Crypto recruiting is a minefield – Cointelegraph Magazine

Hiring in the crypto world can be difficult. Web3 companies are often disorganized and lack HR departments. Developers sometimes want to remain anonymous — even to their potential employers.

Some employees don’t exist at all, while others are secretly juggling three other remote gigs. Then there are those who pretend to be employees but are really just plotting to rug everyone.

The job of a hiring manager is no easy one. This goes doubly so for the Web3 world, where expectations both from employers and employees can be drastically different compared to the Web2 corporate world.

Magazine spoke to Declan Strain, managing partner of Dubai-based talent consultancy BlockDelta, which helps companies in the Web3 industry connect with workers of all levels. After 20 years as a recruiter, he became involved in the blockchain space in 2015 and set up his specialist consultancy in 2017.

“A traditional recruiter won’t be as successful as someone who lives and breathes this space,” he says, referring to his efforts to “be part of the fabric of the metaverse” by attending events and making connections in person.

The ICO craze of 2017 saw projects being organized by small groups of developers who often lived in different countries, perhaps never meeting together. Still clearly in a gray-market industry phase, new hires could not be easily recruited via job boards but were often found online via Twitter or in chat groups on apps like Telegram.

“There was no due diligence, so projects were often hiring the wrong staff,” Strain laments, which can quickly get expensive considering the average blockchain developer earns $12,500 per month according to Dataconomy.

Compared to more established industries, Strain describes many Web3 companies as still being particularly disorganized, without human-resource managers — let alone internal recruitment departments, which come standard for more established technology companies of comparable size. This often stems from the fast pace of the industry, where things simply change so fast that established procedures are not put in place. Job board Indeed.com reports that there are 118% more postings for blockchain jobs compared to last year, with a larger share of these being remote when compared to the software industry generally.

He argues that in the wild west of a new industry that crosses borders seamlessly, it…