Hiring for Blockchain

Hey you!

Welcome back to “that’s what she said”, your friendly neighbourhood newsletter where I try to make sense of the chaos that is building in web3.

Instead of my usual rambling about web3 fundamentals, I'm doing a book summary. I recently finished "Hiring for Blockchain" by Harrison Wright, and it’s for sure a solid starting point for anyone trying to hire in this fast-moving industry.

Harrison's been recruiting since before LinkedIn was even a thing, starting his career back in 2009 during the financial crisis. The book is basically him distilling nearly two decades of hard-won experience into a framework that works for the web3 space.

So grab your coffee, settle in, and let me walk you through what I learned.

💡 The Truth About Hiring

Harrison opens with an uncomfortable truth from a 2005 Leadership IQ study that surveyed over 20,000 hires across 312 organisations: almost half of all hires fail within 18 months, and only 19% achieve what you'd call "unequivocal success".

Here's the real kicker about why those hires failed: only 11% of hiring failures are due to a lack of technical skills. The rest? Lack of coachability (26%), emotional intelligence (23%), motivation (17%), and wrong temperament (15%). Though the research was conducted 20 years ago, the author is referring to it as the only large-scale observational study comprehensively addressing this topic.

What about web3? Harrison argues that if we had similar data for crypto, it would probably look worse due to short tenures, constant market swings and global competition.

🧭 Industrial Age VS Information Age

The book's main thesis is simple but powerful: we're using Industrial Age hiring practices in an Information Age industry, and that's why we're all struggling. Harrison breaks down how the entire hiring landscape has flipped:

The Old World (Industrial Age):

• Finding candidates was genuinely hard.
• Reaching them was labour-intensive (calling switchboards, researching directories).
• Getting them interested was relatively easy.
• Competition was mostly local, maybe national.
• People stayed in jobs for years, sometimes decades.
• The gap between average and high performance was moderate.

Our World (Information Age):

• Finding candidates is trivial (everyone's on LinkedIn).
• Reaching them is easy (one click away).
• Getting their actual attention is brutally hard (everyone's drowning in noise).
• Competition is global (your hire could be anywhere).
• Average tenure keeps dropping.
• The gap between average and high performance is extreme.

The recruitment industry evolved to solve the finding problem, so that problem no longer exists. Harrison puts it bluntly: "It's not about finding candidates. It's about creating them".

🎯 What Top Performers Care About

In this section, Harrison argues that conventional hiring focuses on all the wrong things. The typical job ad reads like: "We're a dynamic team looking for a rockstar developer with 5-10 years of experience, who's passionate about blockchain, with great communication skills. We offer competitive salary, health insurance, and remote work flexibility". Cool. So does everyone else.

Harrison's fundamental insight: top performers are producers. The organising principle of their life is production-oriented. They're driven to build, learn, adapt, improve, achieve excellence, and deliver impact. Some might even prefer Mondays to Fridays. If they're an OG, they might already be crypto-rich, but retirement? That's for other people. So instead of listing perks, Harrison says: sell the work, not the perks.

Tell them exactly how they can build with you. Talk about the real work that needs to be done, the objectives that need to be accomplished, and the hellish roadblocks that must be overcome. Paint a vision of the mountain they must climb. Describe your metrics for success and your high, uncompromising standards. In short, sell them the hero's journey. This will scare average people away. But to a top performer? It resonates powerfully.

Harrison breaks down what exceptional people evaluate:

The Fundamentals

• Compelling use case (solving a real problem vs. another undifferentiated NFT marketplace).
• Founder pedigree (why should someone follow them into hell and back?).
• Team quality (winners want to work with winners).
• Funding and runway (nobody wants a ship that's sinking in 3 months).
• Tokenomics and cap table (if you joined during the bull and tokens are down 90%, can you ever make that up?).

Purpose, Mastery, and Self-Actualisation

Harrison gets philosophical here. Post-industrial humanity is drowning in material abundance but starving for meaning. High performers already have a strong sense of purpose. Your job isn't to give them purpose; it's to show them how working with you helps them live their purpose, achieve mastery, and become who they want to be.

Mission and Values

The Simon Sinek reference is inevitable. Most companies talk about what they do and how they do it. Exceptional companies talk about why first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. It's okay to be polarising. If you try to appeal to everyone, you'll inspire no one.

