From Mastercard to Nike, jobs in Web3 are growing. Here’s a manager’s guide to hiring (including interview questions)
This article was originally published in Fast Company (with Avery Akkenini).
While the economy has been facing headwinds ever since the onset of COVID-19, Web3 jobs have been rapidly expanding. The demand for Web3 skills has been so large that supply has not been able to expand fast enough, bidding up the average wage. For example, LinkedIn reported a nearly 400% increase between 2020 and 2021 in job titles containing the words “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency,” compared with nearly a 100% increase in the broad tech sector.
And, even with the so-called “crypto winter” in a market of polarized Web3 sentiment, the demand for blockchain developers and other Web3 professionals has continued to grow.
The myth is that demand for Web3 talent is concentrated solely among startups, but many enterprises are actively hiring dedicated Web3 teams to meet a rising consumer interest in Web3-focused applications. For example, many Fortune 500 companies across sectors, ranging from entertainment to retail to fashion to technology, announced Web3 hiring in 2022, according to Vayner3’s 2022 trends report. And we expect more to follow suit in 2023. In fact, some of these companies have even created dedicated Web3 investment teams with both non-technical and technical roles, including Mastercard, Anheuser Busch, Adidas, Nike, and PepsiCo.
We believe that these early signs of investment from enterprises provide further evidence that Web3 is here to stay, and that the technology is sufficiently general purpose that it will forever transform the way companies do business. This highlights that major brands are putting both their reputational and financial capital behind Web3, and continued education, evangelism, and community building will chart a new road ahead.
But as with any emerging technology, understanding how to hire and manage Web3 talent has been challenging. Given our expertise as professors/researchers (Christos) and executives of a leading consultancy (Avery), we believe that there are a couple of best practices that will help the hiring process for startups and enterprises alike.
CONDUCT A HUMAN CAPITAL INVENTORY
Whenever there is a new salient and trendy technology, it is easy to focus on all of its features. But we need to remember that what matters at the end of the day is value creation for the end consumer and how we treat employees. Every organization needs to understand the tasks that are involved in delivering that value, and then connect people with the execution of those tasks—even if they are yet to be hired.
Specialist organizations (like Vayner3) can emerge from established entities (like VaynerX), and we’ve seen similar things occur at much larger companies, from Salesforce Web3 Studio to Adidas /// Studio. This is often driven by a single passionate individual, who builds a business case to internal leadership; but also can occur through top-down executive sponsorship.
Possible interview questions:
Imagine that you could work with your human resources department to survey interest in Web3. What do you specifically think Web3 brings to the table for your organization?
What would you ask others in the survey to galvanize support for Web3 initiatives?
FOCUS ON PERSONALITY AND PASSION FOR THE SUBJECT MATTER, NOT JUST HARD SKILLS
It’s easy to develop technical assessments, especially for developers, to gauge their skill level and ability to program under pressure. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Recent research from one of us analyzing millions of observations on peoples’ wages across occupations and time in the U.S. shows that personality, namely intellectual tenacity (reflecting problem solving capabilities, mental toughness, and curiosity), is at least as important, if not more, important in explaining wage differences in the labor market than technical skills.
In the very early days of Web3, hiring “natives” who live and breathe the Web3 culture to educate cross functional teams accelerated. In particular, at Vayner3, we hired several individuals from the Web3 community, using recruitment tactics that may seem unusual to traditional human resource systems, namely identifying candidates via Discord and Twitter, compared with Greenhouse and LinkedIn. Other pioneers in the field have followed a similar strategy. The founders of Forum3 (the platform behind Starbucks Odyssey) met as part of a specific Web3 community. Even Playboy’s Web3 team hired passionate community members to their team.
The easiest trap for enterprises to fall into is to treat Web3 talent acquisition the same as other talent and assume that what matters is technical skill alone. Part of the attraction of Web3 to many community members is the countercultural elements, especially the focus on decentralization and autonomy, so filtering for technical skills on traditional job posting boards alone will risk attracting people who look good on paper, but are not going to catapult the organization to new heights—or potentially even align with the team.
Possible interview questions:
What Web3 communities do you admire the most, and why?
Are you personally a holder of any Web3 projects, and what motivated you to become one?
Have you been involved in any Web3 community programming (DAOs, NFTs, metaverse experiences)?
FORMAL BLOCKCHAIN EDUCATION IS HELPFUL, BUT NOT REQUIRED
Even though blockchain has been around for years, few institutions of higher learning have any serious curricula around blockchain apart from cryptography classes in computer science departments. One of the few is University of Nicosia in Cyprus, which was the first to launch a masters in blockchain and digital currency and will be the first to launch a masters in the metaverse. Core to its success is its engagement of practitioners, not just academics, who actively work in the blockchain space, which provides learners with the opportunity to hear about real-time trends in the market and cultivate hands-on skills.
