Hiring an Ecosystem HR Manager

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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
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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!

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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.

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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.