🫠 The Discovery Phase

Before you recruit anyone, Harrison says you need to nail down exactly what you're hiring for. Most people skip this step entirely or do it half-heartedly, which is why they often end up with the wrong person. He lists nine common mistakes:

• Over-emphasising experience. If someone can do in 2 years what others need 10 years for, they're obviously better. But your "5-10 years required" filter just ruled them out.
• Over-emphasising technical skills. Remember that 11% stat? Stop optimising for the least predictive thing.
• Under-emphasising soft skills. EQ, problem-solving, and dealing with setbacks — this is the lifeblood of accomplishment.
• Superficial culture fit based on likeability. People tend to like those who are like them. That doesn't mean they'll work well together.
• Vague understanding of required outcomes. If you can't define what success looks like in specific terms, you're not ready to hire anyone.
• "We'll know it when we see it". No, you won't. This is just hoping luck finds you.
• Stringent but wrong criteria. Making your talent pool tiny without any actual benefit.
• Weak consensus. When everyone has input but nobody owns the decision, you end up with the most vanilla, mediocre candidate.
• Little attention to marketability. If your role isn't competitive, nothing else matters.

Instead, Harrison recommends a proper discovery process:

• Define clear objectives. Not "grow the community" but "drive a $10m increase in TVL by the end of Q4". Specific, measurable, ideally time-bound.
• Define the workflow. How will those objectives actually get achieved? Two competing projects might hire salespeople, but if one uses rigid cold outreach and the other uses relationship-based partnerships, they need completely different people.
• Reverse-engineer the profile. Based on objectives and workflow, what does the ideal person's track record look like? Focus on accomplishments and impact, not skills checklists and years of experience.
• Understand what's inherent vs. learnable. A great C++ programmer can learn Rust. But you can't train toughness, discipline, or emotional stability. Know which traits are dealbreakers.
• Culture match and values. Not superficial likeability but deep stuff: approaches to problem-solving, conflict resolution, handling of ethical dilemmas, degrees of hierarchy, process vs. outcome orientation.
• Spectrum of performance indicators. Can you tell the difference between the 60th and 80th percentile? That's where most hires land, and it's critical to get it right.
• Value proposition. All this selection work means nothing if you can't first solicit their interest.

The output of discovery should be a detailed written profile that all stakeholders have signed off on. Get alignment upfront, not after months of wasted effort.

📩 Outreach: Real Headhunting

Here's where the book gets really tactical. Harrison shares what he considers the most effective recruiting email he's ever sent: "Is it a good time to talk to a headhunter?". That's it. That's the whole message. Intrigue, curiosity, and selling the conversation, not the job.

He emphasises that recruitment outreach shouldn't try to generate interest in your position immediately. Instead, it should open space for a conversation about what's wrong with the prospect's current situation. Because here's the thing — you need to make two sales: the need for change and your opportunity as the solution.

Most people skip straight to #2, which only works on people who've already sold themselves on #1 (active job seekers). But the best candidates haven't sold themselves on needing change yet.

Principles for Effective Outreach

• Be unique and use pattern interrupts. If thought leaders on LinkedIn are promoting a tactic, it's already overplayed. Do something different.
• Be persistent. Aim for 7-10 points of contact. Harrison shares a story about a candidate who responded after the 11th touchpoint. Many of his best placements come from those later messages.
• Use multi-channel outreach. String email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, and phone calls together. Calling someone while simultaneously sending an email and a Twitter DM is a powerful pattern interrupt (but use sparingly).
• Be relevant. Persistence without relevance is just annoying. The weight of your message must match the tenacity of your outreach.
• Pay attention to trigger events. Funding rounds, layoffs, leadership changes. People who survived layoffs are often more nervous than those who got laid off, but you'll have less competition for their attention.
• Do what others aren't willing to do. Pick up the damn phone. Seriously, Harrison generates over half his candidates from cold calling. Leave voicemails even if you don't reach them — it humanises you.

The best recruits are often the hardest to reach. Just because someone's eager to talk doesn't mean they're the right hire. And just because someone's hard to reach doesn't mean they're not interested.

