Caroline O’Neill, Chief People Officer
Irreducible uses hardware acceleration to provide fast and cost-effective computation of zero-knowledge proofs.
The Blockchain Recruiter was engaged to hire an Engineering Manager for Irreducible’s high-performance software team.
We were introduced to Irreducible as they were in the midst of closing their Series A and tying up a number of operational initiatives.
The Engineering Manager hire was an urgent, mission-critical requirement. While undue delays in getting someone on board could threaten the entire project, hiring the wrong person would be even more destructive.
The high-performance software team is responsible for performant, embedded Rust code in a hardware-software co-design environment. Furthermore, Irreducible has an exceptionally high bar for technical ability in their team, including for managers.
After intensive previous efforts, the role remained open for months and 19 candidates had already been interviewed, with no successful candidate in sight.
Our intensive onboarding process brought a forensic analysis to prior search efforts and identified new avenues for success. It became evident that the successful candidate would likely not be a crypto-native, but come from an adjacent industry also working on hardware-software co-design.
Principally, these industries were AI Acceleration, High-Performance Computing and Self-Driving Vehicles. This added multiple additional layers of difficulty:
With the parameters established, our research team produced a stack-ranked and geographically segmented target list of 220 prospective candidates. This was then shared transparently with Irreducible and, as the search was so critical, the prospects were also ranked individually by the founders for prioritization before outreach began.
In the GTM phase of the search, we made a staggering 1,438 contact attempts across phone, email and social, generating 52 conversations – around 25% of the target list.
Our philosophy of recruiting is to rigorously identify the target market, generate as many conversations as possible within that market, and then disqualify everyone except the most capable and motivated, adding only the highest probability candidates into the hiring process.
As a result, the very first candidate we presented was hired.
“I already had high expectations when we engaged The Blockchain Recruiter, and yet the experience was even better than that.
The process was thorough, progress was over-communicated, and I could see a huge amount of work went into the search.
This was an exceptionally difficult hire and so it was a pleasant surprise that the very first candidate Harrison presented was the one who got hired.
There’s nothing I would have done differently.”
– Caroline O’Neill, Chief People Officer
