Inside crypto’s hiring spree: A ‘Wild West’ search for talent with one big problem

Welcome to a special edition of Human Capital, featuring a new LinkedIn report on the state of talent in crypto.

When Bain Capital unveiled a $560 million crypto fund in March, it was debuting one of the biggest pools of money to focus on the burgeoning ecosystem centered around digital assets.

But the announcement — which took place on International Women’s Day — made news for a different reason: The entire investment team was made up of men.

“The mess-up we had today is one of many, many reasons why it’s critical to have a diverse team to provide much-needed perspective,” one of the fund’s partners said on the evening of the debut, after deleting a thread of tweets that included a collage of the seven team members along with explanations of how he knew each of them.

The episode underscored two critical facts about the relatively young cryptocurrency industry. First, it’s a space where rapid progress and growth have begun to attract serious interest among institutional investors, accelerating the pull of top talent from industries like finance and tech. And second, even as the crypto movement promises to democratize money by tearing down barriers to access, it is falling short on diversity within its own ranks.

Those are among the takeaways from a LinkedIn analysis of the state of talent in crypto. In the U.S. last year, net crypto hires rocketed 73% from two years earlier, according to new data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph. By contrast, the net number of hires in traditional finance industries declined by 1% over the same period.

But crypto’s rapid hiring growth has not been spread evenly, and while women have always been a minority in the industry, the gap is getting worse. From 2018 to 2021, 70% of new crypto hires were men and 30% were women, according to the data. Last year, women’s share dipped to 26.5%. It’s a marked difference from finance industries like banking and investment management, where women have held steady at roughly 43% of net new hires over the same time period.

What’s keeping women from entering crypto? Part of the problem is cultural.?

“It’s a little shitty,” said Alana Podrx, the CEO of Eve Wealth, a community for women to invest in crypto projects together and share learnings. She was reflecting on the frequent “female takedowns” that occur in online forums where crypto enthusiasts, often using pseudonyms, congregate to discuss everything from new projects to currency swings. “It’s like going back to Joan of Arc days, where we have to pretend to be men to be safe.”

Because of its novelty and sheer pace, the crypto ecosystem can be rife with imposter syndrome, say leaders and team builders in the space. People often doubt their expertise or chances of success, and so they opt out. Additional obstacles for diverse talent have included a lack of mentors and sponsors who encourage women and people of color to take career risks, as well as historical recruiting practices that suffer from embedded bias.

Kevin Logan sees things changing. A top recruiter for crypto jobs, Logan said that in the past three to four months every founder he has worked with has made finding diverse candidates a priority at the start of their talent search. And the issue is raised by the founders themselves, not him — a marked difference from his work with traditional technology companies.

“Crypto is a chance to do things differently — that’s the whole point, right?” he said. “From the start, we should be building processes that take out bias and remove blockers to diversity.”

Despite its significant gender gap, the crypto ecosystem has quickly become more diverse and inclusive than other industries in a few ways. One is in the geographic makeup of its members, who converge on projects from around the world to work on delivering crypto’s promise of borderless currencies and decentralized transactions. BlockFi, one of the fastest-growing U.S.-headquartered crypto startups, employs 800 people around the world, including in hubs like Singapore, Argentina, Poland and the UK. “That was always part of the plan,” chief people officer Laura Cooper said.

Henri Arslanian, a global adviser to companies and governments on crypto matters, sees this kind of geographical spread all the time. “It’s very common to see, for example, a U.S. project where you have developers from Russia, from China, from Latin America working together seamlessly,” he said. “In that regard, crypto is more diverse than other industries.”

Within the U.S., crypto talent can be found coast to coast, according to LinkedIn data. The top hotspots for per-capita crypto hires — San Francisco, Austin and New York — align with existing hubs for technology and finance. That’s reflected, too, in the top roles for crypto hires last year, according to the data: cryptocurrency trader; blockchain developer; software engineer; blockchain consultant; and bitcoin miner.

Rounding out the top 10 locations for recent hires are cities from Miami and Denver to Seattle and Atlanta.

PayPal, which with its scale and reach has now become one of the largest crypto players, deliberately looks for talent across the country, said Edwin Aoki, chief technology officer for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies at the payments giant.

“The decentralized nature of crypto and of the companies in our industry mean that we can hire in new locations,” Aoki said. “In addition to our existing hubs in Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, Scottsdale and Chicago, I’ve asked our team to look at Detroit, Atlanta, Miami and other places where we know there are great folks with a variety of backgrounds who want to make a big impact.”

