As I pointed out in a recent post, the number of roles we need to fill in the ecosystem is growing, and we are not filling them quickly enough. This means we don’t have the systems and/or people in place for our decentralized environment to describe needs and find talent to match the scope of our ambitions.
Scoping the HR Manager
I propose that OpenGov hires an “HR Manager” (working title) to attack the issue and help the ecosystem build the systems to help match talent and roles. The person we should look for has professional experience in HR and Talent acquisition. They understand the nature of Web3 and are a culture-fit to Polkadot. They have enough people skills to talk with ecosystem agents to identify role needs and talk with talent to screen them. They understand processes and can build systems that work without them.
Rough outline of the role:
Talent Operations
Own & iterate the OpenJobs board - structure, taxonomy, analytics.
Build and nurture a qualified candidate database; run light screening interviews; shepherd candidates to teams or OpenGov flows.
Community & Process
Work with bounties, collectives, parachain and tooling teams to find talent gaps and turn fuzzy needs into clearly defined job descriptions.
Design & document the end‑to‑end matching workflow so that future contributors can run it.
Host or co‑host virtual job fairs / speed‑matching calls; experiment with bounty‑matchathons.
Support talent in the ecosystem navigate the complexities of OpenGov.
Data & Reporting
Track headcount, salary bands, and funnel metrics
Publish a monthly talent & hiring dashboard for ecosystem stakeholders.
I have written a draft role description and published it at the OpenJobs board: Ecosystem HR Manager
Execution Plan
I initiatiated the first public discussion in a recent AAG episode. You can find the segment here: “Should we hire a hiring manager”
I want to get feedback from OpenGov quickly to determine if we should move forward with this.
The plan, starting today:
2 Weeks: Gather and incorporate feedback
4 weeks: OpenGov referendum
4 weeks: hiring call for applications with defined cutoff date, rolling screening calls, 2-3 rounds of interviews
I think the quickest path to execution would be for OpenGov to appoint a set of 3 or 5 curators that are trusted with 1 year of salary + overhead costs for the role. The curators would do the actual interviews/hiring decision and then pay the HR manager a monthly salary as long as performance matches expectations. This creates a clear social contract with predictability for the HR manager while keeping open a strong feedback loop with OpenGov during the period.
The OpenGov proposal I have in mind would either send funds to a pure proxy multisig or a bounty controlled by the curators.
This thread
This thread asks for feedback on the role and the execution plan.
Please do:
provide constructive feedback on the role description
provide qualified feedback on the proper payment for the role (it would be highly appreciated if you only chime in if you have knowledge about what proper salaries are for such kind of global remote HR roles; if you don’t, please don’t)
provide constructive feedback on how to execute the hiring/managing of the role
looks good overall and I’m supportive of the idea. Would make sense to have someone that represents the ecosystem.
This can save cost to builders and help have a central point to direct candidates to!
I’m highly in favor of this as well, and I hope we can further enable professionals to make a living through OpenGov.
Lately, I’ve been reaching out to teams to make more use of our Polkadot.com-Jobsboard. Here, I want to point out that the solution automatically crawls for job openings from companies that have an actual jobs/career page. I’m currently aware of 16 projects and waiting for input from our ecosystem. If there are more, please send them my way to create more transparency - it’s important to show that Polkadot is open for talent!
BTW: we still have the DF recipient IPTS - but I don’t know how stuff works with them.
I’m not an HR professional myself, but I recently did an analysis of the GitLab Handbook for an HR Management class. Considering their business is a global, remote-only workplace and they are a “handbook-first” organization which solves problems by defining clear policies and standards, their open source handbook could act as a blueprint for an OpenGov “Polkadot Operating System”
The handbook is released under CC BY-SA 4.0
This might be a resource to draw inspiration to align OpenGov processes and procedures, at least from an operational standpoint.
Hey, Daniel here, leading the Talent team at Parity. We agree that improving the way we hire within the ecosystem will contribute towards solving some of the unique challenges associated with a decentralised environment.
To set us up for success, we would like to address the following:
Role clarification
Hiring process
Curator model
Employment solutions, Compensation / Rewards
Tooling & Resources
Success Metrics
Compliance (some knowledge will be necessary)
HR Support
“HR Manager” seems to cover a broad range of responsibilities, duties and responsibilities outlined in the post here, such as managing job boards, conducting candidate screenings, and coordinating with various teams. In my experience, this profile more closely corresponds to that of a Recruitment Coordinator, rather than a HR Manager, who specialises in HR Compliance, payroll etc. This distinction is important to ensure that we attract candidates with the appropriate expertise.
