 Good to go. And let me say, David, you're recording right? This is now streaming on YouTube. Yes, you're live and recording. Okay. All right. I can record it here. Oh, no, that's right. You're recording. I'm good. Okay. So I want to welcome everybody to the blockchain Employee Summer 2021 series that has been sponsored by the Hyperledger Project and the Linux Foundation. And so what we've been doing is trying to basically offer sort of a non-ramp for people to understand about how to find a career, if you will, in blockchain specifically a little bit. So there's plenty of technical careers out there. And we thought it would be helpful. And actually, I'll give Bobby Moskara a credit. She's the one that invented out of the entire concept of this. So Bobby, do you want to talk a little bit about that before we get to the panel? Bobby, are you on mute? Sure, Jim. Do you want to go on present mode? Because we're seeing your... Everything. That's right. Sure. I can do that. Let me go to the slide show. All right. There you go. Great. And you could just go to the next slide already. Okay. So this is a VC employee. It's a meetup group that's hosted by the Hyperledger and the Linux Foundation. So could you go to the Linux Foundation anti-trust policy? Thanks. There you go. There you go. There you go. So the anti-trust policy for the Linux Foundation is on the screen. Please just read it over. It's just a basic guideline on how to behave in public meetings. Okay, great. And then I'll go to the next slide because we're fast readers. So this is like Jim was saying, it is a blockchain employment initiative to try to see where exactly people are getting their talent from, what the talent that they're going to need, and how to get the pipeline filled with qualified applicants. So the first meetup was more for individuals looking for jobs and trainings. And this one is more geared toward people who are going to be hiring, starting projects and looking for qualified applicants. The next one will be in the middle of August and that's going to be geared towards branding and marketing yourself, looking for jobs and how to actually go about applying and getting in front of the right people. And then finally, at the end of the summer, we're going to have a job fair where people who, companies that are looking for applicants, will have a position at the job fair and the applicants will be able to go to the table, sit down and discuss with the actual people hiring what they're looking for and how they can get to that position. Next slide. So again, I'm the Hyperledger Princeton meetup person. Jim is the Hyperledger Boston person. John is the Hyperledger Denver person. And Narish is the Hyperledger India person. And together we've worked on all the pieces for this presentation. Next slide. Okay, so the agenda for today, we're going to go into, Jim's going to run a panel discussion. And we have three panelists, Gary Sing, Ben Townsend and Brian Nelson, who will talk to us today. We have certain questions to pose to them about hiring practices in the blockchain arena. And then we'll open it up for questions and answers. And if we have time, we'll go through just some hiring plans that corporations should think about implementing before starting to hire for blockchain. So at that, I'm going to turn it over to Jim. Thank you very much, Bobby. So let me flip to my deck. Give me one second. Here it is. Then I'm going to go back to slide show again. Here we go. So tonight, we want to talk about what, in a sense, the, I'll call it the employer perspective is in the blockchain job market in general. So the focus is there. I'm lucky enough to have three excellent panelists with me tonight. And I've got in the presentation, you'll get a copy of this. We'll post a PDF file along with the reporting. The reporting will also be up on YouTube. But you can read, obviously, the descriptions here. What I'd rather do is just introduce the panelists, let them tell you a little bit about themselves before we kick off the discussion. So Gary, why don't you start and give us a little bit about your background, what you've done and what you're doing now. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jim. So yeah, I guess Gary, I mean, in the blockchain space, I spent five years, I guess at IBM, leading kind of blockchain development there. We had Hyperledger Fabric, obviously, as a core contribution that we started way back when with the Linux Foundation. And yes, I did that and did the open source. I still am part of open source. My job there, I ran all of, by the end of the time, my time there, I think I ran all of development for our blockchain as a service for the open source side, so hiring for different roles. And now I don't quite do as much on the blockchain side. I work on Kubernetes at Google, actually. Cool, awesome. That's great background. And you said earlier when we were talking that you've been on both sides of the fence. So just recently, you transferred over to Google, so you went through that hiring process. And as you said before, you've done a lot of hiring in the past as well. Excellent. Ben, can I have you introduce yourself to the audience? Absolutely. Hello, everybody. My name is Ben Townsend. I'm a blockchain specialist recruiter for a company called Jackson Hogg, based in the UK at the minute. But obviously, we cover the sort of wetland breadth of the United States of America. I've been recruiting for 10 years solely in the development space, but in the last two years specifically, solely within the blockchain space, sort of building development teams from scratch, but also working with sort of startups and SMEs as well, just on sort of one-off developers and assisting them with their projects. But yeah, nice to meet you all and looking forward to talk for everything and answering your questions. Great. Brian, you want to take that shot? Brian Nelson? