Hashing It Out

Navigating Web3 hiring with Talent Protocol CEO Pedro Oliveira

• Pedro Oliveira • Season 1 • Episode 58

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In this episode of Hashing It Out by Cointelegraph, host Elisha Owusu Akyaw dives into the world of Web3 talent with Pedro Oliveira, co-founder and CEO of Talent Protocol. Discover the current state of builders in Web3, the challenges of hiring in this evolving space, and how Talent Protocol is revolutionizing recruitment with onchain reputation systems. Learn about the integration of Proof of Humanity, builder scores, and the importance of decentralized social platforms in creating a transparent and efficient hiring ecosystem. Whether you’re a recruiter or a job seeker, this episode is packed with insights to help you navigate the future of Web3 hiring.

Time stamps:
(00:00) - Introduction to the episode
(01:11) - Current state of talent in the Web3 space
(04:57) - Pedro’s background and how he transitioned into the Web3 space
(07:54) - The concept of onchain reputation, proof of humanity, and integration with Worldcoin and Coinbase
(10:55) - Major challenges in recruiting within Web3
(15:03) - Filtering and verification of real human profiles versus bots and fake resumes
(17:17) - Current recruitment trends and the role of decentralized social platforms in hiring
(20:24) - How companies and projects can attract builders, Optimism’s retro funding
(27:22) - The future of hiring in Web3

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[00:00:04] Pedro Oliveira: I just realized that the whole talent industry is just so lame. The main issue is not the tooling, the products that we’ve built — it’s the data. The data is fragmented, so we definitely need a lot more than what we have right now.

[00:00:22] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Hashing It Out. And today, we are talking about talent. Well, that’s true in two ways. We are talking about talent in the Web3 space, the people that build the applications, the protocols that we are excited to use, and the people who are leading Web3 adoption by making sure that there’s a lot for people to do in the Web3 space. And we’re also talking about Talent, the company Talent, the protocol. And we’re going to learn more about how they are making sure that builders are finding work and people are also finding the right builders. Joining me for today’s episode is the co-founder and CEO of Talent Protocol, Pedro Oliveira. Hello, Pedro, and welcome.

[00:01:05] Pedro Oliveira: Hey, Elisha. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk about talent.

[00:01:09] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Amazing service. Really excited to talk about talent, too. So, let’s start with what is the state of talent personnel builders in Web3. Like where are we in the Web3 space when it comes to people who are willing to build and get things done?

[00:01:27] Pedro Oliveira: Yeah, straight to the jugular. With that question, we need a lot more, you know, to simply put like we have a lot of degens, a lot of traders. And I think the last data was that we had like one builder for each 1000 degens. And that’s too little, especially if you consider that you know like we’re living off the work of giants like Vitalik, even Satoshi, whoever he or she or they is. So we definitely need a lot more than what we have right now.

[00:02:00] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: We need more. And that’s interesting. There’s been a trend where people celebrate people leaving Web2 or TradFi and coming into DeFi. Are we seeing a pivot of a lot of talent from other important sectors to Web3? Because there was also a point where people were saying Web3 was losing a lot of people to AI. So, are we seeing more people entering or more people exiting from where you sit?

[00:02:27] Pedro Oliveira: So, like, I’ve been in the space since 21, and back then, you know, there was, like, we still didn’t add the AI as like a hype trend. So everything was coming into crypto, so we had to take that into consideration. It’s hard to compare today with back then. Having said that, I just feel like back then, people would be coming into crypto, and we just weren’t ready. And I do remember the narrative being, you know, let’s onboard the next 1 billion users into crypto, and it’s like we’re not nearly there when it comes to experience infrastructure. We’re just definitely, we weren’t there in terms of mainstream. What I feel today is that we are starting to have, like, I mean, obviously, there were billions invested into the space through venture capital. And, you know, as a result, now we have better infrastructure. Now we have better experiences for new people to join. But also I think we have less pressure. I’m not seeing in this cycle everybody saying, oh, let’s onboard 1 billion people into crypto. Like, I don’t think that’s the point. You know, the point is to keep building regardless of the price fluctuations, and the builders will come.