But the reality is that many programs do not yet have the support to provide significant value-added, so focusing on candidates with the appearance of Web3 or blockchain educational credentials may give the impression of capabilities that are not really there.
Instead, there are many self-trained candidates who would be excellent hires, but do not have any educational degrees to necessarily back it up. In these cases, look at what they have done and pay attention to how they talk about the Web3 community. Candidates’ aptitude to learn and thrive in the role matters even more than their current technical knowledge—that’s easy to fill in!
Practically, one way to determine whether a candidate has the right aptitude and personality (as an alternative to relying on outside credentials) is to give them a hypothetical problem to solve and see how they handle it. These hypothetical problems are thematically no different than the classic case problems that pervade the management consulting world, but here the problems and set of skills that are being tested will vary based on the role. Hiring managers should pay close attention to the candidate’s thought process and, if it is a technical problem, their approach to building a system and drawing on prior knowledge.
Possible interview questions:
Can you show me a best-in-class blockchain-based application? Why is it a smart use of technology?
What separates a great smart contract from a standard one?
How would you leverage blockchain technology to solve a problem that you are especially passionate about?
What are some elements of this that Web3 could not solve?
THINK LIKE AN ARTIST, BUT BUILD LIKE AN ENGINEER
Web3 is fundamentally a general purpose technology because it provides a new layer, or delivery mechanism, for assessing, recording, and validating activity in a distributed fashion. And with that general nature comes the opportunity to apply incredible creativity to the product design and user experience. But that creativity needs to be tempered with an engineering-like mentality that also knows how to execute. The combination must be paired on a team explicitly, or balanced by someone who can think like an artist and build like an engineer.
Too often in business and venture capital, the focus is on bringing products to scale. But before scale comes the individual and their experience with the product or service. This is the key: We believe that Web3 talent must focus on building for people, not for profit. That’s why so many attempts at “community building” fall short. Disingenuous efforts eventually show their signs and get called out, and the results aren’t pretty.
So, how do you do that? Artists do not think of their customers as “users,” but rather as their audience and even patrons. Artists perform and produce to service them. And that cannot be made any more clear than in an opera where the audience gives a standing ovation and even more than 10 minutes of standing applause for an exceptional performance. That demand on the artist creates transparency and accountability to perform beautiful and creative art.
But to execute all of these aims at scale enterprises need engineering talent that can take these creative ideas and embed them in code. Indeed, the blockchain relies upon distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts that work seamlessly and attract people from geographically disparate areas to participate as validators on the network. Enterprises cannot forsake top engineering talent, but they need to ensure that engineering is not done robotically or with an overly narrow perspective that it short circuits the creativity of the overall brand.
Possible interview question:
Imagine a big brand came to you asking for help to launch a Web3 initiative, and Gary Vee was willing to serve as an ambassador. Describe the process you would take.
TAILOR YOUR WEB3 HIRING TO YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
Every organization is different. Some are bigger than others. Some rely more on external contract work than others. And some function more as creative consultants than others.
Organizations need to know who they are before they make hiring decisions. In Vayner3’s recent trends report, we shared the results from conversations with many large enterprises on the three most common approaches to operating models for Web3 teams:
Steering committees
Centers of enablements
Design studios
A steering committee approach views Web3 projects as complements to a broader set of digital initiatives. This could be an excellent starting point for brands, however requiring a high degree of cross-functional decision-making and alignment.
A center of enablement approach develops the best practices and guiding principles to facilitate cross-enterprise execution of Web3 projects, meaning that Web3 is getting embedded into the fabric of the organization. This drives flexibility for multi-brand execution and allows for greater accountability due to dedicated stakeholders.
A Web3 design studio approach involves a dedicated, cross-functional team who handles the go-to-market strategy and execution, taking a hands-on approach to seeing the Web3 vision come to reality. This allows a faster go-to market strategy however requires a top-down commitment, vision and funding.
Possible interview questions:
What do you believe are the core team members needed on a Web3 program team?
Imagine you’re a business leader at a Fortune500 company. How would you incubate innovation in your marketing or operations department? Would you consider integration within core teams; a “center of excellence” model or a protected “studio” model? Or something different?
Christos A. Makridis is a cofounder and COO/CTO of Living Opera, a Web3 multimedia startup, and holds academic appointments at Stanford University, Columbia University, and the University of Nicosia.
Avery Akkineni is the president of Vayner3, a leading Web3 consultancy.