You have seen it on the news, social media, and across the internet. Over the next decade Web3, Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse are going to change the world.
But if you think about it. How could it change recruiting and the job search? I am going to cover a few different ways we can see change throughout the year but this article will just be focused on Resumes and NFTs.
Just as you now email or upload your resume to land a job, things used to be a little different. There were days where people had to snail mail or fax a resume to get hired. Over the next decade, some of the things that people do now what you do will be the same, but there will be a lot of things that will be different.
At the moment is that you can post your resume to various places when you are looking for a job. Places like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, and Monster. You can update and optimize your LinkedIn page help your job search. On the recruiting side, recruiters both internal and headhunters pay these companies thousands per month to be able to access your information and find you. Companies pay external Headhunters 20-35% of the first-year salary to find great talent, Internal recruiters are paid good wages (many of them six figures) to help great candidates get in the door.
Currently, the resume is just a PDF, Word doc, or an optimized LinkedIn Profile. But soon it could easily be an NFT on the blockchain.
This could be a way that a candidate can take a little more control of their career, their future, their data, and their resume. We will cover that later, but first.
What is an NFT (Non – fungible token)
First of all many people might not know or understand what an NFT is. All they have heard on the news is that these are just a picture that’s being sold for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. You have heard maybe about Beeple, Crypto Punks, VeeFriends, or Bored Apes Yacht Club and have either thought that you have missed the boat or that these things are dumb. Some of the prices on these NFTS are a little insane, but think of this as going into the dot com era… There will be many fiery crashes but Web 3.0 and NFTs are here to stay)
The easy way to think of NFTs (Nonfungible tokens) are like certificates of authenticity for digital artifacts. They are a crypto asset where each token is unique. Fungible assets like Ethereum, Cardano, Shiba Inu, Bitcoin, and dollar bills are all worth exactly the same amount as the other ones. NFTs are unique because you are able to authenticate ownership of the digital artwork. Currently, NFTs are currently being used for a wide range of things such as:
NBA virtual trading cards – NBA’s digital NFTs that people virtually trade are worth $2.6 Billion
Digital Art – Digital Art NFTs have taken off. The largest player in space Opensea saw $3.4 Billion in transactions over the month of Aug. Its big enough that Sotherby’s Auction House set up an entire NFT division.
Video Games – There is a whole gamut of Video Games in the world of Blockchain. Some of the big ones like Axie Infinity have had over $2.5 billion in sales so far. There are others that go into a whole metaverse world like The Sandbox. Even Mark Zuckerberg sees the potential here as Facebook looks to change their name to focus on the metaverse and hire 20,000 Engineers in the EU to make that happen.
Virtual Real-estate – At the moment virtual real estate is gamified through companies like Upland who has paid out over a million in real money to its players. People are buying, selling, and trading virtual real estate with every transaction captured on the blockchain. During the game players earn a digital token that they can use to buy additional properties and even upgrade the properties they have.
Music – Even music is taking over the digital world. Companies like Audius have already pulled in some of the biggest names in the music industry its platform.
Venture Capital and Angel Investments - There are a group of VCs and Angel investors that are building a Web3, Blockchain, Metaverse, and Crypto investor/startup community through NFTs. The Chummy Fin Club is even offering a $100,000 seed round startup competition for Web3 startups.
Tickets for concerts, conferences, or masterminds – Gary Vaynerchuk probably is the best example of this with VeeFriends. Each holder of a VeeFriends NFT gets to go to the next few years of a conference that Gary V is putting together. Your NFT is the pass to get in, it can get you mentorship, and even numerous mastermind groups. The market cap for VeeFriends is right now over $600 million.
As the world is adopting NFTs for everything, why not Resumes.
This could be a way for people to have ownership of their careers. This could also be a way for candidates to rent out their NFT Resumes to platforms for recruiters to show interest in their background and skillsets.
There could even be a few decentralized platforms where recruiters could search for resumes. These places could even flip the current business model of the mammoth job boards whereas recruiters will be paying you or splitting with a type of money or crypto to be able to access your information and reach out.
This next idea could be something of the future (or already in development by multiple companies)
This is where the idea of the Resume NFT Project comes in.
It’s the start of Web3.0 for the recruiting space.
This would be building out what you already know as a resume database.
But your resume would be a unique NFT that you own, not the platform. The Resume NFT Project would be a marketplace where recruiters, businesses, and Human Resources would be able to access your unique NFT (your resume) to reach out to you about opportunities.
The unique structure of the platform is just like many of the resume databases, customers pay to access your profile and your resume. But here you also earn (soon to be named coin) for every time they access your NFT resume/Contact information to reach out to you. The more companies that reach out to you the more (soon to be named coin) you collect.
To top it off to reward early members who are not job hunting at the time but still have their NFT resumes/profiles as part of the ecosystem. Every member will receive a % of each transaction fee distributed from every transaction from a recruiter, HR, business accessing the marketplace platform it will be automatically redistributed automatically without the need for gas fees.
Your future and potentially your first NFT you own could be your resume!
I know that this is an idea that I am sure numerous companies are going to start or have started to build out. But just like anything new, I know there could be challenges. Here are some of them:
- Since each resume would be a unique NFT, if you make any changes to your resume you would have to mint a new NFT. (Here is one of my old resumes on OpenSea to check out: Resume.) So maybe it could be the talent profile that is the NFT/Or just blockchain-based. We have already seen with many of the gaming platforms is that you can make some of these NFTs upgradable
- Adaptation. I can see at least for the first few years adaptation and mainstream would be tough. It's tough to compete against the Indeed’s of the world. This would probably be a niche site for blockchain companies and those that would like to work for them. So far this year over $20 billion of Venture Capital has been invested in Crypto focused companies so places like that would be the initial target of the project. This could be helped with an ICO for the coin that will be the basis of the platform.
- The ability to have trust-less verified work histories. How would companies know that the resume is real or legit? I think this could be a real issue but not a major one like its not a major problem now. A few early adaptors could become rich by partaking in the process early and getting the crypto coin involved. But much of the rest of it will just help with candidate stackability.
But outside these challenges and adoption, the future is coming faster than we know it. If you don’t plan on at least jumping in, make sure your are still at least tracking some of these changes. The world won't stop changing.
If you ever want to chat about the future of recruiting with Web3, Crypto, or Blockchain, hit me up!
Need to hire? We can help! This article was written by Benjamin Mena who is a Managing Partner of Select Source Solutions which is a boutique executive recruitment firm specializing in Data Science, Cyber Security, Talent Acquisition, and Government Contracting.
If you’d like to have a conversation about employee retention, growing your team, or hiring plans for the rest of the year, please get in touch! Benjamin@selectsourcesolutions.com
Join me on upcoming episodes of the Elite Recruiter Podcast on Apple or Spotify!