[00:03:40] Pedro Oliveira: So what I felt, and by the way, my background is talent. So, I’ve been in the, as a builder in the HR technology or talent technology space for 13 years now. And I can definitely see a lot of talent going into AI, but I just feel that nowadays, it’s more organic, and it’s more like we can retain that talent. So what happened in 21, 22 is that we were attracting a lot of talent, but we were not retaining it, and now we are probably attracting a lot less. But we are retaining that talent because there’s things to do, there’s things to build, and people can see, oh, I just built a frame on Farcaster, or it’s being used by thousands. Great. Whereas before, it wouldn’t be the infrastructure just wouldn’t be there. I’m sorry. I’m just going deep in here, but it’s just that there’s so many cool stuff happening. And the fact that we now have layer 2, even Solana is doing a great job. So, everyone is doing a great job when it comes to scalability and infrastructure, that it’s just that the experience just started making sense. Does this make any sense? What I just said?

[00:04:47] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Yes it does, yes it does. And I think we are going to dive deeper into what all of that means a bit more when we discuss what Talent Protocol is doing. But let me start with you. What are you building and how far have you gone with what you are building, and how long have you been in this space?

[00:05:06] Pedro Oliveira: The reason why I came into the blockchain space was in the end of 2020, early 2021, when I was wrapping up my founder tenure at my previous startup, which is landing jobs, tech recruitment marketplace, mostly focused on Western Europe. But in that startup, we’ve hired thousands of people from all over the world to relocate to Europe to work in tech. And I just realized that the whole talent industry is just so lame. You know, I don’t have a better way of saying this. It’s so lame in terms of, like, the experiences, the products that we’ve built. And I just realized that the problem was that the data level, like the data, is fragmented; the data is just bad. And if we’re able to fix that underlying problem, like the experiences that we can build around talent. You know, obviously, the main use case would be recruitment, but that experience can be like 10x or 100x from what we have. So that was the reason why I came into the space. It’s not the typical degen, it’s very talent-centric. My approach in my career has always been around building products that, you know, help people have better careers and better vision for what they want to be in their lives. So, we started 2021, team of three founders just pushing our way through. We had a few false positives, few experiences that didn’t work out.

[00:06:33] Pedro Oliveira: Then, early this year, in March, we came out with Talent Protocol as an actual protocol for onchain reputation. And that just kicked off. And to make it even better, every protocol needs like a super use case, right? Like a breakout ecosystem map or use case. And about a month ago, we are recording this on the 25th of June. So yeah, about a month ago, we released Build, which is kind of this like nomination game that just exploded in a good way. And so now we have protocol with a massive use case, and we’re onboarding other builders to use our API. And basically, yeah, things are going well. We have almost half a million people that have set up their Talent Passports, which is sort of their onchain resume. But yeah, to answer your question, and I’m sorry that I went like super deep and gave more context. I felt it was necessary to answer your question. That’s how I got into the space. And that’s how Talent Protocol is what it is today. You know, because of all the failures and experimentations we’ve done before. We wouldn’t be where we are if we hadn’t gone through those, that desert walk, you know, through the bear. I say our team was born in a bull, raised in a bear, and now we’re just making our own way.

[00:07:52] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: So let’s get into Talent Protocol. What exactly is Talent Protocol, and how does it work? You could go off with the technical stuff and explain what it means to have an onchain reputation protocol.

