Your web3 identity will be 10x your LinkedIn profile, so start making one

As data becomes more standard, composable, and available on-chain, it opens up better ways to differentiate online identities

Status is important, but not the kind you think. It’s not about being ‘above’ other people. Rather, it’s status to find your people—those who share the same values. This is important in many ways, but it’s easier to understand in the context of work. For example, your status (i.e. your reputation) is helpful for job searching.

Today, the online status is increasingly becoming more important. For the Linkedin and Twitter crowd, Google search results, followings, and profile pages matter.

As web3 grows in popularity, online status will further rise in importance. Million-dollar jpegs are canaries in the mine. Profile pictures to prove you’re ‘in’ is just the start.

LinkedIn profile = logos and titles; everything else is noise

Have you every tried sourcing hiring candidates? It’s tough.

There’s a lot of noise, especially in LinkedIn. Who has the right skills, experience, and context that can raise the bar of the team? At the end of the day, you need to have a chat or maybe a case study to increase your confidence. But, there isn’t enough time to talk to all of them! So somehow, you need to screen them.

Logos are the easiest way. If they come from a reputable tech company, good chance they are a stronger candidate. Flawed approach? Sure, obviously not perfect.

Next are titles. You want someone senior or ‘did it before’. Again, are titles a good signal or just something candidates or their company made up? Still flawed, but what else do you have?

All other data in LinkedIn is even worse along the confidence and accuracy spectrum. Description and achievements? Who knows if any of those are true or relevant. You can’t even filter that data to narrow your search.

Here’s what a typical LinkedIn search for an ‘ideal’ candidate probably looks like for a tech role:

• Experience? - look for Meta, Google, Amazon, etc

• Titles? - Senior blah, Head of X, Lead of Y, Director of Z

• Background? - Masters in something, Graduated from [insert Ivy league]

Note: not a jab at these profiles. But the reality is that people use these easy proxies because everyone is time poor. No one can talk to 100+ candidates for one hire.

That’s not fair.

Yup, it’s not. Chances are, you’ll miss the diamond in the rough. 🤷‍♀️

There’s a missing piece—a way to standardize ‘achievements’. How do I know that what a candidate claims to have achieved is true and relevant while saving me time from talking to them one by one?

We need standard data that can be trusted, beyond just the career experience logos.

Companies should just do more research.

You can argue that a good recruiter can find the rough diamond.

Check each ‘unknown’ logo. Scrutinize online activities like newsletters, Twitter following, the blue checkmark, try back channels to find candidates with a solid reputation. Sure, the best recruiters might do this. How about everyone else?

If there was an easy way to measure and search through online activity, the size of online companies, the reach of a candidate’s network, then maybe more people will have a better chance of finding their people.

Web3 is a chance to change the definition of online ‘status’ from beyond just logos

Let’s stack rank the things you can really trust with today’s online profiles (again, not perfect but…):

• Logos of your work experience

• Social media following

• Titles

Assuming we can make web3 work, the concepts of a ‘wallet’ and on-chain activities become pervasive to the online stuff we do. Things you can probably trust expand further to:

• The ‘success’ of even relatively unknown companies, because you can measure the TVL or on-chain activity of that company’s wallet

• A candidate’s on-chain activity i.e. how degen are they, because you can track the activity of their wallet to protocols or dapps they’ve interacted with

• The performance of their side projects like NFT collections, dapps, etc. Again, the data and activities for these are standardized and published in web3

• The reach of their work. For example their newsletter could be in web3 dapps like Mirror.xyz and you’d be able to measure the performance of each article

• Their network could even be measurable with projects like Lens Protocol that deconstructs the social network

With some luck, the new candidate job search could look something like this instead:

• Experience? Companies in the creator industry with at least 5Mn revenue in the past year

• Background? People who’ve at least used AppX, AppY, AppZ, because those are most likely our target market

• More specifics? Someone who has a strong reach and can write well would be perfect. They should have 1,000+ followers across our relevant social media list with at least a handful of articles getting 100,000 views or garnered $10,000 in sale volume or royalties

• Would be cool if… The candidate has a few side projects that have either had 1,000+ customers or revenue (or TVL) amounting to at least $100,000, then that would be a good signal even if they don’t have top-tier tech experience

• Better yet… If you happen to find a candidate that has a decent network in the finance space (e.g. people in apps A, B, C), then that would be perfect.

That is, I hope with web3 talent isn’t limited to just the famous (tech) brands. Because the data is there, available, and standard enough for a better way.

Finding your people

Beyond the recruiting example, the availability of standard data paves the way to find more relevant connections. How do I keep myself updated with the feeds of people I respect—from apps X, Y, Z, has 10,000+ followers, has built at least one decent NFT community, publishes material read by 1,000+ people, etc etc?

Web3 isn’t just expensive jpegs. On-chain, publicly available, and standardized data is a boring but ground-breaking at the same time.

Start your web3 journey

We’re spending more of our time and energy online. Curious about other ways web3 might impact our online future?

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I also post web3 stuff in Twitter: @nigelwtlee