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jim. Hello, everyone. I am a currently a technical recruiter at an agency, so we help about 60 different companies here in the Pacific Northwest with their recruiting efforts. Prior to that, I was recruiting in-house corporate recruiter for a startup here in Seattle. And that's where I kind of got my start. But I really enjoy what I'm doing now because I get to work on all technologically sound jobs from front-end, full-stack, back-end, blockchain, crypto. So it just gives me a, I'm learning every day, which is a fun part of my job. Cool. All right. And then although Bobby already introduced yourself, I'm going to pick on her anyway because I'm accidentally forcing her to be on our panel as well for commentary. I know she's done a lot of research on the job market as well, and I think she has a lot to bring to the table. So welcome, Bobby, to the panel surprise. That said, let me move forward. And these are the three panels we have. You've seen, I'll quote, the overview of the topics we're going to hit, but I'll go through a more detailed discussion. And the first area I want to hit is talking about market demand for blockchain-related skills and roles. And so let me just open it up and ask the panelists, Gary, from your perspective, since you've been in the space for more than five years now. If I ask you, what do you think of the job market today, the opportunities? And I don't mean just developers, but I'll quote the whole market within blockchain for different types of roles. How do you see it as something that's growing fast, slow, anything about the demand side of it? Yeah, I'd say it's probably on the cusp of it's not as obvious sometimes, I think, but it's probably growing, maybe steady, but maybe fast. I'm sure some of the recruiters will be better, better off than me on telling the exact rate of how many folks that there are on there. But I think there's a wide variety of, there's a wide spectrum of stuff, right? There's definitely developers, right? There's been a lot of focus on the consulting and services business, right? All of them are generally been hiring. I mean, you can find a ton of jobs there. I think you've got other stuff in this space, right, that people think of as blockchain, right? But like Coinbase, right? Big hiring, right? You know, other companies that are out there, like companies like Securrency and whatever, are all hiring. And you'll also see, I think you'll see in-house, right? You can find in-house jobs, right? You saw JPMC, right? With hiring and starting up stuff. So I'd say there's plenty of them from a development perspective. Also, you can find companies that are doing blockchain stuff that are actually looking for normal development, DevOps, running cloud, that type of stuff as well, right? I'd say you'll see that across the board. So I'd say it's definitely a growing market, I guess I would say. Yep. Ben, your thoughts? Absolutely. I think the demand is very, very high. In the blockchain space, sort of in general, the roles that I've sort of been working recently and that the clients that I've been partnering up with, a lot of it is smart contract focused at the minute. Decentralized finance and applications, a lot of stuff with hyperledger as well. And I'll be honest, if you used to go on LinkedIn recruiter, which obviously a tool that we use as recruiters, if you was just to go across the whole of the USA and just use the term blockchain developer, now that's obviously, it's not the finite number because there's software engineers, software developers, but if you were to just look at blockchain developer across the US, that only brings up about 2000 candidates who solely market themselves as blockchain developers, which gives you an idea, obviously, it's a very, very candidate short market. But that's obviously not to say that that is the be one end all of it because there is a lot of developers that have dabbled in certain parts of blockchain who don't market themselves like that. But just to give you an overview, across the whole of the US, 2000 candidates that are solely marketing themselves as blockchain developers, it gives an idea of the sort of supply and demand that we're dealing with at the minute. Yeah, so when you flip the coin on that question and you say, okay, the supply is 2000, they're purely focused that way. Any sense of how many openings there are within a year for that? I mean, even if I was just looking at the East Coast as an example, I couldn't give you a figure, but I think my sort of market map that I built myself is in excess of 170 clients just in New York and Boston. So there's certain companies that are only required one or two candidates, but then a number of other developers. But I mean, there's probably a thousand just on the East Coast, I would say. I would go as far as to say that. Okay, and Brian, your thoughts? I am probably in a, I mean, it's a small market, right? Because I work for one boutique firm here in Seattle. A lot of the roles just give you an idea in the past six months, a lot of the roles will be focused on. I've seen two that involve blockchain and it wasn't purely