[00:08:05] Pedro Oliveira: Yeah. So basically, you can go on our site and set up, anyone can go and set up their own Talent Passport, and then you start connecting wallets or Web2 logins like GitHub or even LinkedIn, and you start building up your onchain reputation. This also includes a couple other things. One of them is like proof of humanity, which is fundamental. We’re like one of the preferred partners of Worldcoin. So, if you go into Worldcoin app, you’ll see our application in their preferred applications list. We’re also integrating with Coinbase verified ID as well. And so we, there’s that proof of humanity thing, which, you know, helps us with Sybils and bots. But basically, we also have another thing which a lot of people talk about, which is the Builder Score. So Builder Score is essentially an aggregation of all the, let’s say, point system that aggregates all your onchain reputation together. For instance, if you deploy smart contracts on Base or Superch— or sorry, on Optimism or Celo, or if you have, let’s say, a Safe credential, there’s a bunch of credentials we keep integrating with the Passport. And that helps you build up your Builder Score. So, right now, my Builder Score is above 100. Took me a while to get there. So you really need to get your ass off to improve your score. But yeah, we’re one of the leading projects on Base and Coinbase, and we definitely see the Talent Passport, which is kind of like if Farcaster has Warpcast, then Talent Protocol has the Talent Passport app.

[00:09:45] Pedro Oliveira: Yep. And we kind of see it as becoming a sort of insight into how talent is doing in the crypto space. So one day, we hope that people will see our token, which isn’t launched yet, as a sort of understanding of how the space is doing in terms of talent. So the first question you asked me during the podcast, you could answer that question, oh, well, this month, X amount of Passports have been created, and they have an aggregated score or Builder Score of X. And this would be a representation of how talent is doing in the Web3 space. But yeah, in a nutshell, it’s quite easy. Just set it up and start building up your score. And there’s apps building on top of the Passport. One of them is the Build game, which I think you’ll appreciate that I think early next week, we’ll be able to launch the game number two with Build. And yeah, I’m not sure if I did a good job at explaining the Passport, but I think it’s going to be in one of the key artifacts, one of the key products in the Web3 space, in specific in the Base world, and hopefully in the Superchain family as well.

[00:10:55] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Sounds interesting. We are going to dive deeper into why you chose to build on Base, also other parts of the technical composition of how Talent Protocol works. Let’s get into some of the problems that people face when they are recruiting in Web3. What are the biggest challenges when it comes to hiring in Web3 and recruiting in Web3?

[00:11:15] Pedro Oliveira: So first of all, like I’ve been in the recruitment industry for a long time, one of the biggest problems of this industry, this is not related with Web3 or Web2 at all, but one of the biggest problems in the industry is that the delivery quality is, in most cases, subpar. So, the NPS, expected NPS for the industry is quite low. So this means what? When someone like a company hires a recruiter or an agency or a platform. They already expect that the quality of delivered work will not be the best. You know, 100% is like if you went to a grocery store to buy oranges, but you already expect that out of the five you buy, three of them are ruined. So this is what the state of the industry right now. So it doesn’t help that the massive players in this industry, the two biggest ones, Indeed and the most known one, LinkedIn, they basically are gaining the data. And to make it worse, they’re getting bad, unverified data. That’s where Web3 comes in. Being onchain and bringing this reputation data onchain just changes the whole game. You know, it makes it verifiable. You can build new types of experiences around it. So we’re not trying to be the new LinkedIn.

[00:12:35] Pedro Oliveira: We’re trying to be the next LinkedIn. And this is the biggest difference that I would say, compared to narratives that I’ve seen in 2021 and 2022, which was like people trying to be the Web3 LinkedIn; I don’t think like that makes any sense because the way you build an economy onchain has nothing to do with an economy offchain or online. You know, if you put it like that in the Web2 space. So, in terms of Talent Protocol, we’re still, we are working with a couple of builders that are creating their recruitment apps on top of it. And I think that, you know, we did have a breakout ecosystem app which was built, which is great. You know, every protocol needs one. But I think we’re still missing the recruitment part. And that’s gonna unlock the next wave of growth for Talent Protocol. One more thing I’d like to mention is that the problem or the need for onchain reputation is even higher today than, let’s say, a couple of years ago because of AI, precisely because of AI. There’s a lot of AI is bringing a lot of great things, and I love it.

