Built In The Field.By The Crew.
ValorJobs didn’t start as a tech company. It started on a jobsite in central New York — a contractor with a hiring problem and a phone full of veteran referrals who kept solving it.
What follows is the timeline of how an informal hiring practice turned into a network. It isn’t finished. The work continues.
The Problem.
Billy Kittell had been running Valor Development LLC for years — a construction company headquartered in central New York, with crews running residential and commercial work across the region.
Hiring through the usual channels (job boards, walk-ins, recruiters) kept producing the same problem: too many no-shows, too much résumé padding, not enough people who actually wanted to do the work. The model was broken on both sides — workers funneled through agencies that took a cut, contractors paying premiums for crews they couldn’t trust to show up Tuesday.
“I’d post a job and get fifty applications. Maybe two of them showed up to walk the site. Of those, maybe one stayed past lunch.”
The Referrals.
What changed it was a few referrals through Billy’s veteran network. Tradespeople who showed up. Took ownership of the work. People whose discipline didn’t quit when their discharge papers got signed.
It wasn’t a program. It wasn’t a recruiter. Just an old buddy who knew a guy who needed work and could swing a hammer. Then another. Then another.
The Pattern.
Billy started hiring more veterans. Then first responders — guys off the line who needed offseason work or a second income.
Other contractors began calling. Asking how he was finding people who actually wanted to work. The answer wasn’t a better recruiter or a better job board. It was a community — one that already trusted itself, that already showed up for each other.
The Platform.
ValorJobs is what happens when you stop trying to scale that community by hand.
The same direct connection Billy was already making — between contractors who need crews and the veterans and first responders who back them up — turned into a platform anyone in the network can use. Brett Nyquist joined as co-founder to build it. iOS and Android launched in 2024.
No middlemen. No recruiters. No résumé games. Just the same network — discoverable on a radar instead of a phone full of contacts.
In The Field.
Live on iOS and Android. Operational in central New York. Veterans, first responders, and the contractors who hire them are using the radar to find each other directly — no agency, no markup, no middleman cut.
Where the work goes, we go.
Built for those who served.
Built for veterans and first responders by people who get it.