blockchain. It was like, okay, they have to have blockchain and security and crypto, you know, or and FinTech or something else. So it was all these groupings. So it's very challenging to find candidates. A lot of the stuff we do up here because we are Pacific Northwest Central is more just full stack, front end, back end, UX design, very specialized skills where they maybe need to know up to maybe three languages. And then I get a very broad search. But when I dive into the blockchain, I get a very narrow search. Yep. Bobby, since I know you've done a lot as part of the whole series on research, your thoughts on demand? Well, I've been monitoring a lot of the sites that offer or looking for applicants. And I would have to say Accenture, Consensus, Hyperledger, and a lot of AWS have been posting enormous amounts of jobs weekly. I mean, at least 20 to 25 brand new jobs every week for those like heavy hitting companies. So the demand is growing enormously. I mean, for just that kind of turnover for new jobs, I mean, we put them on the BC employee website, and it's hard to keep them up because every day there's like 20 new jobs. So it's exciting. Yeah. Well, thank you for trying to keep it current, which I realize is an impossible task. I mean, if they have things like RSS feeds, something like that, or APIs that would always help to get the postings, but you're right, there's many places there. My next question is back more to the company side, that I'm going to ask, how do companies define their needs? Blockchain is one thing, but just in general, it can apply to any kind of a technical role with, in a sense, my panelists, how are they defining what their staffing roles and opportunities are? How do they decide whether it's a full-time or a contract person that should be filling a role? Gary, any thoughts on your end? Yeah. So I guess, you know, it's interesting. I think, I think, you know, Ben mentioned, you know, smart contracts, right? I think you see, you know, a lot of jobs out there, you know, contract, you know, contract to hire on the sort of smart contract side, right? Those more for, I think those would be more for people who want to just, you know, be a blockchain specialist and maybe go from potentially like, you know, company to company, right? There's just a lot of opportunities out there on, like, you know, projects that were started on, like, fabric a while ago, just from, you know, what I used to work on fabric a while ago. And now they need some expertise to come in and update it, right? Because somebody built the original one, they've lost some skills, they're looking to, you know, bring people in. So I think there's, you know, plenty of those. And I see them because I get offered them a lot. But so there's a LinkedIn. But I think in general, right, when we were, you know, if you look at the bigger ones, right, I think things, you know, span a couple of things. And development side, you know, definitely, as Bobby said, right, all those companies are looking for, you know, full time. I think the roles are generally, you know, I think many of the consultancies have gone, you know, multi-blocked, you know, multi-multiple technologies, right? So they'd like to see that you've dabbled in at least one, but if you have experience or knowledge in two, you know, at least can, you know, talk about it. I think that becomes, you know, fairly important. But I'd also say that you'll find some that are just on the cloud operations and DevOps side too, right? For a lot of these ones who are running blockchain as a service and running it. Because it's not just, you know, there's the blockchain piece, which is usually, you know, probably like 20, 30% of the work on any of those projects. And there's like front end, there's operating it, there's running it, managing, maintaining it. So I'd say you'd see, you'll see all those, you know, types of types of roles, right? At companies that are out there. And then, yeah, it just depends on whether it's, you know, an enterprise itself, probably looking more like smart contract stuff, the IBMs and Accentures looking for full stack blockchain stuff, AWS looking for developers, right? So that's kind of the variance. Yeah, a good point though, you're right. Because there are some blockchain apps that are I'll call it heavily blockchain, I'll say where that's the primary focus, but a lot of the apps, you're right, are having all kinds of other services plugged in, not just AI or device integration, but other types of things, mapping services, messaging, you know, omni-channel kind of architectures and things like that. And not just cloud, but all over the place. And so you're looking for a ton of skill sets. I understand that we were looking just as a thing, you know, the jobs that we hired for, right? When we were running Fabric and Blockchain as a service, right? I mean, we were also looking for skills in those sort of languages too, right, that were out there, right? When we were looking for specific things, right? We were looking for people who that we thought had a way of thinking, right? So can you show what kind of projects you worked on? And what was your method of thinking? Were you skilled in, you know, I could take a go programmer and, you know, make them, you know, we needed some people who could do that. We needed people on Kubernetes, you know, for example, because that's what we were running on. So we had, you know, various roles, you know, like, like that. I don't think that we, ironically, even though we were working on Hyperledger Fabric, we never actually, on my team, we never defined like Hyperledger Fabric, you know, developers, right, as something like that. We just defined kind of a couple of core things to work in. That's more on the product side. And I guess on the services side, of course, then you would, then you would see more definitions on the technologies that you've actually used, like Fabric or whatever, right? Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. That's an interesting perspective though, because you're right. You're saying that the, in a sense, the people you want on the team are probably, I'll call it skill, motivated, intelligent, but they're skilled utility players that probably can play lots of roles where when you're going with the contract side, you're saying, I got a real need right here right now. Boom. You know, show me that you can address that need specifically, jump in and fill a gap quickly kind of a thing, which is different than your thoughts. Yeah. I'll be honest. I can echo what Gary was saying a little bit there. Some of, some sort of out and out developers who maybe don't have any experience in blockchain, but if there's a blockchain developer in-house, a lot of companies will look at talented developers, you know, Java, Go, C++, Rust is being used, you know, a vast amount at the minute. And, you know, that's obviously some advice that we're giving to clients that is a very candidate short market. It's very candidate led, very candidate driven. And if you do want to sort of bulk up and strengthen your permanent team, then that's obviously the route that we can go down as well if the skills aren't necessarily there. Having said that, if it isn't, you know, a company, a bit of a startup that's got some funding, you know, they've got the idea, they've got the money there now, then sort of nine times out of 10, it is going to be a contractor that's going to fill that void for them. So yeah, that's all my overview and thoughts on it. Yeah. Brian, your thoughts? So my experience has been a little different than what Ben just alluded to. They wanted full time, direct hire, someone that can grow with the company, be in house. What I typically see is companies, we start there with the full time. And if there's any sort of difficulties in finding that person, we will go back to the client and say, okay, you know, here's sort of our metrics of our current searches. Here's what we're finding. Here's the common themes. And here's a couple of things we can do to open up the market. And then as a secondary measure, we will open it up to contract. Okay. Well, let me ask you then, if you have a role that was originally full time, you say you couldn't get the right person, I open it up to contract, I bring in people on a contract. Does that mean eventually some of those positions will become contract to hire? Yes. So actually, there's a stage that we do before we hit contract or contract to hire. And a lot of companies, when they say I want full time, they also say I want someone in the area that can potentially come into the office on a hybrid work model. If that's not working, then we need to broaden our search. So then we'll say, what about a remote person full time? So that would be step two. Then as a third step, it would be let's open it up to contract to hire slash contract. Okay. All right. That makes sense. Perfect. Yeah. Bobby, any thoughts on your end on staffing? No, because I haven't really done the staffing process yet. Okay. All right. Thanks. Develop your values. So now we want to ask you guys to flip perspective. And now you're a candidate. And if you're giving advice to a candidate, and obviously, we're covering more than one type of role developers one role. But as Gary said, there's many roles here that need to get filled typically on any kind of a blockchain project because blockchain is a piece of it. But how any thoughts on how candidates in a sense can improve their, I'll call it attractiveness to employers in terms of skills, branding, training, any of that stuff. Gary, your thoughts? Sure. So the brand one is interesting. I guess, I guess, if you haven't worked in a growing market, it's hard to say, it's hard to be like, what was your experience on blockchain? It's kind of like, there was a joke that there was a job ad by some company that said they needed somebody who had 15 years of experience on say Kubernetes, right? You couldn't possibly have 15 years, the company. But it was a mistake, but somebody applied. And I think you saw that AWS joke on their product, that the made up product that they did. And people, they put it as a skill. So, but I think on the brand side, things like Hyperledger, communities, if you're working in those type of communities, you're going to be, people will see you there, but it also just works as, we looked at it, did you contribute to open source? Because it's obviously the easiest way for us from a coding perspective to not give you a coding test, but just see what you've done, see what your motivation is, where you're kind of a self-starter. So I think that's sort of on the, you know, on the development side. I think the other thing is though, I think in the space, right, is to, you know, if you're not on the technical side, right, I think it's, but getting a, oh, I guess I would say on the technical side too, you don't have to learn other, every product per se. I think what you need to figure out to have an educated discussion with people is the basics of how the technology itself works, right? I