The Badger Association fosters growth of the BadgerDAO ecosystem, a community first collective launched in 2020 that’s focused on building open source protocols to drive growth of Bitcoin across DeFi.
The Blockchain Recruiter was engaged as part of an ambitious effort to transform the Association’s capabilities, first in engineering and then across leadership & GTM.
At an inflection point, Badger contacted us in the midst of an intense, organization-wide upgrade of core business systems, operations, service providers and talent.
Hot on the heels of high-profile collapses of the likes of Luna, FTX, Celsius, and their own significant loss event, it became clear that decentralization and security must be front and center of all future DeFi development.
Prior to working with The Blockchain Recruiter, Badger had historically hired core team members organically via the community. This worked well enough in the past, but to bring Badger’s new eBTC product to life and make it successful, a more rigorous approach was needed.
We were engaged to deploy a direct headhunting model and bring the very best DeFi talent to the table, while also implementing a demanding selection process as a new benchmark for hiring practice at Badger.
The expectation was to attract top-tier engineers who not only excelled technically, but who also possessed a strong product and business acumen, ownership mindset, and significant track record of success in DeFi.
Prior to working with us, there was some skepticism among the leadership that running a direct headhunting model in DeFi was even possible, or that it would prove effective. Concerns lay around DeFi’s anon culture, extremely limited (and often financially independent) talent pool, and lack of Linkedin coverage.
Nonetheless, there were no viable alternatives which could promise comparable results. The Badger Association trusted our judgment and took the leap of faith.
Since Badger had no established hiring process or expectation of what working with a recruiter entails, onboarding was an intensive orientation process pulling in all core team members and even the occasional outside contractor.
This enabled us to get to the heart of not only the objective business requirements, but culture and vibes internally, and design a search strategy, performance-based job descriptions and selection process which all deliver first time.
With such a limited pool of experienced DeFi engineers, it was vital to ensure no potential candidate was missed. Further, a significant number of these engineers lack Linkedin profiles, making access difficult.
Our research team trawled through GitHub to identify every single person who ever contributed Solidity or Typescript/React code (for the smart contract & full stack positions, respectively) to the top 100 DeFi projects. This was then cross-references with other sources to build a comprehensive target list including any and all contact details (phone, email, Linkedin, Twitter, Telegram).
A compelling, multi-channel outreach campaign was then deployed in order to bring these well-hidden engineers to the hiring table, even if they weren’t considering a career move.
In addition to standard screening, all finalists were put through our rigorous, “deep dive” 2-3hr performance-based interview process, shifting the burden of time investment from Badger to us, as well as weeding out tire-kickers and locking in buy-in from the most serious candidates.
This allowed us to deliver hiring ratios on the back end that are practically unheard of among recruitment firms – and of course, two successful hires.
A few months later, we were re-engaged for an even more critical hire – a Business Lead to take charge of running the Badger Association. Not only were the same quality metrics achieved, the hire was made 30 days faster, demonstrating the value of an ongoing partnership.
Finally, the shortlist was so on point that Badger made a second, unplanned for hire from among the finalists.
Today, this new team continues to work hand in hand to elevate Badger and make eBTC the protocol of choice for Bitcoin across DeFi.
“Building in DeFi is tough, it’s not for everyone. The Blockchain Recruiter stands out as a talent partner that gets how big the stakes are and puts in the work to deliver outcomes at the highest standards. Their commercial acumen, integrity, and proven front loaded value process wins.”
– Brian Lipp, Ops Lead
