Nearly one in three employees at HX5 is a military veteran, a statistic that traces directly back to how founder Margarita Howard has built the company’s hiring and retention pipeline. Since 2021, HX5 has participated in the SkillBridge and Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship programs, both of which place transitioning service members with employers before they formally separate from active duty.

Margarita Howard, herself a U.S. Air Force veteran, built HX5 into a contractor operating across approximately 70 government locations in more than 20 states, supporting NASA and Department of Defense missions with roughly 1,000 employees. Veterans now account for more than 30 percent of that workforce, a share that reflects a deliberate recruitment pattern rather than coincidence.

Why the Fit Works

Military veterans typically spend careers moving between installations and operating in distributed, mission driven environments with limited oversight from a central headquarters. That background maps closely onto the demands of embedded contractor work, where HX5 employees are often stationed at government sites far from the company’s own leadership. The adjustment from military service to that kind of site embedded role tends to be smaller than the jump civilians make into similar contractor positions, and the institutional knowledge veterans carry about how government sites function transfers over with them.

This timing matters given conditions across the federal workforce. The Department of Defense lost more than 61,600 civilian employees, close to 8 percent of its total staff, through deferred resignation and reorganization programs in 2025 and early 2026. Those departures have left many contractors watching for talent, and Margarita Howard’s early investment in veteran pipelines gives HX5 a recruiting channel that predates the current wave of federal departures by several years.

Rather than treating veteran hiring as a one time initiative, Margarita Howard has kept HX5’s fellowship partnerships running continuously since 2021, building a pipeline that now functions as one of the company’s steadiest sources of experienced, retention minded talent.