[00:13:52] Pedro Oliveira: I use it daily. But it’s also breaking, you know, it’s breaking the internet experience as we know. And it’s going to have double down effects on the recruitment space. So if the recruitment space was already bad in terms of delivery, now with AI coming in, obviously recruiters are using AI, but the thing is that it just increases that exponentially. The problem with the data. And again, the recruitment industry’s main issue is not the tooling, the products that we’ve built. It’s the data. The data is fragmented, you know, and sometimes people don’t even do it on purpose. It’s just the way sometimes you look at yourself in a way, and that’s just a misrepresentation of what your reputation is. Everybody can be a superhero on LinkedIn, right? I can be the CEO of Google on LinkedIn if I want to. I just need to change my headline. Does that make any sense? No, it doesn’t. So yeah, that’s kind of like a deep dive into the recruitment space because I think this is transversal to Web2 or Web3. It doesn’t matter. I just think like Web3 is bringing new tooling that will solve the biggest problem, which is the data, reputational, professional data.

[00:15:03] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: I think the conversation about the possibility of fraud, the possibility of people lying about who they really are, brings me to the question of, like, how are you sorting through people that are coming through your platform? Or how are you sorting through people that companies are looking at and deciding this is a real person, this is somebody that has a real reputation? How are you deciding who a bot is and who a real human being is? Or how are you deciding who a fake resume or CV is and who a real CV looks like?

[00:15:35] Pedro Oliveira: Yeah. So, there’s like three main components to the Passport. One of them is the proof of humanity precisely to, you know, filter out bots and Sybils. The second component is what we call like onchain reputation, which is essentially your trail, your history, your background in the onchain economy. And the third one would be the Builder Score. So the Builder Score is mostly about understanding who is a builder, who isn’t. Proof of humanity is about understanding who is the human, who isn’t. I would say the onchain reputation is more subject to interpretation, but it’s because it’s onchain, it can be verified. So like, how many smart contracts have you deployed on Base, on Celo or on Optimism? There’s a bunch of credentials that can be done and improved on a Passport. How many hackathons from ETHGlobal have you attended? Are you a Bonsai3 early adopter? Do you have an ENS? So there’s a bunch of things, like are you a Powerbadge on Warpcast? So there’s a bunch of things that aggregate this onchain repetition that make us understand if you’re a human, what your footprint is in the onchain space. But also, is this person a builder or not? This is what we have right now in terms of the protocol and looking ahead, what we call our reputationOS. It will involve a lot of curation or revision of data. But I mean, we can go deeper on that one. But yeah, basically, when we ship the token, we’ll start implementing the curation mechanisms so we can enrich the reputation database of Talent Protocol basically. Yeah.

[00:17:17] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: I have heard from some recruiters about how difficult like it is sometimes trying to sift through. And as someone who was looking for a job or have been in the position where I’ve been looking for jobs in the crypto space, sometimes you realize like a job listing comes out and thousands of people have already filled the form, applied for the job, and you’re like, this came out a few hours ago, and you speak to recruiters, and they’re like, a lot of this is just chaff and not real applications. And it’s really painful having to go through all of that.

[00:17:50] Pedro Oliveira: Yeah, I think it’s painful for both sides, really. Like I do have a lot of friends that are recruiters, and it’s really painful for them as well. But you know, let’s not forget about candidates as well. Before we go forward, just I’d like to highlight one project that I like and we’re integrating with, which is Bountycaster built on Farcaster, which basically is a bot that you can use to showcase or tell the world, look, I need someone to do me this design, or I need help with this. So it’s mostly typically, you know, tasks. But it can be like, do me a frame, do me like… It’s mostly bounties, basically. And I’ve used it, and it works quite well in that sense. The advantage is that it’s happening in the open. It’s the Web3 advantage. But we didn’t see any disaster happening in 2021 because we didn’t have the infrastructure, we didn’t have Farcaster, we didn’t have the distribution that we have nowadays. So nowadays, we have it. And now things like Talent Protocol and our Passport are appearing, which are going to make everything 100x easier.

