Bridging the Web3 Hiring Gap, Yanislava Hristova, RemoteIT World | ETHSofia 2025

[Music] Are there any web tree builders here? No hands. Okay, let me go. You don't hear me, but do you hear me now?

Okay. And do you see me? No. You don't see me. But now, do you see me?

And do you trust me now? Do you trust me more? No. Okay. Because what this session is about is about the challenges we are going through as an industry in hiring in the web three.

And it is an industry that we are no longer hiring hiding behind the masks but we are moving into transparency from anonymity to transparency. This is a very long process of maturing and what I would like to walk you through in the next few minutes are the challenges that we have. What are the good practices? What are the bad practices and each one of you here maybe a founder or a builder can take away home and uh implement it. A little bit about uh myself.

I'm Yaniso Christo, founder at Remote IT World. My background is HR and operations. I've been in 15 years in the space and in crypto since 2016. At Remote IT World, uh we connect the bridge between projects, products, founders, and builders. We are doing this for more than 60 different companies and we have helped hundreds of professionals to land their a new job.

Uh maybe what you should always uh remember when it comes to my name is that I am a huge huge advocate for remote work and uh decentralization. That's why I find uh the crypto and Ethereum space and the blockchain space very aligned with my values. Of course, um later on I am available if you want to know more about me. But in this talk I would like to show you what have been before. As I showed up with this mask uh this is how we used to hire and this is what the industry used to be.

some projects, people that are afraid to show their faces, no legitimacy. And more than 10 years later, we actually see that this is changing. times now are different and uh no matter which side of um this um ecosystem you are a founder or a builder it's time that um we start to connect each other in a more compliant and more transparent way in the web three is about trust but how do we build this trust The ugly truth of hiring in the web tree has been for a long time this is a space that is mainly saturated by scammers. Twitter DMs, Telegram DMs, everyone is offering you to uh download their repo or to invest in their project and you don't know how they are going to break into your phone or your computer. Especially when it comes about hiring.

How we used to hire in web three is hey I have a project do you know someone? Yes I know someone let's bring them on board. But this is no longer enough. Just the private DMs and referrals are very chaotic and messy and this is not scalable. Yes, this can work if you want to go from zero to 10.

But if you'd like to go from 10 to 100 or a thousand as we have seen many examples for such companies, there is already different mechanics and processes that need to be put in place. Another major challenge that the crypto and web3 industry uh is uh facing this is the talent shortage. If you look back at the time, the crypto community and the block space and the crypto companies were always remote companies. Have you wondered why these companies are hiring from anywhere? because there is not enough people and professionals within their locality within Bulgaria or within Europe or within APAC or Latin America.

Everyone was chasing the blockchain engineers with experience, the protocol, the cryptograph researchers and similar and this was only possible beyond borders. Talent shortage is uh still one of the main challenges that we have now and little bit later in that talk I will give you an idea of how this can be solved. Last uh but not least, maybe these flames look familiar with different lines, but there is a huge cultural mismatch when we talk about what are the founders expectations and what are the builder's expectations in terms of workload in terms of processes asynchronous work delivery. So all this is how what I call the ugly truth and it is ugly because the impact the impact it has on the senior professionals and professionals and society is that people are hesitant to join projects with no faces with the risk of being rugged with the risk of being hacked. act.

Job seekers don't know what is real and what is not. And on the other side, when you are the one who is looking for contributors, builders, or others, for founders, this is a extremely frustrating experience. They're wasting months. They are burning funds while their competitors are launching on mainet or anywhere getting their users up and running when someone is actually still trying to find builders for their project. So that is what we are talking about how competitive you are as a company and your product is very much related to the workforce capacity you have.

What is the good part? And we start to notice this lately. Of course, the genius act, the institutional investors, all the regulational framework uh in place is also playing it role here. This does not happen just in a day or naturally. But more seasoned web tool professionals and here I don't talk only about engineers and developers but product people marketers sales they are crossing into the web tree.

The web tree is no longer a space that something semi-legit or something scammy or risky is is happening. It is a place where we are redefining a whole industry and with this cross also come more mature management practices. People who used to work in bigger organizations by joining in the web tree, they bring with them the good practices and this is how management starts to become more structured, better educated and people ultimately gain trust and are more likely to make that leap into the unknown or let's say yet not so known. Something that is happening very much uh in the last year year and a half is that we have everything. We not only have the incoming talent wave, we have the good management practices in place, but we also have the crypto payments and most of the companies are starting to adopt paying salaries in stable coins uh paying uh salaries with um third party providers.

So all the payroll is also also here. So any geographical locations are no longer a limitation. You can work with someone being in Bulgaria and they can be anywhere literally on the earth and this problem is solved. What are the best practices? The best practices that uh we see work at the moment for the companies as well as for job seekers are mainly to build through transparency.

