Original Title: Hiring in crypto: When blockchain experience is essential — and when it's not
Original Authors: Ian Dutra, Craig Naylor, a16z Crypto
Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
As the development of the crypto industry has spawned a huge demand for talent, crypto founders need to know how to find and recruit excellent talent—both crypto-native individuals and those with traditional technical experience. However, one of the biggest questions is: do you need to hire people with crypto industry experience, or those who can learn about the industry? This has sparked endless debates within companies.
The good news is that the cryptocurrency industry is not the first to face difficulties in talent pipelines. This means you can draw on some mature practical experiences to find the right talent with the right skills. The purpose of this guide is to help founders and recruiters determine when crypto industry experience is crucial, when other types of experience can have the greatest impact, and the challenges and considerations that need to be addressed during the hiring process.
To simplify the thinking, understand it this way: crypto companies do have some differences from traditional tech companies, but in terms of the processes and best practices for finding, hiring, and onboarding talent, you are not building a "crypto company" but a tech company. Therefore, be sure to apply those mature best practices to find talent with the right skills.
You Need Talent with Both Crypto-Native and Traditional Skills
The rule of thumb is that crypto-native professionals have a crucial advantage: they can start working immediately. High-stakes projects are often time-sensitive, and every day counts. Sometimes, native cryptocurrency expertise is essential. This is especially true for positions involving blockchain technology and its application infrastructure, where even the most skilled professionals may face a steep learning curve.
Smart contract development is a good example. These self-executing protocols are coded directly on the blockchain, requiring precision and an understanding of decentralized logic, which is starkly different from traditional programming. A vulnerability in a smart contract can lead to catastrophic consequences, even millions of dollars in losses, so this is a high-risk area where understanding the rules is crucial.
Introducing talent into an industry with such a steep learning curve can be a challenge, as candidates may need time to adapt to the nuances of blockchain technology—decentralization vs. centralization, more open source, etc.—and the "spiritual culture" of the crypto industry, which includes everything from different cultural terminology to ways of thinking. However, non-crypto company professionals can drive the crypto industry forward in many areas, especially as companies begin to scale. For example, traditional professionals with backgrounds in software engineering or operations can bring diverse skills and rich experience, often honed in large software companies. These professionals often wear multiple hats and can navigate complex internal bureaucracies and obstacles to push projects forward. In the rapidly growing multidisciplinary teams of the crypto industry, this operational flexibility becomes a powerful asset.
Scaling experience is also crucial. Traditional candidates have often participated in the development of products used by millions of users and have solved the challenges that come with success: ensuring systems remain operational under extreme infrastructure loads, optimizing performance at scale, and coping with unpredictable surges in demand. This experience is directly applicable to Web3 products as they transition from niche crypto audiences to more mainstream markets.
For example, candidates from fintech companies may have significant relevant experience in payment technologies or financial regulations, which could also play a role in your business. If you are developing infrastructure or consumer applications, there is a large pool of talent that has accumulated years of scaling experience in these areas. Consider the overlap of these experiences and evaluate how to quickly get them up to speed on crypto-specific technologies to build your ideal team. More broadly, candidates with experience in design, user experience, scalability, security, and leadership can also accelerate innovation in the crypto industry, as these skills often have domain expertise and may even be more suitable than those without such experience.
After identifying the required skills and people (including determining whether they truly need to be crypto-native), the next step is to go out and recruit them.
Recruiting Top Talent from Any Background
The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity are actually two sides of the same coin: you are a crypto company.
For some candidates from traditional companies, the volatility of the crypto industry, recent regulatory uncertainties, industry jargon, and decentralized products may feel too unfamiliar or unappealing, or both. But for others, the same unfamiliarity and occasional instability are exciting—this is not a flaw but a feature of the company. In recruitment conversations, delve deep into how candidates view the stability and comfort of large companies versus the opportunities and challenges of a fast-growing company. Share a challenge your team encountered in the past few weeks, explain how it was handled, and emphasize the responsibilities each team member should bear given the company's size and stage of development. Their reaction may tell you how they would handle a similar situation, and at the very least, it will let them know what the company expects from everyone when the next situation arises.
