Demand
The number of roles we need to fill in the ecosystem is growing.
Some examples:
- PCF Directors: The 3 community spots have not been filled since inception
- Bounties
- The same ~20 people are always asked to curate bounties
- Bounty operatives in numerous bounties would help a lot
- Ambassador Fellowship: Lots of ideas for useful jobs to do
- Numerous “gigs”: We need Block Explorers, Tax Tools, better developer support, better docs, more evangelism, more regional marketing representation etc…
These roles are obvious to ecosystem insiders, but not the casual community member or person looking for a job. They are non-traditional jobs, which prevents them from being properly reflected in traditional talent agencies and job boards.
Supply
On the other hand, I am certain there is an overflow of talent in the community, of people going through PBA, hackathons etc, that are looking for non-technical, non-founder jobs and they don’t know there to look or how to apply.
So we have supply, we have demand, but the two don’t connect.
Conclusion: We need a more efficient job market for the ecosystem.
Current solutions
There is the “official” Polkadot Jobs board, but it is only listing traditional jobs. The W3F has also contracted IPTS to help with talent, but again, this is for traditional roles.
I hear that Pala Labs is also working on a jobs board.
However, I believe the current problem is not coming from a “we miss the right tools” angle, but rather “we haven’t set up the right social process to connect supply and demand”
Ideally, we would have an “HR Lead Polkadot Ecosystem”. I think finding such a person would help us immensely. However, until we have that person, we should not rest.
I think finding competent people to help projects in Polkadot succeed is one of our biggest long-term bottlenecks right now.
Near-term solution
To attack this project in the near-term, I have decided to dedicate half my time for the next 2-3 months to manually match supply and demand in the ecosystem. I also do this selfishly because it is my biggest blocker right now to bring the Polkadot Growth Strategy into execution.
I will execute on the following tasks:
- Create a jobs board
- Create a people board
- Match jobs and people
Some first details:
- Fill the jobs board
- personally reach out to bounties, ambassador fellowship, and ecosystem teams to determine their needs and roles to be filled, develop job postings together
- create job postings from the the OpenGov.Watch backlog of ecosystem issues and the current version of the Polkadot Growth Strategy
- Fill the people board
- advertise the people board to gather applications from people including their resumes and skillsets
- Match jobs and people
- interview the most promising candidates to fill details on their profile
- suggest them to teams
- help promising candidates that need to go through OpenGov to navigate the process
Current Status
I have create the OpenJobs Board. It is not beautiful, but it does the job. It includes one table of current Job Openings and one table for People. I will now get to work filling those tables.
How you can get involved
- If you are working in the eco and need to get a role filled, please fill out this form: Post a Job
- If you are looking for a job, please fill out this form: Post your Profile - NOTE: The data will be public!
- If you can help in any other way or want to sync, please reach out on Telegram @alice_und_bob or book a call with me
- I am not an HR person, so I will be continuously be looking for a real HR person to take over this role from me. If you are that person, please reach out
I will be posting updates as this situation develops.