Hi everyone, and welcome to I'm Interested - our weekly newsletter to keep you up to date with all things jobs, hiring, and web3.

For those who don't know me, I'm Alec.eth - the Chief Alec Officer of interested.fyi, a web3 hiring platform that helps teams find their next great hire through high-quality referral funnels.

Interested.fyi is an evolution of my recruiting work @ Peeple.work. After leaving Consensys Mesh, I've been operating Peeple.work since early 2022 and have since helped 40+ brands schedule interviews, 30+ candidates find new gigs, and paid out $185K+ to our referral network. Before ConsenSys Mesh, I spent 5+ years of Recruiting experience with HFT firms like DRW/Cumberland, Jump, Citadel, HRT, etc.

But all of my experiences led me to one conclusion; that hiring in web3 sucks.

So, I'm on a mission to make hiring more transparent, effective, and efficient. Interested.fyi is a platform with an open bounty and referral system to incentivize recruiters and candidates to make high-quality introductions to teams. We built out our first iteration last year and are focused on making it as frictionless and actionable as possible this year.

Through this newsletter, I hope to share key product updates and showcase companies hiring and AMAs from our community of expert recruiters, founders, candidates, and VCs. Whether you are a founder looking to hire or a candidate looking for their next gig, I want to help you cut through the noise and find new people and opportunities that are right for you.

And if you want to stay updated daily, join our /jobs channel on Farcaster. I am a huge Farcaster fan and am grateful to be hosting this community. We have over 3.5K+ casters posting everything from new roles to seeking advice on conquering this job market. With the 2024 bull run underway, it's a great time to look out for who is growing their team and what bets folks are making in the market.

So without further ado, let's dive in into all the interesting things happening @ interested.fyi and /jobs

Big News

We've been cookin' 👨‍🍳

Interested.fyi is coming to Farcaster! We started building interested.fyi in 2023, and the process was extremely hard. Couple that with being a first-time product owner, a terrible jobs market, and no real sticky features....let's just say we didn't make the splash we were looking for.

And that's why we've been heads down in the kitchen, revisiting our fundamentals and cooking up a storm. We realized that the only way we can help unlock opportunities through intros is to make the process as simple as possible. That's why we are entering our Farcaster era 💜.

Farcaster has been an amazing community hungry for innovation and ready to try new social experiments. We also see so many great opportunities and amazing candidates entering /jobs, and we want to make matching the right talent to the right jobs easy, effective, actionable, and rewarding.

Introducing @interestedfyi : Farcaster mode (launching next week)

We see two issues currently in the market:

1. Web3 dapps have a fragmented experience.

2. Web3 recruiting is how slow af.

Our goal with Farcaster mode is to help job seekers apply for jobs and to help recruiters make high-quality intros without ever leaving Farcaster. We want to create a unified user experience while helping teams find the best candidates without the bottlenecks.

Why nominate yourself/others?

1. Referrals are the most effective way to get yourself/your friends hired. So if you have a job in web3, pay it forward by nominating your talented peers. If you are looking for a job, you owe it to yourself to maximize your chances of success.

2. Successful referrals not only help you contribute to scaling the team, but also boost your reputation in the space.

3. Get paid for your social network; some open roles on Farcaster will have a $3-5K bounty. If your referral is successful, you get that piece of the pie!

Launching soon 🚀

We are launching next week with some amazing partners. Stay tuned to be one of the first to try Farcaster mode on the /jobs channel.

And if you haven't already, create your interested.fyi account here for a seamless experience.

Talent Spotlights

Every week, we host AMAs in the /jobs channel with amazing recruiters and founders from top web3 organizations who share their knowledge and tips with our community. In the past week, we hosted Harper from OP Labs, Jake Kerr, and Lena from Pimlico!

Meet Harper from the Optimism Talent Team

Harper has been building teams for most of his career, usually at startups, because it's more fun... He joined Optimism two years ago and is responsible for developing the Engineering, Product, and Design teams. Over the past two years, he has played a pivotal role in expanding the team from 20 to an impressively productive size of ~75 (labs + foundation). As our inaugural AMA guest, Harper gives us the DL on all things Optimistic 🔴.

Building a team 101:

1. Understand the role/need

2. Understand the candidates

3. Don't settle + don't rush

Those fundamentals don't shift across teams.

