CONTE NTS

Introduction 11 7 Killer Outreach: How To Recruit The 75

Unrecruitable
1 The Problem: Information Age Industry, 17
Industrial Age Hiring 8 The Recruiting Call: The Art of Candidate 87
Creation
2 The Recruitment Industry Is Broken 25
9 Principles for a Superior Assessment Process 99
3 The Solution: Information Age Hiring For 37
an Information Age Industry 10 Offer Management for Pros 115

4 What Do Exceptional People Care About? 45 11 Hard to Get and Even Harder to Keep 129

5 Discovery: The Critical Foundation For 55 12 The Future: Yours For the Taking 139
Optimal Hiring
Author Bio 143
6 Go Where Others Won’t: How To Beat the 67
Hiring Odds By Breaking Supply and Demand
 A N I NVI TATI O N

The age of hierarchies is giving way to the age of networks.

Information is created and distributed among individuals, judged on the

merit of its content and open for critical appraisal.

The old way is the monologue: the pre-selected TV personality, the

corporate press release and the gatekeeping publishing house.

The new way is a dialogue: participation available for all.

This is the essence of crypto.

And in that spirit, I believe in being accessible.

Hiring for Blockchain: The unconventional approach to hiring exceptional
people in Crypto and Web3
Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

©2023 Harrison Wright
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or
transmitted in any form or by any means; electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright
owner and publisher.
Feel free to email me, hit me up on Telegram, or if you are so inclined, even
pick up the phone and call. I really do answer the phone.
I hope you derive great value from this book, and I welcome your questions,
comments and feedback.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-blockchain-recruiter/
Cover and interior design: KP Communications Twitter: https://twitter.com/harrison_BCR
Email: harrison@theblockchainrecruiter.com
Phone: +1 (332) 206-4886
ISBN: 979-8-9887575-1-1 (paperback)
ISBN: 979-8-9887575-0-4 (digital) Telegram: @hwright
Discord: @theblockchainrecruiter
Website: https://theblockchainrecruiter.com
 I N T R ODUCTI O N

I’ve been fortunate.

My recruiting career began just as the twilight of the Industrial Age was
merging into the dawn of the Information Age.

I’ve been doing this just about long enough to remember when the only
tools required for recruiting success were a phone, an email address, a
spreadsheet, or other rudimentary forms of organization.

If you were really flashy, you could certainly use a CRM, but even index
cards would do.

Trainers of the day would often speak of “the internet” in disparaging

terms—a monumentally wasteful distraction from the serious business of
picking up the phone and making things happen.

There was no cloud, no marketing automation, no LinkedIn, no Calendly,

no Zoom, no smartphones, no Telegram, no remote work, no concept
of content marketing or community management as they currently exist,
and email was simply the digitized equivalent of snail mail, used only to
exchange files or one-way information, not as a vehicle for conversation.

7
When I started, the #1 trait firms would look for in a recruiter was the
willingness to make large numbers of cold calls. Today, many recruiting firms
don’t even have a phone number.
I’m grateful for the benefit of a perspective spanning both eras. Few today
appreciate just how radically different the recruiting and employment
environments were as little as a decade ago.
The crypto space has been at the forefront of reinventing the world of work
for a digital age. And yet, for all that’s fascinating about what’s changed,
perhaps even more so is what hasn’t changed.
Let’s take a step back for just a moment to appreciate the incredible
recruiting tools we have today, right at our fingertips.
• Unparalleled reach and scale, empowered by technology.
• A talent pool that’s not just within a “commutable distance to the
office,” and not even merely regional or national—but global.
• The near-disappearance of the stigma associated with being a “job
hopper” or the risk of being fired for talking to a recruiter.
• The ability to connect with candidates 24/7/365, not just via their
landline phones in the evening.
• Interviews as a frictionless Zoom experience, not a logistical
nightmare planned around vacation days and held hostage to snow
and bad weather.
And on and on it goes.
You would imagine the impact on hiring outcomes to be monumental.
And yet, for all these enormous advantages, those outcomes have, if
anything, gotten worse. Most hires still either fail outright, or fail to live up
to expectations.
Positions still go unfilled for months. The average tenure is lower than ever.
8 9
And recruiters still retain pride of place among the world’s most complained
about professionals.
Clearly, for all this apparent progress, something is fundamentally broken
here. But what?
Luckily for you (and me), I’ve spent a long time developing the answer to
this question.
This book will teach you what I needed nearly two decades of hard-won,
in-the-trenches grind work to fully understand and articulate.
On Conventionalism
Conventional wisdom is usually wrong.
Sometimes, conventional wisdom is the output of an intentional campaign
of misdirection. Case in point: Paul Krugman’s success has nothing to do
with the validity of his ideas and everything to do with his usefulness to
the system. His purpose is to lend pseudo-scientific legitimacy to the fiat
currency/central banking regime and obfuscate simple truths undermining
its credibility.
Or, in other words, to baffle you with bullshit.
Similar scams abound on a smaller scale in business every day. But most of
the time, conventional wisdom will lead you astray for a far more obvious
(and far less malevolent) reason: it’s conventional.
Conventional ideas produce conventional results.
Chances are, if you’re a founder or leader of a thriving Web3 startup and
you’re reading this book right now, you’re anything but conventional.
And you didn’t get to be where you are by doing what everyone else does.
However, unconventionality in one domain does not necessarily translate to
others.
The thought process which leads one to a worldview-shattering revelation in
one area may leave another critically unexamined. discomfort, and go right back to the way they used to do things.