[00:18:55] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: So you are working with a lot of data where you are combining offchain and onchain data. How has that been figured out, and what does that look like for you as a protocol?

[00:19:06] Pedro Oliveira: For us, again, what matters is reputation data, and it can come from anywhere. Right now, when people go on our Talent Passport, they can connect their wallets, the wallets that they feel represent themselves better. But they can also like log in with some Web2 tools. Like I think a very good example is like GitHub. GitHub comes in with a set of data in terms of activity, but also in terms of reputation like how many stars you got in your repos, PRs done in the past three, four months. You know, like, what are the projects that he contributed to? So it’s quite interesting in that sense. Again, we’re very agnostic where the data comes from. What matters to us is like, okay, what’s the quality of the data? What does it tell us about this person being a builder or not? And in the future, as we progress the protocol further, these decisions won’t have to be done by by the core team of Talent Protocol. These decisions will be done by the Talent Protocol DAO, which will be a DAO that has mostly like a data guardianship role. Besides, the governance role is a data guardianship role. Saying which data points can write to the database or not, regardless if it’s Web2 or Web3. Really.

[00:20:23] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: You’ve been mentioning social platforms like Farcaster Lens, and these are decentralized social media platforms that are becoming very popular as decentralized alternatives become more preferred. And you are mentioning them a lot when you are talking about what Talent Protocol is doing. Which then leads me to wonder, what is the role of these platforms when it comes to hiring and finding talent in the Web3 space?

[00:20:50] Pedro Oliveira: This is super, super relevant because what we don’t have in Web2 social platforms, regardless if it’s social Web2 like Twitter or X or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, we cannot see the social graph. They’re opaque, they’re data-gated. So what we have with Lens and Farcaster is the opposite of that. Not only are they like awesome distribution platforms for new products. So I tell a lot of builders coming into this space, you know, just join Farcaster and have fun. You know, there’s loads of channels in there. There’s loads of frames. Really interesting things happening. It’s a great time to join, but the main point is that everything that you’re doing there, they’re like, it’s creating this social graph, your own social graph that can be used for things like the Talent Passport to understand whether you’re onchain. Reputation is not just the credentials; it’s also your social graph. One thing, Elisha, that Build was really good at, and this is really good at, is that in the first game — and by the way, Build is being built almost like an experimentation, almost like if it was a lab. And in the first game, in the first nomination game, we ended up building a huge social graph. So, in like 20 days, let me just check really quick the site, so I give you updated data. But in 20 days, we had almost 2 million nominations. Can you imagine the social graph? This means it’s really interesting. So I think that’s the biggest difference. The fact that it’s open and you can see that the new tools, the new information that was not visible, it is, you know, like and the way it is done is like, look, we’re making blockchain invisible, but we’re making talent visible if that makes any sense. And so that’s what we love about this protocol is not only the distribution that they gave us, but most importantly it’s super aligned with our vision for Talent Protocol. And it’s super aligned with our vision for the Web3 talent space.

[00:22:59] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: I think we’ve discussed a lot of protocol-specific functions, and we’ve also looked at some of the challenges, but let’s get into some positive things like what have you seen companies, projects, people looking for builders do to attract builders. So, if I was a builder that was looking for other builders to join me, I was Web3 projects looking for people, what do I need to do from where you sit? What are the incentives that get people to want to work for my project or work with me?