don't think you have to be sort of hands-on with it, but there's different models, right? Fabric has a model, you know, Sawtooth had a model there. There's commonalities between them, but they all have sort of different ways, you know, other people. Bessie has a different sort of model as Ethereum based. So kind of like getting your heads around that, I think is, you know, is important, right? Just to kind of understand the range of things and why you might apply those technologies. And then I guess the, so that's how I would sort of, you know, train, right? You know, take training labs, get out there, contribute. You know, I always find that's a good way to jump in. For the non, you know, I think for the non people who are not not not developers, but there's a lot of roles, right? And there's product management jobs, right? There's, and if you're, you know, if the other thing is if you're in a domain, right, and maybe you're not in there, like think about how blockchain is applicable to whatever your, you know, your SM, your subject matter expertise might be, right? Because I think in a lot of ways, right, you'll start seeing those pop up in various companies, whether supply chain, financial services, et cetera, right? And you can see a lot of this stuff on the sig zone, hyperledger of different ideas that are out there. But I think if you start to have, you know, that right, then you have the domain expertise, plus you can apply, you know, blockchain, you're sort of new thinking. So that's how I would kind of don't mind, don't mind, you know. That's a huge point though. I think you're right that when you're trying to figure out and looking at child descriptions, if you say that, yeah, I understand the technology, I have experience, if you will, delivering software products or projects successfully, I understand what success looks like. And then to your point, if you say, wait a minute, I have a couple of years of domain experience in something, that's probably the first place to focus, I would guess, as a candidate. That's a really good thought. Ben, any thoughts on your? Yeah, I think, you know, getting yourself immersed in as much training or accreditation as you possibly can is always going to help and be a benefit. If you've got any sort of personal passion projects that you've done, to get those out there as well, promote those on LinkedIn, any LinkedIn forums, any other groups. And just like I said, get yourself out there in the market. Come on, you know, come on to sort of panels like this. And, you know, just get yourself out there as much as you can. And, you know, the more you immerse yourself in the market, and the more you network, you know, an opportunity will present itself at some point, even without the experience, I believe. Yeah, good point. Brian? What I try to do, I'm not sure I can add anything other than what Gary and Ben said, as far as how they can build their skills, brand, train for roles. But what I try to do is help them forward the interview, right? So what I'll typically ask candidates is, tell me about what project that you were working on and how did it impact the organization as a whole? And then I let him answer that. And then, you know, I can ask follow up questions like, was the project delivered on time? Or is it, you know, still in process? What was the size of the team? You know, I try to see if the candidate can answer the question succinctly, directly, without, you know, kind of hopping all around. Because hiring managers nowadays, you know, everyone's limited for time, and they don't want to spend 45 minutes on an initial interview, and not really get the actual question answered, because they have to keep redirecting the question back because it's not getting answered. So that's what I try to, I guess, train the candidate for prior to their interview. Yeah, that's very good. Bobby, on your end, when it comes to skills, this is another SME area for you, because you've been in the space forever. Before there was blockchain, you've been training people. 15 years. Well, okay, so that's not forever, I apologize, but it's a long time. So and you probably, I don't know anybody else that has more perspective on different types of training in the technical space, those that work and those that don't. I mean, you bring a lot to the table. Any thoughts specifically? Well, I think first, the most important comment that was mentioned in discussing this is community, because all the blockchains are just based on communities. And if you want to get involved in the community, the different communities, there's so many ways. Gary mentioned hyper ledger working groups, consensus has working groups, and the global or government blockchain association has working groups. Now what these working groups can give you not only as an education into what's going on in your sector. So for instance, there's trade finance groups, there's Jim runs the public sector, which talks about, you know, how public sector and blockchain intersect. There's social impact, there's capital markets, there's one of my favorite is the climate action. And these meetings are open to everyone. And taking advantage of them, I think is your best bet in getting ahead. So for instance, if you're working in trade finance and want to make the jump into blockchain, go to a trade finance blockchain working group, and just introduce yourself and say, I'm just here to learn and listen. And the connections you make and the communities you get tied into, you know, you don't know what training