This means that it's not a fake or semifilled website that you are creating you end up to. But when you go to a website, it should be verifiable company information. What is your mission? What are your values? People are here for the mission.

We are no longer here just for what is the capitalization or what is possible. But this is a true missiondriven environment. Public team profiles as I said we are no longer wondering who is behind that project, who is funding that project and why they are doing this. This all should be verified. One question that I was asked earlier is are crypto companies only on Telegram and on Twitter and actually they are not.

We start to see more and more companies who want to be recognized as legit to have also LinkedIn company pages. So this is just one signal of the adoption and the governance and the trust that these companies want to have with the people they want to attract. Professionalized hiring is where is my biggest pain obviously because every day we deal with founders who are great visionaries who are able to engage people for their project but their processes are terrible. You send a CV, it ends up somewhere in a DM on Telegram and you never hear back. So to professionalize your hiring means to set up clear job descriptions.

We don't just need a engineer. We need someone who will do X Y Z and this will be the impact of their work. Structure interview processes in a very clear way so that people have predictability and this reduces uh their frustration and hesitation. Reduce the biases. All these professionalizing of the hiring will allow you to compare different candidates and select the ones that are right for you.

Reduce biases. If someone is a friend of someone else that already work with you, it does not necessarily make them the better candidate. I would like to encourage you to question these assumptions that we are used to working with and navigating our decisions. widen the talent pool. So, leverage the communities.

Almost all of the projects have communities or at least if they don't then they'll chase those that have communities because community is a great tool to actually differentiate the true builders and people who want to make a difference between those who want to find a job and invest in upskilling people coming from the web two to the web three because they bring lot of transferable skills and business knowhow. launch a bounty program or engage other part. The match culture to reality. This is again a very close to my heart pain. Is the unrealistic expectations.

The push to deliver so fast when actually this is technically not possible creates friction and then the initial mission alignment gets broken down by use cases by undeployed uh on time uh launches. So this uh results oriented uh work needs to be communicated uh very transparently. There are people who are hustlers who will spend 20 hours per day to build and deliver because they are so passionate and there are people who will just spend six hours. It does not matter just a line on on the results and on the output. very often it's a compensation as well is what percentage will be tokens allocation what will be equity what will be base salary one of the things that I started with and I will finish with with the best practices because I see lately a lot of the companies in the space are also moving to hybrid which I believe is a huge mistake decentralized companies exist is because they know that it's output first.

So stay remote, hire globally, paying crypto and just be the real example of what we are doing by being the employer that is not only desirable but competitive and adequate to the modern times. It's important for your survival because you can find one person, you can find two people, but you will not find the fifth, you will not find the 20th person. You will burn your people and they will burn you and then this is the end of story. So be transparent, use best practices, professionalize your hiring. If you cannot then ask someone to help you.

And because so far the first part of my presentation have been mainly about companies that are hiring, I would like to spend a couple of minutes to talk about um my top three advices how to land a job in the web tree. Of course, you can go a friend. This is something that doesn't need mentioning. But first and most is built in public and contribute to the GitHub repos of the protocols. Um it's um way faster for you to show your skills, demonstrate them also to collaborate with the people that are already in this uh protocol or in this project.

And this way you become visible and not only you start you look for opportunities but you start to attract them. Opportunities start to find you when you are there and you deliver something that is meaningful and valuable. Prioritize transparency over hype. Remember those things that I mentioned earlier that should be present on the company's website. Make sure you validate them.

You want to know who is behind those projects before you commit to do anything with them. Do your deep research before you saying yes. And uh very important here uh when you look for a job especially in engineering there is some form of technical assessment. They send you a GitHub repo that you need to install. So this is a big risk.

It could be a trap. So don't install anything on your local machines. If anything anybody is asking you to do this, I would encourage you to ask for alternative form of assessment of your skills in public in public GitHub repos. But you never know what is coming and you should be careful and security first. If you have never heard about the web three smart contract protocols or anything else, I invite you to upskill and educate yourself because we are still early.

Yes, 10 years. I believe we're among the first people that have been here in this fight, but this is still the beginning. There is a way more that is going to evolve and there will be place for more professionals. So I really encourage you to read about tokconomics, read about contracts, DAO governance, any portion of this that might be of interest to you. I think time is almost up.

So I will wrap it up and make a conclusion. If you are a founder, build trust

and act like a professional. Otherwise, why should we work for you? If you are a job seeker, look for clarity.

Seek transparency and show your skills by contributing. This will pay off on the long run. And if you are somewhere in between then upskill upskll to web three because we are just starting and the future is very much promising. So this is trust I believe is the new alpha in web3 hiring.

So thank you. Any questions? Okay. If you don't have any questions, you can come at our booth. We have some um giveaways as well as you can uh win uh ledgers and and interesting other stuff, but you can also win a free consultation uh with us.

Regardless if you are looking to hire or if you are looking for a job, we can give you all the shortcuts and and what works. Thank you. Heat. [Music]