🤓 Understanding the Four Types of Candidates

Not everyone who talks to you is actually a candidate. Harrison breaks down four types:

• Active — Currently looking for a new role.
• Passive — Keeping an eye out but not actively searching.
• Committed — Not moving under any realistic circumstance.
• Prospects — Have problems with their current situation, but haven't realised they need to change.

That fourth group is where the magic happens. These are people too devoted to their work to spend time thinking about what's wrong. But if you can help them see the gap, they'll only interview with you — not five other companies.

The Vision-Pain-Gap Framework

When you get someone on the phone/Zoom call, don't pitch your job. Instead, set expectations: "I'm sure this is where you're expecting me to tell you about some amazing opportunity, but I'm not going to do that. I find these conversations are far more productive if we first talk about you and your career situation, what's working, what's not working. Then I'll let you know if we're in a position to help you achieve your goals. Sounds fair?"

Then walk through:

• The Vision. Ask them to describe their ideal job, ideal career, and ideal life. Get them talking. Get them a little emotional about it. Don't settle for vague generalities; dig in with follow-up questions. Many people have never actually articulated this. High performers especially tend to be so focused on executing that they neglect to reflect on whether they're heading in the right direction.
• The Pain. Now flip it: "If you look at your ideal future and where you are today, what's missing?". Some people will immediately vent. Others will play it close: "It's pretty good, really". Push gently: "When you say pretty good, do you mean you're 100% happy? Or is there some room for improvement?". What you're looking for is admission of a problem. Then explore the implications — the current or future pain caused by that problem. Harrison warns: if the only pain is compensation, be wary. Money-chasers will leave you the same way they left their last employer. But if they're obviously underpaid and the pain is resentment from feeling undervalued? That's different.
• The Gap. By exploring vision and pain, you're creating a gap in the prospect's mind between current reality and ideal future. The larger the gap, the greater the motivation for change.

For most people, avoiding pain is a far greater motivator than attaining pleasure. This is why pitching jobs to "passive candidates" generates so many declined offers and flakes. Interest doesn't equal commitment.

You need both: solving their problems and offering an opportunity to reach their vision. Then ask yourself: can you bridge this gap? If yes, you've got a real candidate. If no, better to pass — even if they're incredibly talented.

🙌 Interviews Are Broken

Harrison opens this section with a reality check: there's no secret hack to great interviewing. Over a large enough sample size, you'll never have a 100% success rate. Some hires will fail. But what's realistic? Raising your hiring average from the 60th percentile to the 80th percentile, with some percentage of rockstars in the top 5%.

What Most People Get Wrong

• Ill-defined structure. Some people literally wing it, opening the candidate's resume 30 seconds before the Zoom starts. "Just do it" might be good productivity advice, but it's terrible for interviews.
• Inconsistency. Conversations flow in completely different directions depending on chemistry. Without a consistent process, objective evaluation is impossible.
• Cognitive bias. People make decisions emotionally, then justify with logic.
• Poor questioning. Either irrelevant "gotcha" questions or surface-level questions that barely scratch beyond the resume.
• Non-predictive criteria. Harrison calls out LeetCode-style challenges. Sure, some people can solve obscure algorithms under pressure. But is that actually the job? Big Tech can get away with this because armies of motivated people will jump through any hoop. You're not Big Tech.
• No process for granular differentiation. Anyone can spot the obviously incompetent vs. the rockstar. But can you tell the difference between the 60th percentile and the 80th percentile? That's where most hires land, and it's critical to get it right.
• Neglecting the selling aspect. All the discernment in the world doesn't help if your preferred candidate declines. Your interview process should be optimised for conversion.