you're going to need until you know where you want to be. The field is so wide open. So for candidates looking to get involved, it's better to work from what you know. And there's areas of blockchain coming up in every area. And you just have to find it. And I think the working groups, again, there's so much free education out there. The, all the classes are mostly auditable from hyper ledger the Linux Foundation. I know the class that ledger Academy just finished writing the blockchain for business. You can and this is how a lot of the classes are structured. You can sit in the class for free, but you want that certificate to put on your LinkedIn or on your resume, you have to pay for the class and take the exam. But you can sit in on all the classes basically and just learn whatever you can. So that to me, from an education perspective, is it's like the Wild West out there. And so far as grabbing information. Yeah, you're right. There are a lot of sources today. If you will, obviously, blockchains, I'll call it as a market is not that old. And at the beginning of a market, there's not a lot of sources for stuff. But certainly for something that's several years old, there's plenty of sources usually all over the place. So that's good to know. Cool. Next thing, finding jobs, candidates. So here's a really good question. And maybe just because I'm old, and I have more jobs than anybody I know. I'll say one thought is sometimes you look at a job, other times you're looking for a company. And so you're it's put your candidate head on again, and say, hey, whatever it is the company sunk or I need to move on to something different, whatever reason you want to leave where you are, you want to go somewhere else. How do you decide as a candidate where to focus? So Gary, let me flip that to you first. Yeah, that's a nice lead in because I was going to say, I guess the one starting point is the easiest starting point is if you have a list of places you think you want to work. And maybe it's because you've seen people speak from those companies, whatever it may be. And then I think that's also where community comes in. So what I would say is try to find something less than six degrees of separation between you and somebody who works at that company. I mean, honestly, you can go scour the company's site and all that type of stuff. I mean, the usual job hunting things. But I think we found people just from people reaching out. And you'd be surprised how you can get opportunities that are in there. And reach out to other folks in the community if they may know things. I'm just not a me thing, but a lot of people do reach out to me. And hey, do you know anybody hiring? Was somebody hiring? Did you know somebody at this company? Any advice? So I think that those things do work well on jobs that the jobs that fit interesting. And the other side is too. An interesting point is if you want to do blockchain, but you're not finding it for whatever reason, it's asking a skill set that's not there. Bobby mentioned it's viable in every industry. Think about companies that may want to do something in blockchain. Even at Google, we don't really hire blockchain people, but we have a small group of people who do blockchain. So it's like a 20% thing. But many initiatives and many companies are always started by just somebody who had an idea. So if you're motivated, you have something, find a job, a company that you're comfortable with or whatever, and try to push the blockchain agenda. So that would be my two pieces of advice, or I don't know, three pieces of advice, maybe? Yeah, no, the big thing I, the steal I'm going to take from what you just said is the less than six degrees of separation. Because the win on that one is if you know somebody who's at the company directly, that's a win. Because even if they're not in your department doing what you want to do, the point is they do know about the company from the other side of the fence. You're not looking over the fence to say, what's that company like? You get a second perspective on that, and that's huge. And then the other side of the course is maybe they can tell you, well, it's not my department, but I know the guy, Gary, who runs in the cloud department, call him. He may have an interest in that type of candidate. So you get two wins there. One is learning more about the company directly from somebody you know. So it's kind of like if you gave me an opinion on Google, it's a lot different than me reading an opinion from somebody who I don't know. Do you know what I mean? So that's a good deal. Ben, your thoughts? Yeah, so I think this is a question where I can probably add the most value. So if somebody, as an example, is new to the space, they may not have an extensive network in terms of who they're looking for and what they're looking for. It's obviously very bespoke to them as an individual. So that's where I feel like as a sort of specialist recruiter in the space I can add a lot of value. So if they do have a list of companies that they're keen to work for or keen for me to approach on their behalf, I might work with some of them and therefore I can give them a much more in-depth idea of the team, the culture, the projects they're working on. If not, however, if on the flip side to that point, I don't necessarily work with that company. I might have worked with somebody who I've previously worked with before as someone who works there who may have been a candidate before. I can give them some information on a specific hiring manager who to