And so it is that, despite being a magnet for the most brilliant contrarians
on earth, the crypto space nonetheless remains achingly conventional in its
hiring practices.
My goals for you with this book, then, are threefold.
1. First, I’ll illuminate the true price of inaction in this area. What is it really
costing you to shuffle along with just a makeshift collection of “good
enough” hiring practices? Chances are, it’s a lot more than you think.
The clue is contained within this book’s title: Unconventional. If everyone
adopted these methods, they would cease to be unconventional—and
as a result, lose much of their effectiveness. Recruiting is, after all, a
competitive sport. And we’ll be talking a lot about competitive concepts
such as positioning, tenacity, and how to break the mechanics of supply and
demand.
In short, you will benefit most from this book if you’re willing to do things
differently, not just talk about being different.

2. Second, we’ll discuss exactly why the conventional wisdom on hiring is so And for you, it should be welcome news, indeed, that only a minority of
wrong, where it came from, and why the ramifications keep worsening. This your peers will ever implement what you will learn within these pages—the
is not your grandfather’s recruiting environment. rewards that you accrue for doing so will be all the greater.

3. And finally, you’ll learn a step-by-step framework that you can use to beat This book is for you if you recognize that hiring is your single most
the odds and achieve distinctly unconventional hiring outcomes. important responsibility as a leader. And that doing so exceptionally will
multiply the success you will enjoy and the magnitude of the impact you’re
able to make.
Who Will Benefit from This Book?
Once I’m done pointing out the myriad flaws in blockchain hiring, you might This book is for you if you’re willing to do what others won’t—treat this
expect me to offer up some great truth that promises to change the world responsibility with the level of respect it truly deserves.
forever.
Let’s begin.
While I have identified certain fundamental truths about recruiting—
observations I have yet to see anyone else make—I don’t claim these to be
the universal solution.

The methods you will learn in this book are capable of producing results
that most would deem “too good to be true.” Specifically, by elevating
the average outcomes of your hiring to above the 80th percentile while
making the process of hiring considerably more reliable and efficient and
dramatically reducing downside risk.

Yet, most people will never implement them. They’ll devour this book, say,
“That’s interesting,” and then never change their actions. Or, they’ll try,
make a half-hearted attempt at execution, meet a wall of resistance and

10 11
 C HAPT ER 1
Th e Proble m: Inform at i on Age Indust r y,
In du stri al Age Hi ri ng

Half of all hires fail.

At least, that was the conclusion of the only large-scale observational study
comprehensively addressing this topic. The Landmark “Hiring For Attitude”
study was conducted by Leadership IQ.

Let’s get a little more specific about Leadership IQ’s sample size and
findings.

> 5,247 hiring managers

> 312 organizations
> Over 20,000 hires

> 46 percent of hires fail within 18 months

> Only 19 percent achieve unequivocal success

And the reasons for failure?