Candidates may not know much about the crypto industry when you first contact them, but natural curiosity and interest in the advantages of decentralization are key. During the hiring process, an important signal is whether their knowledge and engagement deepen over time: are they doing their own research? Are they asking more specific questions after learning new things? Etc.
To distinguish between two types of candidates—those who are skeptical about crypto and those who are interested—and to avoid wasting your time and money, understand the candidate's motivations early to ensure they are aligned with your company's direction. This is a basic principle of recruitment, but it is worth emphasizing because it is very important, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.
Each recruitment conversation needs to be tailored to the specific candidate: what drives them to choose their current job? What made them stay in past roles? These factors are likely to be important parts of their decision-making this time as well. Start understanding the answers from the first phone call with the candidate.
At the end of the hiring process, you want to hire someone who is aligned with the company's vision and passionate about your product. At the same time, your team also needs to be excited about the new employee; this will help you judge whether the candidate is a good fit for your company, regardless of whether they have crypto industry experience. This should always be your guiding direction.
Since you are targeting highly curious candidates, tailor your recruitment pitch to their characteristics. You can start by explaining the two cultural differences in the crypto industry: one is the "computer culture," which sees blockchain as a tool to build new networks and drive a new computing movement; the other is the "casino culture," which focuses primarily on speculation, trading, and gambling. Then, you can share how this emerging industry offers candidates a unique opportunity to reshape the future of technology, similar to the early days of the internet.
A useful thought experiment is to try to talk about your product and company without mentioning crypto technology. What problems does your company solve? What motivated you to start it? Why does it make the world a better place? This approach can help you convey the company's philosophy and vision without distracting the audience with technical details.
Another good starting point is to simply ask: "How much do you know about the crypto industry?" Even if the response is skeptical or negative—such as stories from news reports or narratives of casino culture—this can open up the conversation and allow you to listen to their real concerns: external factors (policy), internal factors (technical complexity), personal factors (risk tolerance), etc. You can share that many people in the crypto industry also agree with some skeptical views and steer the conversation toward the cool technical problems your project is solving.
Not everyone is primarily motivated by money, but you also need to be prepared to emphasize the financial returns in the crypto industry. Historically, top talent has often been reluctant to join early-stage companies for three reasons: (1) high-intensity work culture; (2) poor work-life balance; (3) lack of liquidity compensation. Even if you address the first two issues, the third can cause you to lose a large number of potential candidates.
Compared to rare liquidity events like IPOs or acquisitions in the Web2 era, compensation innovations such as token-based salary structures can bring financial benefits and liquidity to early-stage companies. Be sure to use vesting/token grant plans that are somewhat locked into long-term goals, binding employees to the company for the long term to some extent. Compensation is a complex topic and obviously a top concern for job seekers, so make sure you are well-prepared to talk about it.
If you can execute these steps well, you will have a great chance of attracting top talent outside the industry to become interested in your company. Next, you need to help them clarify how they can contribute their best performance in their daily work.
Notes on Onboarding
Integrating new talent into a Web3 company requires shortening their adaptation time through education. You have identified each person's knowledge gaps during the interview process. Use this information to design the onboarding experience and fill these knowledge gaps as soon as possible.
For example, new employees may need help to go beyond the technical details of blockchain and decentralized systems, understand the real-world problems they will solve, and build confidence in their roles.
Regular knowledge-sharing sessions, where new employees can exchange ideas with senior employees who have deeper crypto industry experience, can foster teamwork and allow team members to learn from each other's strengths. Mentorship programs can pair new members with experienced Web3 professionals, providing valuable hands-on learning opportunities. Even better, you can structure projects to pair crypto industry "unicorn" talent (i.e., those with all the skills, knowledge, and background) with new members, enabling them to develop into their own crypto industry unicorns over time.
Upskilling and education are also necessary and will remain important as the industry continues to evolve. Resources such as blockchain-related blogs, podcasts, and educational courses—for example, how to use smart wallets, how to stake, token economics, smart contract design, or basic concepts of blockchain in different scenarios—are good starting points for continuous learning. Collaborating with mentors in established crypto organizations can provide practical experience, and thought leaders in the industry can offer deep insights through reports, including our own "State of Crypto Report").
The key is that whatever your new employees need to excel, your job is to help them learn, find, or access these resources from day one.