potentially reach out to. So on that side of the coin, even down to things like their interview styles, the team and the culture fit, and then obviously going down the actual recruitment route, negotiating the high salary package for them, post placement care with them and just giving them a full service. If it's a client I'm working with, then great. And obviously if not, still giving as much consultative advice as I can on that front. Excellent. Awesome. Yeah, that sounds like a quote of big help as a process to a candidate. Brian, I know you were saying earlier you're focused on one larger enterprise and so I think my guess is you have a deeper understanding of what the company is and what's available within that company. Yeah, anytime we bring on a new company or an existing company as a new role, we like to set up a call similar to what we're all doing now. And we ask questions of the hiring manager, what's this role all about? How does it contribute? What specifically are you looking for in terms of candidate skills, you know, saw skills and hard skills? And we just try to get really in depth on that initial intake call. And then we look at their job description, which is typically a wish list, right? It's going to be 20 bullet points or whatever. And then we condense that for them until like the top five and, you know, do a write up that's going to appeal to people and then we'll post it. Up here a lot of candidates find companies and jobs that are a fit by referrals. I would say by and large Seattle is a very networking. I'm not sure if that's a word, but that's people will rely on their network, whether it's, you know, their local college that they went to, or maybe they know a friend that works at a large, you know, one of the fame companies. Once in a while, someone, you know, anytime someone reaches me directing, my first question is, how did you find out about this role? You know, I'll say, well, I went to, I found it on LinkedIn, or I went to your site, found it there, or, you know, I saw it on your job post. So they will, they will give you that information, you know, you just have to ask for it. Yeah. Yeah, good point, because you're right. You want to understand how they're, what door they're coming in, so to speak, to get a background on what they already know, what they may not know as well. And you hit another point, Brian, which I thought was a good one. You said the company, and I don't know whether it's the HR department, the hiring manager, or both, how they come up with it, but somebody writes up a job description and says, this is what I want for a blockchain developer. And usually they'll, they'll, I've even seen really good, what I call a humorous job description, descriptions written by something that, quote, Superman and all of his friends couldn't possibly fill. And you want, when you read these, I'll quote, I'll quote, use a gentle term, insane job descriptions, they'll say things like it required languages, and they'll list, and they don't even say preferred, they'll just say required languages, and they'll say something like Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Rust, and COBOL. And it's like, okay, that's a list of languages, fair enough. When you read that, you go, well, let's see, when I get hired, I'm not going to be doing all of that for sure. And what bothers you when you read a job description as a candidate is when somebody hasn't vetted it well enough to figure out, when you read the job description, what were they really looking for? Do you know what I mean? And those wish lists are just that. And I don't really, any thoughts on what the purpose of the wish list is, I guess, from the company's perspective. I think they look at the job as a whole. And when we're on the intake call, you know, oftentimes they'll throw in, oh yeah, and they need this, and they need this. What we try to do is say, okay, most of the time, what are they going to be coding in? You know, what's the primary language? And then, okay, so it's JavaScript, 75% assigned, okay. And then what would be second to that, right? Oh, it's going to be, you're going to have to know SQL server. So some of these other ancillary ones like, you know, Rust or COBOL or whatever, that's something they may have to have some familiarity with, because you're going to be doing it some of the time. So that's really not that important. We can find the candidate that has the heavy JavaScript and the heavy SQL server, right? And then that broadens our net. And then through our discussions, we can touch on those, what we call nice tasks. Yeah, great. And Bobby, any thoughts on your? Well, just how the candidates find the companies, again, there's so much to be said for skill matching. You either have the skills or you don't have the skills. But like, as people were mentioning in the chat, there are business roles that don't have anything to do with coding and blockchain. And they're enormously available, such as project managers and all different types of marketers, front end designers, which is kind of a little coding. But there's so many positions that if you're just looking for the coding, you're closing yourself off. Again, the project managers are and the marketers are growing even faster than some of the developer jobs. Yeah, excellent point. Let's flip it around now. Hey, Jim, just one quick thing on the, just because we shot that a direct question on product management roles and blockchain, I guess I would say the primary thing, since the market is fairly like it's