What Actually Works

• Documented, consistent structure. Create a systematic process that's executed the same way every time. This makes measurement possible, ensures all candidates get similar treatment, and removes "key person risk".
• Objective and process-oriented evaluation. Don't just evaluate skills. Evaluate their proven ability to achieve the concrete objectives you identified in discovery, using the processes that work in your environment.
• Peel back the onion. Depth matters more than breadth. Spend 15+ minutes having candidates walk through specific projects that relate to your requirements. Ask follow-ups: What results did you expect? What challenges did you hit? How did you overcome them? Where did you exceed expectations? What would you do differently?
  Harrison gives an example: hiring a VP of Engineering who needs to scale from 5 to 45 people in 9 months. Don't just ask if they've done it — spend significant time understanding exactly how they did it, what went wrong, what resources they had, what they learned.
• Process for discerning granular differences. Ask yourself: "What's the difference between a good and great person in this role?". The answers are often more esoteric than typical interview questions cover:
• Rigorous yet decisive. You can execute a meticulous interview in 2-3 weeks. Most cases only need three steps: performance-oriented interview (1-3 hours depending on seniority), working interview or take-home assignment mirroring actual work and an informal call to meet the team (more for rapport than evaluation).
• Use a scorecard. Harrison uses a modified version of Lou Adler's Performance-based Hiring scorecard (motivation for change, work history review, technical competence, motivation, EQ, problem-solving, planning, track record, growth trend, culture match, character, potential; 2-3 individual projects deep-dived, 1-2 team projects, candidate interest level). Each factor gets a 1-5 score. When interviewers disagree, they must justify their position like a jury.
• Focus on character, EQ, culture match, and work style. Notice that most scorecard points aren't technical skills? That's intentional. Most failures happen for other reasons.
• High will, not just high skill. Harrison defines will as drive, motivation, stamina, tenacity, and pain tolerance in your environment. For many roles, high will beats high skill. All the talent in the world is useless without application. One warning: don't mistake enthusiasm to get the job for enthusiasm to do the work. Assess their past attitude and commitment, and evaluate whether your environment unleashes or stifles their drive.
• Optimise for conversion. Being rigorous and fast helps. So does including an informal "meet the team" call for building rapport. For some candidates, roll out the red carpet — fly them in, wine and dine them. The combination of an extremely demanding process plus a powerful welcome for those who make the cut is incredibly effective. Who doesn't want to join an exclusive club?
• Include a working interview. Engineering teams already do coding challenges. Apply this to every role. For BD, have them work with the team for half a day. For marketing, give them a real campaign challenge. Make it mirror actual work conditions as closely as possible.

🤝 Offer Management

You've done months of work. Don't lose the candidate at the end, lay the groundwork at the very beginning:

• Focus on creating candidates. If someone has five offers, you'll statistically close one in five. But if you recruited someone not on the market? They have a binary choice: stay or go. This is why Harrison says they accept over 90% of offers.
• Bridge the pain-vision gap. Curiosity isn't commitment. If you didn't polarise this earlier, you'll end up with time-wasters who interview everywhere but never leave.
• Make your offering competitive. All those fundamentals we talked about earlier? They all impact offer acceptance. The best recruiter in the world can't work miracles if your project sucks.
• Provide exceptional candidate experience. Candidates judge what working for you will be like based on your interview process. Professional, thorough, efficient? Good sign. Disorganised, inconsistent, poor communication? Red flag.
• Address counter-offers early. As soon as interest is confirmed, ask: "Hypothetically, let's say we make you an offer and you're delighted to accept. Time to resign. How do you think your boss will react? What will they do to keep you?". If there is a counteroffer risk, know upfront. Revisit this at every stage to avoid surprises.

Mastering the Close

Offer acceptance isn't a one-time event. It's a process from first contact to day one.

• Re-qualify constantly. At every interview and substantive interaction, ask:
  - How would you rate this opportunity 1-10?
  - How does this compare to your current situation and other opportunities?
  - Any concerns at this point?
  - If we made an offer, any reason you wouldn't accept?
  - Has anything changed since we last spoke?
  Their interest should increase with each interaction. If it's flat or declining, you'll have problems later.
• Test the offer before extending it. Say something like: "We're impressed with you. We're considering making an offer, probably in the X-Y range. How would you feel about that?" (suggest slightly lower than you'll actually offer to exceed expectations). If they hesitate or want to think about it, dig in: "What exactly would you need to think about?".
  
  The real problem might be fear of change, not your offer. Your job is to get behind the smokescreen, identify the real hesitation, and resolve it before formally offering. If they say yes enthusiastically, you have the green light. But if you sense any hesitation, probe gently: "When you say you'll probably accept, what do you mean by that?". Sometimes you can't get 100% commitment. But it's better to know what you're dealing with.
• Time it right. Present the offer when their interest has peaked and they're filled with anticipation (and a little insecure they won't get one). The longer you wait past this point, the more interest declines.
• Think long-term. Don't make a lowball offer just because you can. Agreements made under pressure create resentment. Make a fair offer that will keep them saying no to headhunters a year from now. Customer retention is cheaper than acquisition. Same for employees.

