Most companies treat employee retention as something that happens naturally when pay and benefits are competitive. Margarita Howard, founder and leader of government contractor HX5, has taken a different position, treating retention as a management design problem that requires ongoing attention rather than an outcome a company can assume will take care of itself.

That distinction matters more now than it has in years. The defense contracting industry spent roughly a decade focused on the supply side of talent, worrying about too few cleared engineers, adjudication timelines stretching for months, and salary competition from commercial technology firms. Retention of existing staff got comparatively little focus during that stretch. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense lost more than 61,600 civilian employees, close to 8 percent of its workforce, through deferred resignation and reorganization programs in 2025 and early 2026.

A Workforce Rarely in One Room

HX5 operates across approximately 70 government locations in more than 20 states, meaning its roughly 1,000 employees are scattered across sites rather than concentrated at a single headquarters. Margarita Howard has pointed to that structure as part of why retention has proven harder to systematize than hiring. The interventions a company can use, from fellowship programs to career development, do exist. Sustained execution depends on paying attention to a workforce that, by design, is rarely gathered in the same place at the same time.

HX5 has leaned on the SkillBridge and Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship programs since 2021 to build a pipeline of transitioning service members, and veterans now make up more than 30 percent of the company’s staff. Margarita Howard’s framing treats those programs as part of an ongoing structure rather than a fix applied once and left alone. A contracting industry now absorbing a wave of federal workforce departures finds that structural approach to retention has become one of the clearer distinctions between HX5 and competitors still treating the issue as secondary.