12 13
 > Lack of coachability (26%)
> Lack of emotional intelligence (23%)
> Lack of motivation (17%)
> Wrong temperament for job and/or work environment (15%)
> Lack of technical skills (11%)
Note that “technical skills” sit dead last on this list. That might make you
view those live coding challenges in a different light.
These are pretty damning numbers.
We don’t have access to this kind of aggregate dataset for crypto and Web3
hiring. But if we did, I’m certain it’d look worse than this.
Why?
For one thing, eighteen months might be considered good tenure by the
standards of the industry average today…
But seriously, as with most other things in the world, there has been a broad
revolution in hiring conditions since the turn of the millennium, gradually at
first and then suddenly.
And our industry sits at the very leading edge of these changes.
Leadership IQ’s study was released all the way back in 2005. Back when
we were just beginning to feel the impacts of the Information Age and
the disruption left in its wake. I would argue that then, just as now, this
disruption is the primary driver behind such poor hiring outcomes. And in
the intervening years, this disruption and its impacts have only multiplied in
size and scope.
Let’s examine these factors.
Remember Jobs for Life?
Over past decades, the prevailing norm has evolved from jobs for life to
jobs for a season and then to project-centric engagements, as is often the
case today (especially in crypto).
14
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really that long since you’d show up
to a company with nothing to your name except high school and the right
attitude (and maybe a degree if you were really brainy), and they’d train you
into a lifetime career with the firm.
The implications of this change are more far-reaching than most realize.
To the extent that people ever discuss this topic, it’s usually from the
perspective of either lamenting the demise of loyalty, the American Dream
and the good old days, or its opposite—thank God the world is more
interesting now, and I’m not destined for 50 years of the NPC cubicle life
and the daily drudgery of corporate minutiae.
What’s missed is a pragmatic focus on the downstream implications for
hiring, work output, and the ROI thereof.
When the average tenure of an employee is well north of a decade, you
can afford to take a long-term view of their contribution and development.
You have a lengthy time horizon over which to realize ROI from your hiring
efforts.
What if the average tenure is only two years? Or even less?
A one-month versus three-month ramp time becomes a critical
consideration. More than ever, the right person needs to walk in and be
productive from almost the very first day. Eeking out an extra year or two
of tenure from the very best people becomes an enormous competitive
advantage.
Moreover, short tenure means a dramatically increased volume of hiring and
a corresponding increase in competition, along with the accompanying shift
in bargaining power. More hiring instances means a lot more opportunities
to get it wrong.
The Value Equation: People vs. Assets
In many ways, what we are experiencing is a reversion.
15
In a medieval economy, how valuable was the craftsman or artisan in
relation to his tools? Extremely so. While they weren’t very productive on
account of a pre-industrial technology level, the overwhelming majority of
value in their work output was derived from their own skill and knowledge.
Enter mass production and the Industrial Age. Now the individual worker
is highly productive, but their skill and knowledge are a comparatively
small component of their work output. The worker, economically
speaking, is a largely interchangeable commodity who simply keeps the
machines functioning.
Our modern value equation looks much more similar to the medieval
example. Not because productivity has reduced, but because in
an Information Age economy, the source of value in a company
overwhelmingly derives from the creative output of its people, not from
capital investment in physical assets.
In the crypto economy, all workers are also capitalists, and founders and
investors are also workers. DAOs and the community-centric business
model they have spawned will continue to blur this distinction still further.
Perhaps the myths of Marxism(also a product of the Industrial Age) will
finally die off for good in the decades to come.
The Exploding Complexity of Work
Professional work is far more intellectually demanding today than it has ever
been in the past.
Creativity, adaptability, and the mental and emotional flexibility to
continually unlearn and relearn ways of doing things are now critical factors
driving long-term career success. The days of learning a profession once
and then executing the same playbook for 40 years are long gone.
To take just one singular example of a disrupted profession: marketing.
What was marketing in the 1990s? Advertising. Branding. Creative. Artistic.
Overwhelmingly qualitative. And relatively uniform in scope.
Today, marketing has splintered into dozens of different specialties, each
16
one of vastly increased complexity and accountability for quantifiable
results, tested against the razor’s edge of relentless global competition.
Apply this exercise to your discipline, and you will see the same trend lines.
The traits needed to excel in this modern work environment – and
particularly at startup life – are far rarer than were the traits needed to
excel in the Industrial Age. The implication of this is a dramatically and
permanently reduced candidate pool from which to recruit.
The Barbell Economy
The middle is going away.
The whole concept of the ‘middle class’ is a twentieth century anomaly
powered by industrialization. It didn’t exist in the past, and it won’t exist in
the future, either.
While fiat currency is certainly a major factor in the decline of the middle
class, the return of sound money alone would not restore pre-1971
mass prosperity.
While globalization drives competition to unprecedented levels, it
simultaneously explodes your access to resources, prospective customers,
partners, and employees. As such, value and money flow to the top in ever
greater concentrations.
It used to be enough to be the best something in town. Now, increasingly,
you must be the best in the world.
And if globalization sets the stage for the end of the balanced economy,
technology delivers the killer blow. The typical Information Age business
technology has the effect of automating the low end of any profession,
commoditizing the middle, and adding rocket fuel to the productivity of the
high end. AI/ML, as a topical example, will be no different.
For this reason, success today demands adherence to the 80/20 principle
(or is it 96/4 now?).
17
And nowhere is this more critical than in your hiring efforts. to grasp this transition, and identify the root cause behind why it rarely
manages to live up to its promises.

The Recruiting Bottleneck Has Shifted The remainder of this book will then provide you with the framework to
To this day, people still discuss recruiting in the context of “finding” execute a hiring process fit for the Information Age, or how to delegate it.
candidates.

Sorry to say, this is a relic from a bygone era.

Finding candidates used to be difficult, indeed. There was no LinkedIn, no

GitHub, and no corporate websites from which to peruse the team pages
for potential recruits. As such, firms paid handsomely for access to the
well-cultivated Rolodex of a recruiter. And sometimes, for their painstakingly
laborious original research.

Today, “finding candidates” is essentially a minimum-wage activity. Anyone

can find candidates online.

But this is not without consequences. Ease of access generates huge

volumes of noise. Walls go up. Your message gets tuned out.

The bottleneck, now, is not in “finding” candidates but in the ability to

create them. Successful recruiting hinges on breaking powerfully through
the noise and profitability engaging those who have managed to tune
everyone else out.

Very few leaders truly understand this.

Onwards
All commercial success is a product of relative value, i.e., the value of a
particular offering compared to available alternatives.

Similarly, this widespread dysfunction in hiring may be bad for our industry
as a whole, but it also provides an opportunity for you, the intrepid Web3
founder or leader who wants to win. Get this right and secure an enormous
competitive advantage.

In the next Chapter, we’ll explore how the recruitment industry has yet

18 19
 C HAPT ER 2
Th e Re cr u itment Indust r y i s B roken

Has there ever been such a gap between what passes for expertise and
reality? Indeed, the very phrase “Experts say . . . ” is a sure sign that you’re
about to be scammed. In our time, the emperor truly has no clothes.

The popularity of crypto is, in itself, a living repudiation of the expert class.
Our entire industry exists in reaction to a broken system.

The recruitment industry, still stuck in an Industrial Age that no longer exists,
also suffers from this delta between conventional wisdom and reality.

Bad Incentives Drive Bad Outcomes

A common perception is that recruiters are the ambulance chasers of the
business world—an accusation not entirely without merit.

And yet, why is that?

20 21
Is it something inherent to the function of recruiting? Or might it be a
product of the ambulance-chasing business model itself?
Let me ask you this: would you ever dream of enlisting the help of three
different accountants, promising to pay the one who files your taxes
the fastest?
Of course not. The absurdity is obvious. And yet, how many times have you
used this method to hire recruiters?
Speed is incentivized above all other considerations. Quality, a distant
second—and true craftsmanship? Nowhere to be found. In turn, the
market rewards firms that can shuffle resumes to market fastest. And those
firms, in turn, hire and train subpar recruiters who thrive under this entirely
wrongheaded environment.
Both buyer and seller share the blame for this scenario. But you can choose
differently—you don’t have to be held hostage to mass market outcomes.
The Origins of Contingency
Non-exclusive contingency recruiting stems from an environment that no
longer exists. Primarily, one of information asymmetry. And secondarily, one
with a far less pronounced differential in on-the-job performance outcomes.
When the recruitment company’s value lies in its proprietary
database, and a “good enough” hire really is good enough,
no-win, no-fee makes sense.
That world, however, is long gone.
Business models are typically adaptive to the supply and demand
mechanics of their space, at least in reasonably free markets not
characterized by state <> industry collusion.
A curious little factoid that might surprise you: the very first recruitment
agencies worked on “Applicant Paid Fees.” That’s right—you, the hopeful
job applicant—armed only with your dreams, aspirations, and a soon-to-be
killer resume, would walk into your local recruitment agency and pay them
to find you a job.
22
Typically, the fees were garnished monthly from the first year’s paycheck.
Then World War II happened, and with it, a sudden and dramatic candidate
shortage. In response, innovative recruitment entrepreneurs of the day
pioneered employer paid fees, aka, the contingency model that remains
popular to this day.
While the skills crunch is ever more prominent today, the internet and
its implications have dramatically changed the hiring environment in
a multitude of ways. Twentieth-century executives could have only
dreamed of having access to a freely accessible, permanent up-to-date,
and information-rich candidate database spanning the entire globe. One
capable of reaching tens, hundreds, or even thousands of candidates at the
click of a button and not being limited to searching within a “commutable
distance” for suitable employees.
As the old saying goes, however, “Be careful what you wish for. You just
might get it.”
Hiring is a competitive sport, and while technology may bring increased
ease in one area, inevitably, this creates new challenges in another. The only
winners are those who most effectively adapt to the new conditions.
Unfortunately, while some innovators are embodying the change they want
to see in the world, the majority of the recruitment industry has been slow
to effectively account for this particular evolution. But what were we saying
about adaptation? This is good news for you, the reader, because you have
an opportunity to get ahead.
The Twin Forces of Globalization and Technology
So why exactly did non-exclusive contingency work reasonably well 20 years
ago but not today? Let’s examine some critical changes in the operating
environment between then and now:
23
 the time, many conversations were had about how, “back in my day,” you’d
INDUSTRIAL AGE INFORMATION AGE
be expected to give decades to a firm.

Difficult and labor-intensive to Quick and easy to identify

Loyalty is, however, a two-way street.
identify potential candidates potential candidates

Difficult and labor-intensive to find
personal contact information
Potential candidates are very
receptive to approach
Supply and demand are
reasonably balanced
Longer job tenure
Local/regional competition
Moderate on-the-job
performance differential
Stable business environment
Quick and easy to obtain
personal contact information
Potential candidates
unreceptive to approach
Extreme supply and
demand imbalances
Shorter job tenure
Global competition
Extreme on-the-job
performance differential
Constantly evolving there are inherent limits to what any salesperson could achieve. While
business environment
Furthermore, while the quality and fit of the person hired into each position
were certainly important, the magnitude of the difference was, for most
positions, far lower than today. Consider a typical position I hired for—a
territory sales manager for an industrial automation manufacturer, e.g.,
Siemens. How much of this position’s results are owed to the person, as
opposed to the company?
In this environment, arguably, most of the results are owed to the company
and its infrastructure. The industry is extremely capital-intensive, and there
are only a few players. The brand name alone opens doors. And the reasons
for the customer to buy have far more to do with the physical and tangible
product itself and the business system behind it than any ingenuity on the
part of the salesperson in devising a solution or adapting the offering to
meet the customer’s specific goals.
With this, plus a distinctively finite market size within a particular territory,
“great” is certainly better than “good,” the outcome differentials were
typically measured in double-digit percentages rather than orders
of magnitude.

Put this all together, and what does it mean?

Then you factor in that once you’d more or less learned your profession,
you could expect to practice it successfully for the rest of your life without
Before we get to the punchline, allow me to add commentary to this table
having to adapt, relearn and reinvent every few years. Which, in turn, made
from my experience. I began my recruiting career in earnest back in 2009,
it far easier to select successful employees based on prior track records or
right in the depths of the global financial crisis (GFC), also known as the
the esteem in which they were held by their peers.
great recession.

And because they stayed in the job far longer than is typical today, and
I spent my first few years parked in the factory automation space, which
the learning curve was kinder, you had a substantially greater window to
to my understanding, has now largely evolved into Internet of Things (IoT)
produce ROI from each hire.
and robotics.

Commercial success is driven by relative value, i.e., the value of an offering

Back then, you were typically considered a job hopper and viewed with
in the marketplace as compared to alternatives. Or at least the perception
suspicion if you moved more often than every four to five years. Ironically, at
of that value. That being the case, in a world defined by competition that

