that problem. The company this week announced Military Skills Mapper, a new feature within Workday Recruiting designed to translate military experience into civilian-equivalent skills that recruiters can immediately understand. The capability is aimed at helping employers identify, evaluate, and hire military veterans more effectively—without relying on external tools or manual interpretation.
It’s a practical addition to Workday’s broader push to apply AI where it can remove friction from core HR processes. And in this case, the friction is real: more than 200,000 service members transition to civilian life every year, often finding that years of leadership, technical training, and operational responsibility don’t neatly fit into standard job descriptions or applicant tracking systems.
A long-standing hiring disconnect
The challenge isn’t a lack of veteran capability—it’s translation.
Military roles are defined by occupational codes, ranks, and mission-specific language that rarely map cleanly to corporate job frameworks. Recruiters, under pressure to move quickly, often struggle to decode that experience. The result is a talent pool that’s widely praised but consistently underutilized.
Workday’s Military Skills Mapper is designed to close that gap by making military experience legible inside the hiring workflow itself. Instead of asking recruiters to “read between the lines,” the system surfaces civilian-relevant skills tied directly to the job being applied for, helping hiring teams make faster, more informed decisions.
This is especially relevant as large employers increasingly make public commitments to veteran hiring—commitments that are difficult to fulfill without structural changes to how candidates are evaluated.
How the Military Skills Mapper works
The new feature will live inside the “My Experience” section of a candidate’s Workday Recruiting profile. When enabled, it analyzes a veteran’s service background alongside the job description and organizational context to generate a tailored list of civilian-equivalent skills.
Importantly, this isn’t a static lookup table. The recommendations are contextual—designed to align military experience with the specific role and company—while still giving candidates full control to edit and refine the skills presented.
That balance matters. Veterans aren’t being boxed into predefined narratives; they’re being given a clearer starting point for expressing their experience in language that resonates with private-sector recruiters.
Joe Wilson, Workday’s global CTO and a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, framed the feature as a visibility problem rather than a capability gap. Leadership, adaptability, and teamwork are deeply ingrained in military roles—but too often invisible in traditional hiring systems. Military Skills Mapper aims to make those strengths explicit.
Why this move matters now
From a market perspective, Workday’s timing is telling.
Enterprise HR platforms are under growing pressure to demonstrate tangible progress on skills-based hiring, DEI commitments, and workforce mobility. At the same time, AI features are proliferating rapidly—often with uneven real-world impact.
What sets this announcement apart is its focus on a specific, well-documented hiring failure point, rather than a generalized promise of “smarter recruiting.” By embedding military skill translation directly into its core recruiting product, Workday is making the feature operational, not aspirational.
It also removes a common workaround: recruiters and candidates relying on third-party military skill translators or manual résumé rewrites outside the system of record. That fragmentation creates inconsistency and bias—exactly what enterprise hiring teams are trying to avoid.
Competitive context in HR tech
Rival ATS and HCM vendors have taken steps toward skills-based matching, but few have addressed veteran hiring with this level of specificity inside the platform itself. Some rely on integrations with external databases; others leave interpretation entirely to recruiters.
Workday’s approach aligns with a broader trend in HR tech: bringing intelligence into the workflow, rather than bolting it on. It also reinforces Workday’s positioning as an enterprise AI platform focused on people, money, and now agents—using automation to reduce friction rather than add complexity.
For large employers with federal contracts, regulated hiring requirements, or strong veteran affinity programs, this could become a differentiator when evaluating recruiting platforms.
Impact for veterans and employers
For veterans, the benefit is straightforward: a clearer, more confident application experience that reflects the full scope of their service-acquired skills. Instead of guessing which civilian terms might resonate, candidates get structured guidance that aligns with how employers actually hire.
For employers, the payoff is speed and accuracy. Hiring teams can assess veteran candidates more quickly, reduce misinterpretation, and better align talent decisions with business needs—without asking recruiters to become military résumé experts overnight.
Rod Levy, CEO of Code Platoon, summed it up succinctly: veterans aren’t asking for special treatment. They’re asking to be understood.
Availability and what’s next
The Military Skills Mapper is expected to be available to Workday Recruiting customers in fall 2026. While that timeline puts the release over a year out, it signals that Workday is treating this as a deeply integrated capability rather than a lightweight add-on.
If successful, it could also open the door to similar translation models for other nontraditional talent pools—such as career switchers, international workers, or candidates with alternative credentials—further advancing skills-based hiring across the enterprise.
Bottom line: Workday’s Military Skills Mapper doesn’t reinvent recruiting, but it fixes a specific, costly blind spot. By translating military experience into skills recruiters can immediately recognize, Workday is turning veteran hiring from a well-meaning aspiration into a more measurable, scalable practice.
Join thousands of HR leaders who rely on HRTechEdge for the latest in workforce technology, AI-driven HR solutions, and strategic insights
