Grove (formerly Pocket Network Inc.) is one of the very first DePIN projects, designed to serve as the RPC Base Layer for Web3.
The Blockchain Recruiter was engaged at the peak of the bull market to recruit first an Engineering Manager, and then additionally a team of Cosmos SDK engineers.
At an inflection point, the engineering organization faced a series of very demanding challenges.
They needed to start formalizing their engineering practices and making them fit for scale. This called for an unusual hire: an engineering manager whose main
responsibility was not line management, but creation, implementation,
documentation and management of SOPs and fostering a culture of best practice across the org.
Next, they needed to make some very critical and highly specific engineering hires: protocol, infrastructure and testing architecture specialists who had a depth of experience working with the Cosmos SDK. The demands on the team ¡ simply did not afford the ramp time that would be required for new hires to join from other ecosystems. Critical production deadlines would be overshot by months.
The requirements were so narrow that only a few dozen people in the world met the criteria for each role. To make things harder, these hires had to be made at the peak of the bull market when competition for talent was at its fiercest, and additionally, there were comp constraints.
We worked together to reverse-engineer the business objectives into a comprehensive profile for hiring the right engineering manager. This search required a lot of creative license, as the key criteria for the hire were more about personality traits which are hard to discern from a profile or job title – it is the mindset and discipline of engineering which was key.
Successfully making this hire paved the way for further expansion of the engineering team. Working with both the CTO and newly appointed engineering manager, we devised a rigorous search plan to attract the required Cosmos SDK engineers.
Because the talent pool was exceptionally narrow, it was necessary to ensure that absolutely no stone was left unturned. Our research team mapped out the engineering teams of every single Cosmos ecosystem project, going so far as to trawl through Twitter and dive into GitHub repos to identify those engineers who don’t like to be found on Linkedin.
To ensure success, we needed to develop compelling personalized messaging deployed with a multi-channel approach (cold calls, cold email, social media) in order to maximize coverage.
We managed to deliver both exceptional conversion rates and exceptional accuracy. Across all hires, nine candidates were brought to interview out of only 242 targeted. Offers were made to five (a ratio better than 2:1!).
“I feel like you’ve changed my view permanently on the recruiting process and what it actually entails to recruit someone.
I will go as far to say that whenever I speak about that experience and I hear people having problems with their own recruiting processes, I just learned so much from that process that I’m able to help them from a different perspective now.”
“I think that level of pinpoint selection was achieved because of the nature of the deep interviews that were conducted before we even started the search. I’ve worked with other recruiters in the past and usually you give them a job description and they’ll ask you some basic questions.
They might not even understand what you’re building and off to the races they go, matching tags in LinkedIn and whatnot. And I feel like in an area such as crypto where you’re doing zero to one innovation every second, I feel like you need a more bespoke service that allows you to cater to the needs of a very demanding job market that we have in our industry.”
“I’ll recommend you a million times over.”
– Luis C. de Leon, Co-founder