[00:23:35] Pedro Oliveira: I’ll give you a bit of alpha, but first I want to give you an example of something that I believe works really well, even though it’s still being constantly improved. So, it’s the Optimism retro funding. It’s really like a virtuous cycle. So you have builders building on Optimism, whether it’s with Base or any other chain building in there, and then you have them like paying for block space. There’s revenue done that Optimism get, and then that gets, part of it gets redistributed back to the builders contributing to the ecosystem and so on and so forth. Like it’s always like this virtuous cycle. We are doing the retro funding number four. And it’s really interesting to see how the Optimism gov team operates as well in the open and is improving this. They should use, and we’re already having this chat with them, they should use the Talent Passport in the future and Talent Protocol data in the future for future retro funding to help them improve this process. Now, the alpha part. Not only that, but I think we’re doing it running a couple of experiments with some companies. It’s what I call onchain devrel, developer relations done like natively onchain. What you want to do is like, okay, what are the builders that I want to target or that I want to reward? How do I segment them? And then how do I distribute the rewards? Whether it’s tokens, NFTs, it doesn’t matter to them. And how do I communicate that? So that’s where Talent Protocol, like the Passport, comes in. We’re doing some experiments with companies. But that’s where I told you before, like we got to look at incentives for builders in a Web3-native way instead of trying to copy the Web2 way into Web3; you just never really fit the purpose. And so I just gave you like, my most favorite example. And, you know, some of the things we’re doing there.

[00:25:35] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: You’ve mentioned Base and the Optimism ecosystem a lot. And I’m assuming that’s because you admire what has been built in that ecosystem. So why did you select to build on Base?

[00:25:47] Pedro Oliveira: I could narrow this down to three things. So, thing number one is like when we launched Talent Protocol back in the day, we started with Celo, which is EVM-compatible. So, part of this Ethereum system, Ethereum framework. And they’re coming into the Superchain, right, into Optimism. So that’s number one. Number two is other partners that we have, like Worldcoin. They also launched their own chain in the Superchain world chain. In this case, we’re also working with Cyber, which did the same. So we have a lot of partners that are already part of the Superchain, and the last one is when it comes to Base, there’s like two subsets here. Like it’s the Base team, Base and Coinbase teams. And then the community, the vibes, the community vibes in Base are off the charts. Our engagement with their team is like, wow, it’s really incredible. And that makes us like one of the top projects building on Base and Coinbase. And we want to keep building up that relationship because we also know that’s part of the Superchain ecosystem. So it’s almost like we’re part of this Superchain family in a way. It sounds a bit weird if you say it like that, but I guess it kind of makes sense. But yeah, when it comes to Base, it’s where we felt that we could leverage the distribution that Base has and Farcaster and other apps and protocols building on Base, and also it’s where a lot of apps and builders that will become our clients one day are building on. So we got to be there. Does this make any sense?

[00:27:22] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Yes, it does, yes, it does. As someone who interacts a lot with the supply chain ecosystem, I understand what you’re saying. So, my last question would be about the long-term goals of Talent Protocol. And I’d also throw in some predictions or projections of what talent and the hiring bits in Web3 would look like in the next couple of months. So, in the future or in the near future, how do you see hiring and finding talent evolving in Web3, and what would Talent Protocol be doing to make that happen?

[00:27:56] Pedro Oliveira: So for us, the main focus until the end of the year is getting new use cases into Talent Protocol. And I think, like our El Dorado will be having a killer app for recruitment. We have a couple of builders building something that might become, but also we’re integrating with a few projects already building in the space, like Multicaster, but there’s a few others as well. So I think that for us as a protocol, like we got Build. Amazing. But we want more, and the killer app is going to be recruitment. So that’s a clear objective for us. And it’s bullseye on the hiring space until the end of the year, basically. Will we make it? It doesn’t depend only on us, but definitely we’re working with builders with a very high Builder Score in their Talent Passports.

[00:28:47] Elisha Owusu Akyaw: I look forward to that future. Thank you so much, Pedro, for joining me. I think a lot of recruiters and people who are just interested in finding work, being hired in the Web3 space would come back to this podcast as a reference point when they are ready to start their next job search or their next talent search. Thank you very much for joining me.

[00:29:08] Pedro Oliveira: Thanks for having me.

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