Parity is prepared to actively participate in the hiring process by:
Providing talent acquisition expertise, offering insights into effective recruitment strategies;
Assisting in role definition, helping to outline the responsibilities and qualifications for the Recruitment Coordinator position;
Supporting onboarding and integration, ensuring the selected candidate is integrated well in the ecosystem.
Should the community decide to adopt a curator model for overseeing this role, Parity is happy to nominate a qualified individual to serve as a curator. This person would contribute to the initiative in the scope of their role at Parity, at no additional cost to the Polkadot Treasury.
Understanding the complexities of employment in a decentralised context, Parity can offer guidance on structuring employment arrangements that are compliant and flexible.
We look forward to collaborating with the community on this initiative and we believe that we can significantly contribute to the success of this initiative. We are currently reaching out to Alice&Bob to discuss this further.
Thanks for calling us out @DotDotApe ! This type of ecosystem-focused hiring initiative is exactly why we pushed to get our DF grant across the finish line. For those of you who are not aware of our team, our team started out as the hiring team for Protocol Labs (IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, etc.), and then expanded to support the entire Protocol Labs Network over the past 4 years. We moved into the Polkadot ecosystem with our DF grant and have been supporting a number of ecosystem teams over the last year with direct hiring support and other recruitment guidance.
In terms of the role @alice_und_bob has laid out, I connected with him last week to hear a bit about it. The role certainly touches a lot of HR/Talent things, but after reading through this more, I feel more of an operational leader is needed in this position that can organize all of these things, but not necessarily do them all on their own. We have an equivalent person in the Protocol Labs Network that does this and her role is definitely heavy on operations and coordination of different groups, and less on her handling a lot of minutiae related to talent and HR.
As a proposal, we could make a small adjustment to our DF grant to cover the entire cost of hiring this role and then the current DF grant structure we have would allow us to support everything else listed that touches talent. For specifics:
“Owning and iterating on the OpenJobs board.” Our team already handles the job board for the Protocol Labs Network and can either work to take this on completely or partner with this new hire to build out structure around it.
“Building and nurturing a qualified candidate database.” Our DF grant is already structured for us to directly support hiring with any Polkadot ecosystem team. We already have a database of 200k+ candidates from 4+ years of hiring and could obviously handle additions to that database and initial screens for teams or OpenGov flows within our current grant.
“Work with bounties, collectives, parachain and tooling teams to find talent gaps and turn fuzzy needs into clearly defined job descriptions.” We already do this with individual Polkadot ecosystem companies and have a portion of our DF grant for “advisory services” to allow us to allocate time to companies for this type of guidance and support.
“Design and document the end-to-end matching workflow.” I have no hesitancy we can help here as we have built and supported 100s of web3 hiring processes. We just need to understand the outcomes we are looking for and are happy to partner with everyone here to document and add structure to the workflow.
“Host or co-host virtual job fairs / speed-matching calls” Support for events is also already outlined in our DF grant. If we end up hiring for this role, we can definitely partner to support both virtual and in-person hiring-related events.
“Support talent in the ecosystem navigate the complexities of OpenGov.” This is relatively vague, but I’m sure we can support this as we understand the scale/scope of the outcomes here.
“Track headcount, salary bands, funnel metrics.” We already track this for the Protocol Labs Network and can provide similar data to whoever would be hired in this role. That is huge part of the benefit of partnering with our team is we have the tools and systems in place on the backend to keep track of this already.
“Publish a monthly talent and hiring dashboard for ecosystem stakeholders.” Partnering on this can also fall under our current DF grants structure. Whether it comes from us or we just provide data and insights for this new hire to present, we are fine either way.
In relation to the suggestion around curators and their compensation, I would need to understand the scale/scope of the roles in the ecosystem before making a suggestion here. On its surface, 1 year of salary + overhead costs seems like a lot for just conducting interviews and making hiring decisions. I’d be happy to suggest other structures - but need to understand this better.
Lastly, I also chatted with Lucy about this potential role and it sounds like there are some structures in place already that can also help take on some of this responsibility and potentially assist with the curating. I’ll let her chime in.
Regardless of where this lands, we’re ready to jump in and support in any way needed.
