The 3-step process to get hired in web3
The 3-step process to get hired in web3
There’s a new paradigm in town: The talent brand paradigm.
Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.
Hi frens - Moon speaking,
We’re making good progress on taking Jericho back from the Goblins - step by step, we’re preparing to win the battle. While recruiting for our army, we’ve noticed that many people have the desire to join but for whatever reason just weren’t ready yet. Here are some tips we’d like to share with these soon-to-be converts.
For the next edition: Should we first identify investors to rebuild Jericho (web3 VC mapping) or improve our army’s mental strength (mental fitness for web3 builders)?
There’s a new paradigm in town: The talent brand paradigm.
Companies have employer brands: They show who they are & what they offer, hoping to be perceived as attractive. A solid employer brand is still a must-have for web3 companies to have unfair advantages in the talent war. The thing is, while the number of jobs posted in web3 has tripled since 2021, the number of applicants grew 8x during the same time.
That means the companies have the leverage and can carefully select web3 native (or at least fluent), experienced, skilled, vocal & culturally aligned talent.
As a talent looking to enter the space, you need to become more attractive by building up your talent brand.
To get a job in web3, you have to go through 3 stages:
Learn about web3
Contribute to web3
Join web3
I’ve seen many people trying to jump straight to stage 3, applying to web3 jobs without even having a wallet. If you skip steps 1 & 2 and go directly to step 3, you’re basically showing companies that you’re passive & don’t care enough. Think about the parallel with going from big corporations to startups: The cultural shift is important, so take it seriously.
Learn about web3
Web3 is hard to get. Very, very hard to get. It takes at least 6-9 months of active evening & weekend research to get a broad understanding of the space.
Your goal shouldn’t be to learn everything because that’s simply impossible. The space moves faster than you, keeping up with everything and still doing your current job is too much.
Your goal is to become web3-fluent: You want to deeply understand the core concepts and be able to engage in serious conversations.
Go through a program like Operation 3 or join a community of peers where you can learn intensively and ask questions (even ones that might seem stupid).
Choose a rabbit hole, a.k.a. a topic of interest: DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, Gaming, or Infrastructure. Even then, exploring DeFi and understanding all the concepts/players will take months. You can decide to focus on something even more niche, such as web3 enterprise solutions or social tokens.
Go where web3 is: Personal accounts on Twitter, Telegram groups, Discord servers, quality newsletters… Avoid web3 LinkedIn/Tiktok content at all costs.
Learn about the culture, going beyond the concepts, use cases, and tech. Web3 is just as much a cultural shift as it is a technological revolution. Learn all the codes, jargon, memes & more if you’re not already familiar with them.
Contribute to web3
Wait, why would I need to contribute?
Learning about web3 isn’t enough to guarantee you a job, it’s simply a prerequisite. You need to go well beyond that and publicly show you’re into web3.
This is what the talent brand is all about.
Web3 is about decentralization. Decentralization is about ownership and autonomy. That translates into the work realm, too. Even if you’re not going to work for a DAO, but rather for a web3 company/startup, the cultural aspects of decentralization dominate the way work is structured.
In web3, you’re not joining as a mere employee executing orders, but as an independent actor with your own agency. Companies aren’t looking for passive employees, but for assets.
Your role as a core team member will be closer to that of a creator/influencer/networker - a contributor to web3 as a whole before being the employee of startup X. People will expect you to go beyond your job, act independently, take responsibility, and have a public presence.
In startups, founders have personal brands. In web3, everybody has a personal brand.
Besides learning, these are the things you should do:
Do stuff on-chain (if you’re not using the blockchain, what are you even doing here?)
Set up & pimp your Twitter account
Tweet about topics of interest
Show you understand the codes and want to be part of web3 (don’t just tweet WAGMI all day, figure out what is lame vs. what isn’t)
Create content in places other than Twitter (write articles, launch a newsletter or podcast)
Join web3 communities
Contribute to DAOs
Go to live events and hackathons
Build side projects
Web3 is a two-sided coin: You’re either trading or building. Choose your team. If you spend your time retweeting NFT giveaways or talking about pumps & dumps, that won’t send the right signal to employers. Companies want to see that you’re aligned with the interests of the web3 movement and care about decentralization. They’re looking for missionaries, not mercenaries obsessed with short-term returns.
Even if you want to join the B2B/infra side of web3, embracing the culture is relevant. Here are accounts from founding team members of large web3 B2B companies:
It doesn’t mean that you have to copy anyone. Find your own voice & style.
Ideally, don’t do step 1 and then move on to step 2. Start posting & contributing from day one. Don’t be afraid of sounding stupid. Be active, learn, iterate.
Join web3
After doing all of that, you might realize that web3 isn’t for you - that’s fine. But if you’ve spent enough time learning and contributing to the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be attracted to joining web3 full-time.
Doing all the above is the best way to guarantee you a job. The vital prerequisites are playing with the blockchain & being Twitter-ready (companies don’t care that much about your LinkedIn).
But there’s one last thing you should do before applying: Reframe your expectations.
Embrace early-stage & chaos or don’t join web3 - we’re early anon.
Web3 companies follow a power law distribution. 20% of the companies are large ones (think Coinbase), but 80% of the companies are small ones occupying the long tail (under 20 people or so).
The space is still in its early days, but it did attract a lot of venture capital over the past two years. There are many early-stage startups hiring - this is where you’ll probably land a job. You’re not just joining web3, you’re also most probably joining a very early-stage startup.
“Web3 + early-stage” comes with major caveats:
Your web2 job - & your title - probably doesn’t exist in web3. Be ok with that. You’ll create your own version of your job.
You’ll have multiple jobs at the same time, especially if you are non-technical. Most of the teams have 60-80% tech employees and very few “business” positions. If you lead the community, you’ll do way more than just managing a Discord. Be ready, anticipate, and don’t get held up by the title.
Brand new jobs are emerging: Tokenomist, Smart contract Developer, Game Theorist, Protocol Specialist… Explore new paths and learn specific knowledge to get access to those jobs.
If you’re a tech talent who’s new to web3 with zero smart contract experience, don’t bother trying to get a smart contract job. Smart contracts are extremely sensitive, so companies want to make sure the person handling them has experience. Ideally, take other tech roles (front/back/data) and upskill or start building tools & NFT collections before applying, making sure you can show resilient contracts to your future employer.
If you’re a senior (8+ years experience) business profile, target more established companies to keep the same lifestyle. Otherwise, understand the potential equity upside and take that into account during salary negotiations. Bet on the right horse. Once again, you have to be OK with ending up with a larger or different scope.
These caveats apply to the startup long tail. You can also join large web3 companies (Binance, FTX, Coinbase, Consensys, Ledger), but there aren’t too many of those around yet.
The other option is to join a DAO full-time. The best way to do that is to start contributing to the DAOs you like and transition into a full-time job as soon as you see an opportunity.
Exceptions exist everywhere, even in web3. But if you go through the steps, you’ll dramatically increase your odds of getting a job in the space.
We’re working on something to help you identify and assess work opportunities in web3, so follow Jericho and stay tuned by subscribing below.
Web3 work opportunities
Kiln (staking-as-a-service) is hiring a Senior Back-End Engineer
Sismo (reputational ZK badges) is hiring a Front-end / Product Engineer
Rarible (NFT marketplace) is hiring a Partnership Manager
Drew is looking for two co-founders (tech & growth) for Frens (web3 community growth software)
Roch is looking for Product Marketing Designer freelancer
Let’s fucking build,
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Moon