24 25
was usually local and occasionally national, but rarely beyond it, far more
people were capable of getting ahead. The selection pressure? Much
less intense.
Conversely, the internet and its network effects act as a turbocharged
accelerant for the winners of market competition. Winners now win far
bigger and harder than ever before, while also-rans are submerged in the
endless sea of global competition. The stakes have never been higher.
It’s not a coincidence that so many millennials and zoomers are obsessed
with self-improvement, entrepreneurship, and “the hustle” like no other
generation in living memory. It’s an adaptive response to the conditions of
our age.
Changes in the recruiting environment itself have been equally dramatic.
While LinkedIn technically existed in my formative years, it was an
idle curiosity at best. Finding prospective recruits was an arduous and
time-consuming task beyond the ability and comfort zone of the
untrained individual.
Typically, we’d call into the switchboard of a company, deploy various
degrees of salesmanship to find out who does what, and get their direct
dial or cellphone numbers. This might take numerous attempts across
several days to gather all the required information. With a particularly
stringent gatekeeper, it might mean pressing #3 to speak to the accounts
department, who were generally more favorable to such requests.
Sometimes, we might need to get really creative, such as calling on plant
managers to ask who the best service engineers they ever worked with are,
or buyers to discover the best sales reps who call on them.
We rarely had any such luxury as seeing this person’s live and up-to-date
digitized resume (aka LinkedIn). Occasionally we would have some insider
information from a referral source, but usually, we had no more to go on
than their name, approximate location, and job title before picking up
the phone.
As a result, headhunting calls were relatively rare (and cold emails were still
a novel concept). Indeed, it was not uncommon to speak to someone who’d
26
never previously been approached. As a result, soliciting interest from each
identified candidate was orders of magnitude easier than it is today.
Not to mention that today the people you actually want to hire have almost
limitless options. They can work virtually anywhere they desire, or work for
themselves. Or, as is often the case in crypto, they’ve already made it and
don’t need to work at all.
In the golden age of contingency recruiting, this was not the case.
Non-exclusive Contingency Incentivizes Mediocrity
The root problem boils down to two simple factors:
1. Contingency optimizes for a world where candidate identification is
difficult, and candidate engagement is easy, while the reverse is now true.
2. Contingency optimizes for “good enough” hiring outcomes, while both
the costs of sub-optimal hiring and the rewards for hiring exceptionally have
never been greater.
Consider the consequences:
In a pre-internet world, you hired a bunch of contingent recruiters. They hit
up their relatively unique databases, of which there was low to moderate
overlap between firms, and their respective candidates were largely
responsive and delighted to hear from them. As a result, little salesmanship,
acumen, or finesse was required to generate high-quality interest in
your company.
Despite the fast-and-loose engagement model, your company’s reputation
generally remained intact because prospective candidates hearing about
your firm from multiple recruiters only occurred in isolated incidents.
And technology didn’t offer them the proverbial megaphone to shout a
suboptimal message from the digital rooftops.
Meanwhile, with a considerably less hostile competitive environment to
contend with and, therefore, lower cognitive demand on your employees
and lower thresholds for success, it was easy to obtain a large enough
pool of quality candidates from which to select. And even if your preferred
27
candidate was actively looking for a job, you rarely had multiple competing
offers to contend with.
Try the same thing today, and you know it doesn’t work that way.
Instead, your contingent recruiters all hit up the same people on LinkedIn.
This time, they’re generally unresponsive, especially so when they’re
spammed with contradictory pitches which reflect poorly on your brand.
Thanks to the internet and the convenience of hiding behind email, the
level of salesmanship and communication skills of the average young
professional has fallen off a cliff compared to the recent past. And yet, the
level of salesmanship required to successfully engage your prospective
candidates—just to get them to agree to a conversation, let alone secure
their interest and commitment, is higher than ever.
With the extreme supply shortage typical of crypto, there’s no reason for the
average recruiter to ever cultivate superior salesmanship under a contingent
model. Someone will always hire the easily accessible candidates who are
eagerly responsive. And recruiters can make a ton of money shopping these
people around the industry. This approach would more accurately be called
candidate brokerage, and doesn’t really constitute recruiting at all. Yet it is
exceptionally common.
Engaging with top performers amongst the noise of the Information Age
takes not only salesmanship, but also persistence. Persistence that will
never get a chance to be deployed in contingent recruiting because it’s
economically suicidal to go deep on a search assignment that’s unlikely to
be compensated. And even the very best contingent recruiters only fill one
out of every five openings they work; it’s usually more like one in ten. Yet,
you’d be amazed how many of my best placements have originated from a
response only after the eighth, ninth, or tenth point of contact.
And with a much narrower target to hit in terms of a successful hire, there
are dramatically increased consequences for getting it wrong, and intense
competition exists for anyone worth hiring. Even if this approach ever
manages to get you the same slate of “good enough” candidates your
predecessors routinely enjoyed, well, good enough frequently just isn’t
good enough anymore.
28
When a precise and rigorous outcome is demanded, the process must
be equally so. And each step must be executed with excellence. The
misaligned incentives render this all but impossible to reliably achieve
under contingency.
While of lesser concern, it’s also worth noting that these very same dynamics
also undermine the value proposition of the old school Big Brand retainer
firms. I’ve no doubt the executives of Korn Ferry or Heidrick & Struggles
would protest this assertion vigorously. Nonetheless, the offerings of such
firms were specifically designed to address information asymmetry, only
from a different perspective.
Namely, they put a full-time researcher on the once-arduous task of name
gathering and sourcing for four to six weeks per search. An approach that
is economically unviable for most hires and justified by the importance of
executive appointments. And this process was supported by consultants
with a greater level of business acumen than found at your average
recruitment agency, as befitting the seniority of their work.
Today, anyone can do that thorough name gathering online in a tiny fraction
of the time and expense, making it viable for all levels of recruiting. Being
effective at making key early hires for startups requires a strong business
sense regardless of the level of those hires.
The old saying “You never get fired for buying IBM” certainly applies to
this situation. But the discerning customer would do well to really evaluate
what exactly they’re getting for their investment of both time and money in
this scenario.
It’s a System-Wide Problem
By what metric do we measure success?
I would argue that the most appropriate measures of success for
recruiting are:
1. The ratio of job openings worked to openings filled (completion rate)
2. On-the-job performance of hired candidates (effectiveness)
3. First interview-to-hire ratio (efficiency)
29
While a zero barrier to entry and the promise of easy money create an
enormous variability in recruiter quality, even high-quality contingent
recruiters fail most of the time if measured by the above factors.
Optimizing for the above factors typically means investing north of 100
man-hours per hire. You can’t blame contingent recruiters for not doing so,
as they’d go broke in the process. It’s far too much expenditure for the level
of risk assumed.
Nor can we reasonably expect the average rank-and-file recruiter to
understand these dynamics and adjust their operating model accordingly.
They are simply doing the job they’ve been taught to do, the best way they
know how.
Ultimately, the recruitment industry needs better visionaries and leaders.
And more informed customers driving partnership models that are
more committed.
attractive offers possible for their candidates, regardless of the source.
This may align with your interests, but your interests are not the operating
principle of the business model. And that’s why the results you receive are
invariably inconsistent.
Bottom Line
The recruitment industry is still teaching its practitioners to operate like
it’s a never-ending 1999, the millennium always on the cusp but never
quite arriving. Using the latest and greatest technology not to augment
their effectiveness but to drown the market in an orgy of unwanted
and undifferentiated noise. All while entirely missing the point that the
fundamental conditions for success have changed. You can’t add fuel to a
fire that doesn’t exist.
The mainstream will eventually catch up. The question is, can you afford
to wait?