In crypto, that desire to make an impact outshines other, more traditional hiring criteria, like a candidate’s education level or years of experience. Those resume qualifications can even be a handicap, said Arslanian and BlockFi’s Cooper, if they signal that a person might be too set in their ways to reimagine the future of finance or technology, as crypto aims to do.

On average, recent crypto hires had slightly less work experience — by about 4.5 months — than recent hires in traditional finance industries, according to LinkedIn data. But as crypto companies mature, they are hiring more professionals with advanced degrees. From 2018 to 2021, 37% of entrants to crypto had an MBA or other master’s degree, compared with 31% among finance industry hires in that time.

Still, the focus in evaluating talent remains decidedly different in crypto than in almost any other industry, according to Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of digital-asset research firm Delphi Digital, which employs 105 people.

“We don’t care if you’re a Harvard Ph.D. or a high-school dropout,” Kelly said.

Arslanian, who has hired dozens of people into crypto roles in recent years, including to build consulting giant PwC’s global crypto team, said he doesn’t look at resumes.

So, what are the key traits for those who want to land a job — and thrive — in crypto? Ask people who have done it and two words quickly emerge: passion and curiosity.

Logan, the recruiter, said many professions are regarded by workers as “just a job,” but he has never seen a crypto candidate view a role that way.

“Right now we are in the pioneering phase of crypto and Web3,” he said, using the industry’s catchall term for a new stage of the internet driven by blockchain technology. “Everybody is in it for some foundational reason. People have educated themselves on why they are here.”

When hiring at BlockFi, managers evaluate candidates’ character first, then their skills, according to Cooper. She said the company looks for people who are committed to being lifelong learners, who have a growth mindset and who have the stamina to tackle problems that have never existed before.

Cooper said she asks job candidates to share a “disastrous” mistake they have made — the kind that makes you feel like you almost just crashed your car. A lifelong learner, she said, won’t get uncomfortable recalling it but rather will launch into an analysis of why it happened, what they learned from it, who they told about it and what they would do differently the next time.

In addition to gauging candidates’ passion and curiosity, Kelly likes to assess applicants’ open-mindedness. Crypto is so fast-paced and ever-changing, he said, that he sees people burn out physically or mentally when they are anchored to one way of doing or thinking about something.

“Having strong convictions that are loosely held is a very good mantra for those who enter this space and are looking to make a career in it,” he said.

Today, the number of people looking to make a career in crypto is only rising, according to Logan. He calls it the “Wild Wild West,” where both he and candidates regularly find themselves online at 2 a.m. discussing the latest developments in the industry from the previous day.

And more of those candidates are from diverse backgrounds, he said. Eve Wealth’s Podrx has noticed the same, especially as job hopefuls continue to see a growing number of crypto leaders who look like them.

“I’m betting on an optimistic future,” Podrx said of diversity trends in the space. “Otherwise, you’re guaranteed sub-optimal results.”

—With Danielle Kavanagh-Smith and Scott Olster. Graphics by Greg Lee.

Methodology

LinkedIn Economic Graph researchers classified a “cryptocurrency hire” as any LinkedIn member who started a position containing one or more of the following key terms: blockchain, crypto, bitcoin, ethereum, non-fungible token, NFT, cardano, ripple, Web3, solana, or solidity and excluding terms related to cryptography and cryptology. Finance hires include LinkedIn members who started positions in one of the following industries: financial services, banking, investment management, investment banking, venture capital and private equity, and capital markets. Finance industry positions exclude those that overlap with cryptocurrency positions. LinkedIn researchers categorized cryptocurrency and finance hires by their highest degree attained from 2018 to 2021. And they analyzed the cities where recent cryptocurrency hires were hired, determined by the city of residence listed on a member’s profile. Each city’s hires were adjusted by the average number of LinkedIn members in that city over the course of each year to produce a per-capita ranking. A city must have had at least 100 cryptocurrency hires and at least 1,000 LinkedIn members on average in a given year in order to be ranked. Gender identity isn’t binary and we recognize that some LinkedIn members identify beyond the traditional gender constructs of “male” and “female.” If not explicitly self-identified, we have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female or by pronouns used on their LinkedIn profiles. Members whose gender could not be inferred as either male or female were excluded from this analysis.