Growing a Deeply Values-focused team like OP

Being super explicit about culture at the outset makes a huge difference and filters out many people who would not be a good fit.

Approach to value-centric scaling:

1. Heavily weight our cultural interview and dig deep when we see yellow flags

2. Be extremely honest about what makes us unique. Candidates should actively get excited about the quirks.

Challenges:

1. Accepting some level of change. It's inevitable. What is good change vs. bad change?

2. Avoid hiring for "culture fit". We do not want to build a team of people who think the same way we do.

Soft Skills for Successful Optimists :

• Deeply curious

• Strong opinions, weakly held

• Dropped out of school

To learn more, catch the full AMA here

Meet Jacob, Web3 Talent Consultant, and Paradigm alumni

Jacob has been recruiting for ~7 years with a range of web2 and web3 teams and has hired everything from interns to executives. He is currently helping Flashbots, Goldsky, and Conduit. Before that, he was the in-house talent at Paradigm and has also helped hire for other top teams like Jump, 0x Labs, etc. Jacob shares his passion for recruiting and his go-to framework for helping build effective teams.

To me, recruiting is a mechanism for helping individuals progress professionally and personally as they take on big impactful missions within their teams … and with crypto, we get to take best practices of recruiting from the web2 world and combine it with unique and wonky challenges of web3.

What motivates you? ( inspired by @dwr)

I love meeting new people and helping build inspiring companies where people can be their best selves and work on things they find motivating.

Finding the Right Hire 101

• Understand the current state of the business/team

• Understand where the business/team wants to go

• Identify gaps in skills, personality traits, responsibilities/goals that need to be filled

• Make sure the interview plan will test for those skills, personality traits, and goals

• Give candidates context on what the team needs so they can highlight their relevant strengths

Read the full thread with @rrekaj here

Meet Lena, aka positron.eth from Pimlico

Lena is currently hiring for Pimlico. Before that, she helped recruit at the Ethereum Foundation, Set Protocol, and Toucan Protocol. Lena shares her knowledge on the Ethereum ecosystem and hiring trends on her radar.

What’s one myth about the EF you can debunk?

I think the EF can come across as this mysterious black box, but actually everyone is super approachable and more than happy to share what they are working on.

What drew you to your current role?

At Pimlico, I am helping to build the founding team (engineering). Getting to be part of building a team from scratch (with everything that this comes with) is incredibly meaningful work.

Catch the full thread with @positron here

This week's AMAs @ /jobs

This week, we hosted some fun AMAs with top web3 talent folks :

• Check out the Full AMA with @b3nnn, the Head of DAO Talent at Pokt Network, where we talk about all things Future of Work.

• We had @0xrecruiter, a Technical Recruiter at Offchain Labs ( creators of Arbitrum), share his expertise on how to grow small teams strategically and source the best technical talent.

Upcoming AMA's

We have three impressive guests joining us next week to share their web3 talent journey:

1. Josh Stein, Dev Rel @ Celestia

2. Nichanan Kesonpat, Head of Platform @ 1kx

3. Greg Clayman, founder at Zero to One Ventures and previously talent @ a16z, Chapter One and Google

This is a great chance to ask them questions and get to know them, especially if you want to work on their team. So make sure to ⭐️ the /jobs channel on Farcaster to stay up to date on all announcements.

Be the first to try @interestedfyi on Farcaster 👀

Next week is a big week for us! We are very optimistic about bringing interested.fyi to our beloved Farcaster community. Tune in to the /jobs channel for more info on how to use Farcaster mode and our very first postings. We will also have mini AMA's with the recruiters managing these roles so that you can get on their radar ASAP through @interestedfyi nominations.

2024 is going to see a huge influx of new open roles. If you are looking for a new role or know of someone who is, we want to get you connected to the right decision makers who can propel your career. We also want to keep on making the recruiting experience better and welcome all feedback, bugs and edge cases.

Whoo! Well that was a long first edition! If you are still reading this - thank you. This is just the beginning, and I'm really excited for how far we've come. I'm still pretty new at this founder thing and I'd love your feedback as we build our product, grow this community, and curate content that excites you. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and feel free to reply to share your thoughts and suggested topics - I'm interested in what interests you!

Cheers,
Alec.eth