Who’s Really the Customer?

When studying incentive mechanisms, it’s key to understand who the real
stakeholders are.

Private companies are accountable to customers. Public companies are

accountable to shareholders. Public companies failing their customers and
having their market share taken by motivated entrepreneurs who put the
customer front and center is a story that plays out time and time again.

Meanwhile, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are busy

conducting thousands of live experiments in new models of accountability.

Extreme supply shortages have led recruiters, especially in crypto, to make

the candidate their key stakeholder. You’ve likely noticed that it’s common
for Web3 recruiters to direct most or all of their marketing and positioning
toward candidates. Some even proudly describe themselves as “talent
agents” or some variation thereof.

This makes sense as an economic model for the recruiter. It’s easy to
find willing buyers for a great developer—or even an average one. But
it’s important to understand their real imperative: to generate the most

30 31
 C HAPT ER 3
Th e Solut i on:
In for mation Age Hi ri ng for an
In for mati on Age Indust r y

Few understand the dynamics of how Bitcoin went from nothing to a world-
changing phenomenon in record time.

Early believers had the prescient ability to see what others could not.

Unfortunately, I cannot claim to be a Bitcoin OG. But by reverse-engineering

Bitcoin’s success, we can learn a little something about how to solve
problems by addressing root causes.

As Saifedean Ammous aptly demonstrates in his seminal work, The Bitcoin

Standard, monetary preferences gravitate inexorably from softer to harder
forms of money.

Bitcoin is the hardest form of money to have ever existed, with

mathematically guaranteed scarcity built in—and can be stored outside the
oversight of the state.

Meanwhile, money printer go brrr and the entire world is staring down the
barrel of economic armageddon caused by profligate governments drunk

32 33
on the excesses of fiat currency. What can we infer from this?

When you analyze it from the perspective of the underlying conditions and Technology generates easification, removes barriers to entry, and, therefore,
incentives, Bitcoin seems inevitable. incentivizes noise and mass competition.

Of course, it’s easy to say that in hindsight. But what if we identify the You can see this in action across many Information Age developments, e.g.,
underlying conditions of modern hiring and the incentives therein? Perhaps self-publishing, podcasting, Amazon FBA, and for a topical example, online
we could use that to construct a new model tailor-made for our times. job boards.

And ten years from now, maybe someone else will be writing about how this Ever since I started recruiting, I’ve been hearing about how this or that
development was inevitable in hindsight. information-based technology was going to make the profession obsolete.
Job boards. LinkedIn. “Uber for recruitment.” And yet, the demand for
Conditions of the Information Age recruiters is higher than ever.
Let’s take another look at that table from Chapter Two.
These predictions have invariably been based on there being fewer barriers
INDUSTRIAL AGE INFORMATION AGE to identifying and contacting prospective candidates. Yes, people actually
claimed, loudly, that job boards would mean the end of recruiting firms as
Difficult and labor-intensive to Quick and easy to identify now employers and applicants can find each other at the click of a button.
identify potential candidates potential candidates
A quaint notion today.
Difficult and labor-intensive to find Quick and easy to obtain
personal contact information personal contact information These predictions, like so many terrible economic takes, fail to account for
the second and third-order effects of these changes. In our case, easier to
Potential candidates are very Potential candidates identify and easier to contact prospective candidates equals much harder to
receptive to approach unreceptive to approach engage and convert them.