The Dead Zone

The deal isn't done until day one. The time between offer acceptance and start date is dangerous, especially with European-style multi-month notice periods. Harrison says you need a concrete engagement plan:

• Hiring manager touches base at least weekly.
• Team members reach out every two weeks.
• Invite them to meetings, Zoom socials, and in-person events.
• Send a welcome video (doesn't have to be fancy).
• Send a welcome gift (book + handwritten note).
• Send their business cards and laptop immediately.
• Get them into Slack/Discord and involved in work that sets them up for success.

Don't wait for day one to make them feel like part of the team.

💪 Retention: Hard to Get, Even Harder to Keep

Short tenures plus high cost of turnover plus hard to replace equals maximum pain. But first, an important point: not all turnover is bad.

The Three Role Archetypes

• The Builder needs to create something from scratch. Visionaries, creatives, and entrepreneurs thrive here.
• The Improver/Optimiser takes an existing foundation and makes it bigger/better. Scale-up operators.
• The Maintainer keeps things running smoothly. Corporate world.

Jobs evolve through this lifecycle. The same position often benefits from different people at different stages. Builders get bored once there's no new horizon. That's not bad turnover, that's natural evolution.

Sometimes a role hits maintenance because the person has maxed out their ability. A new person with a fresh perspective finds growth opportunities the previous person couldn't see.

Minimising Unwanted Turnover

• Don't misrepresent the position. If it's a brutal uphill battle with long hours, present it as a virtuous struggle, not sunshine and rainbows. Otherwise, they'll feel you sold them a lemon.
• Ensure paths remain aligned. You recruited them by bridging their pain-vision gap. That never stops being important. Why were you able to recruit them? Because those needs stopped being met at their previous company.
• Don't hold people back. Short-sighted managers keep people in roles they've outgrown because "they're just too good at what they do". Build a culture of growth and upward mobility. Then, instead of terrifying resignation, you get two wins: giving them and their replacement bigger opportunities.
• Don't let comp slip due to tenure. You don't need to throw crazy money around. Just try to make the comp reflect the current contribution relative to the market. Token packages are especially tricky in crypto. Bull market hires got generous allocations that crashed 99%. New bear market hires get way more tokens for the same USD amount. Your bull market people now have an obvious incentive to leave and get better allocations elsewhere.
• Actually have a retention plan. Most teams don't. Just like you need a roadmap, marketing strategy and hiring plan, you need a retention strategy.

Final Thoughts

"Hiring for Blockchain" is Harrison Wright's attempt to bring recruiting practices into the Information Age. The bottleneck in hiring shifted from finding candidates to creating them, but not that many companies updated their approach.

The book lays out a seven-step framework (Discovery, Scouting, Courtship, Discernment, Assessment, Offer Management, Retention) that systematises how to:

• Define what you actually need (not what you think you need).
• Build a target market of potential candidates.
• Break through noise with persistent multi-channel outreach.
• Create candidates by helping them see the gap between where they are and want to be.
• Interview with depth and consistency.
• Close offers by constantly qualifying and testing before extending.
• Retain through alignment, growth opportunities, and fair compensation.

What makes the book particularly valuable for web3 is that Harrison understands the unique challenges of our space: short tenures, extreme market volatility, global talent competition, token compensation complexities, and the shift from hierarchical to decentralised org structures.

If you're a web3 founder trying to figure out why your hiring keeps missing the mark, or a talent partner starting your career in web3 and wondering why traditional recruiting tactics feel so ineffective in this space, this book is a must-read. It won't solve all your problems overnight, but it will give you a foundation to build on that actually accounts for the reality of hiring in our industry.

Until next time, may your web3 hires be exceptional ❤️

Cookies He Left Behind

Check out the books the author recommended below:

• Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring by Lou Adler
• Recruit Rockstars by Jeff Hyman
• Topgrading by Brad Smart
• Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
• Search and Placement! A Handbook for Success by Larry Nobles
• The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous