In last week’s three-hour Republican presidential debate the word “veteran” was mentioned a grand total of two times. While our nation faces many pressing issues from domestic job growth to income inequality, veterans need to hear more than the utterly useless: “I’ll take care of our vets.” Although this is not a problem of the Republican Party alone, few presidential candidates have said more than 15 seconds of fluff at the end of an interview response or campaign speech.

Despite the absence in the Republican debate, candidates have offered some insight about how they would fix the Department of Veterans Affairs. In late August, Jeb Bush released a VA improvement plan that promises to streamline a Web-based scheduling system, increase veterans’ treatment choices, and expand protection for whistleblowers. More recently, Ben Carson took a different approach, suggesting that instead of improving the current system we should eliminate the VA altogether.

While these statements are far more helpful than the generic “support our vets” tag line, few speeches or press releases contain rhetoric about one of the most important aspects of a veteran’s life: transition out of the military. While the physical and mental health of veterans should always be our first concern, a successful transition from active-duty service to civilian life should follow shortly thereafter.

Our current military transition program, the Transition Assistance Program, exists to “assist discharged military personnel in finding a rewarding long-term career path.” The program includes transition counseling, resume writing skill workshops, interview preparation lessons and community networking resources. In 2012, the Department of Labor redesigned the TAP, creating the new online Transition Goals, Plans, Successes program aimed at providing more personalized outcome-based transition services.

The big question our future politicians face is if the program actually works. Are veterans really receiving proper assistance to find and sustain successful civilian jobs? According to Labor Department reports, servicemembers who use TAP services are more likely to find a job in the civilian sector than those who do not. However, the amount of unemployed and homeless veterans in the U.S. raises some red flags.

Through postgraduate research at the University of Oxford I explored these questions on a quantitative level. Based on analysis of original data from veteran samples gathered in conjunction with the professional military networking website Rallypoint, my research shows that the transition program does not offer a statistically significant employment or income advantage to veterans. While I sampled roughly 2,000 veterans, a recent report by the Government Accountability Office supports my findings. In July, the GAO found that after reviewing the new TAP program in Georgia, West Virginia and Washington state they still had “unanswered key questions about the need for the program.”

While we cannot say with full certainty whether the TAP serves our veterans well, these results should prompt presidential hopefuls to rethink the way our country transitions its servicemembers to the civilian workforce. It is time for our future elected leaders to re-examine the transition process. They must not only address how our nation will care for the health of our servicemembers, they must address the role of the government in the transition from the military to civilian job sector.

While the picture looks grim, veteran transition programs launched by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University hint at a future path to success. In conjunction with the Schultz Family Foundation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and select Fortune 500 companies, the IVMF will launch the “Onward to Opportunity,” or O2O, job training and job placement program this fall. By partnering directly with Fortune 500 companies, O20 creates accelerated pathways to civilian employment through requested and specified veteran training. By tying employers directly into the transition and training process, our nation’s veterans no longer have to guess what civilian skills employers want to see.

This type of partnership should be the way of the future for our nation’s veterans. Over and over we hear that employers want to hire veterans but cannot because most don’t meet minimum job skill requirements. It’s time to fix the gap. The 2016 presidential candidates should not only provide a clear and detailed plan to “take care of our veterans,” they should consider public-private partnerships to fill the veteran employment gap.

In a time of force reduction, our job markets will soon be flooded with thousands of veterans. Presidential candidates should present a concrete path forward for our nation’s veterans. Given the years of sacrifice by military community, they deserve more than two words in a presidential debate.

Connor D. Love is an active-duty Army officer and a graduate of the United States Military Academy. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Army, or U.S. Military Academy.

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