Supply and demand are
reasonably balanced
Longer job tenure
Local/regional competition
Moderate on-the-job
performance differential
Stable business environment
Extreme supply and
demand imbalances
Shorter job tenure
Global competition
Extreme on-the-job
performance differential
Constantly evolving produced by average and high-performing individuals, it’s a very
business environment
And rather than making hiring easier, it simply shifts the bottleneck from
one part of the process to another. Incidentally, one which requires far more
skill to execute. So, our optimal recruitment model needs to account for this
enormous change.
The other key finding underpinning these factors is a dramatically smaller
target to hit in terms of achieving ROI from each hire, combined with much
higher stakes for hiring either well or badly. When you combine a more
complex and fast-paced global business environment, combined with
shorter staff tenure and an ever-increasing gap between the outcomes
potent mix.

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So, our ideal recruiting model also needs to be optimized more explicitly
than ever for right-curve performance outcomes. There’s an ever-smaller
share of the candidate population who are able to truly move the needle.
What might that look like?
The Blockchain Recruiter Protocol™
I developed the Blockchain Recruiter Protocol™ to address all of these
conditions in parallel, and reliably deliver right-curve hiring outcomes in
crypto and Web3. In the remainder of this book, we will examine each step
of the methodology in detail, how you can apply it in your hiring efforts, and
the gains you can expect in doing so.
My goal is to leave you with a framework for success and, perhaps even
more importantly, to get you to think differently about what recruiting
excellence looks like so you’re better equipped to tackle these most
pressing challenges.
This is not explicitly a “here-are-the-exact-steps” sort of book, simply
because you’ll invariably delegate most of the recruiting work. It won’t serve
you to have a series of detailed scripts for cold recruiting calls, or a step-by-
step guide to how to configure sales engagement platforms or geek out on
Boolean logic. There are people for that.
But it will help you to know what excellence in these areas looks like, so you
can make smarter executive decisions about how to manage, delegate or
outsource your recruiting (and which parts of the process you need to keep
closer to your chest).
In the next Chapter, we’ll discuss the foundation you need to have in place
to reliably attract and close exceptional people to join your project before
beginning any recruiting process. The best process in the world won’t
help you if your offer sucks, your message is incoherent, and you don’t
understand how top performers think and make career decisions.
Once we’ve got that nailed down, we’ll cover each of the seven steps
in turn:
36
1. Discovery
The quality of your hiring outcomes depends significantly on the accurate
specification of required outcomes and how to pinpoint exactly who can
deliver them within the context of your environment.
Most people treat this as almost an afterthought. We’ll expose the key
distinctions between mediocrity and exceptionalism in this area, setting you
up for success.
2. Scouting
It doesn’t matter how many people are “on the market” if you’re not relying
on people being on the market.
In this Chapter, we’ll discuss how to break supply and demand by
identifying all prospective candidates that exist, including those who are not
active, not looking, or don’t use LinkedIn.
3. Courtship
In the attention economy, noise is your enemy. I’ll teach you exactly how to
break through it and recruit the unrecruitable.
4. Discernment
Recruited candidates need to be treated differently from those actively
(or passively) keeping an eye on the job market. This Chapter will teach
you how to ensure you’re creating real candidates, not merely tire kickers,
and window-shoppers.
5. Assessment
As we illuminated at the very beginning of this book, the traditional
interview process is about as predictive as a coin flip. Meanwhile, fewer than
one in five hires truly excel.
In this Chapter, I’ll give you the framework to beat these odds.
6. Offer management and closing
Sick of having your offers turned down? Of throwing your hat in the ring for
yet another bidding war?
37
No more. We’ll discuss exactly how to get your offer acceptance ratio
up as close as possible to 100% (and ensure they actually follow through
and start).

7. Retention
It’s heartbreaking to work so hard on hiring incredible people only to lose
them far too soon. In this Chapter, you’ll learn easy to implement strategies
that will help you minimize unwanted turnover and ensure your great
hires stick.

I’ll also help you identify when it’s time to say goodbye—even to good
hires—and why that’s not always a bad thing.

Let’s Go
Faster than many have truly had the time and space to appreciate, the
entire structure of our economy and workforce has changed. Crypto people
say they understand this, and that’s certainly reflected in innovative areas
such as DAO governance and a globally distributed workforce (before it was
cool), but it’s rarely evident in the industry’s recruiting practices.
FULL RELEASE COMING SOON
Recruiting innovations that do show up are often nothing more than old
gimmicks given a decentralized veneer. No, crowdsourcing candidates via a
hiring bounty protocol with on-chain referral verification is not a real solution
to this problem. For questions and enquiries
please contact Harrison Wright
It’s time for a better system. One based on first principles, not gimmicks.
harrison@theblockchainrecruiter.com
Ready? Great, let’s dive in.
+1 (332) 206-4886

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