growth. So I think when people look at for product management skills, it means that they're looking to move on or do something more. Because a lot of times you end up with development, CTO, kind of doing all of it. So you're really looking for something in somebody's resume, one, that they have good product management experience, two, have they had ownership of their product or whatever? And what have they done to innovate and grow? Because a lot of times we're not looking unnecessarily for fully established people that took on a product that existed and just took it on and maintained it. It really wants to be somebody who has new ideas, did some type of innovative thinking. And from applying domain knowledge, it would be the questions we would ask, well, I can tell you what AWS asked for somebody who interviewed there for blockchain. It was basically like, what would you do in the cryptocurrency space if you were us? Yeah, that's all right. They didn't ask me that, but they asked a friend of mine. Yeah, but so, but you're hitting a really big point. And you use the example of product manager. And all I can say is, in my little experience, you wind up, in a sense, saying somebody gives you a role. And I've had a bunch of, I'll call it common roles, whatever they are. And some of those roles, you wind up saying, oh, okay, maybe I'll put a really large company out, use the example of Google. Maybe IBM, I don't know about that. In the old days, they didn't, I was in the field in IBM. And IBM wasn't always well resourced in the field to meet what they were trying to deliver a service. If you were in a lab that was better funded, that's fine. But I think my little experiences, especially in product management roles, is, yeah, okay, you got to know the basics of product management. Number one, what have you got for certifications? What can you show me on your skill sets, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you get past that. And it's, okay, now I want to know about your experience, as you just said. So tell me about your experience as a project manager, right? And when you start talking about whether it's successes or failures, when we dive into that, what you're going to be finding out about me as a candidate is, okay, so here's a project that failed. All right, so what did Jim do during the failure? Let's learn about that as a story. Or here's a very successful one, Jim had a partner, what did he do as his part? And so when you start listening to those stories and breaking them down, and I'm just doing this today with a friend that company I was working with, he was telling me that he's a product manager, but his key is the fact that he actually can talk to everybody else. And because he's done those other roles, and because he has the communication side, his win, I guess, is not traditional project management, that product management. It doesn't separate it from anybody. What it was, he said, was the ability to find risk in the rest of the, I'll put delivery cycle and the delivery teams that other people hadn't found, you know what I mean, gaps. So he's telling you, you know, it's like he's telling you the market's going to crash 10 days before it crashes, because he knows that, do you know what I mean? And it's that kind of, which is hard, I don't see that in job descriptions. It's more of, I guess, I would say probably learning when you're talking to the candidates as you go through those kind of things, really getting their stories. And that every company, I guess, is going to go to that depth. I guess some do. And from what you said, I assume Google has an in-depth hiring process. You mentioned you, to get there, you had to go through a fair amount of hiring, I guess, as interviews and stuff. So I think, anyway, Google does seem to have a long process, I think. And, you know, Ben and Brian, I'll ask you, do you see a difference between companies and how the length of the hiring process? Yeah, some of the smaller startups, Jim, they will tend to act quickly, because we educate them on the, I mean, at least the Seattle market, it goes on too long. And one of their other interview loops, you know, is much quicker, they're going to have an offer in hand, and then have a decision to make, do I want to take this or continue on? So the ones that I prefer is, and this is becoming more common, is the initial hiring manager technical interview. And if that goes well, an onsite interview with the team, and then make a call. But when we're working with some of the larger companies, sometimes you have to let the candidates know this could take a minimum of four weeks, due to the size of the organization that you're applying for. Cool. All right, thanks. And then, just to jump in there as well, I do think as well that with a contract interview process, they're always, they are always reasonably, they are always reasonably quick. I think if you, what has helped, you know, even though it's a completely negative situation that has helped it, is that the remote aspect of most interviews now is quickening a lot of processes. And we have been consulting with companies and just trying to get them to streamline it. And if it does have to be a three-stage process to try and get that done, you know, within a week, if you can. But you know, just advising on Streamline and the short and the time between the first and the final. And then if there is an intent to offer there to get that out ASAP, and you know, sometimes it can be fastest, fastest finger first. So, you know, we do advise and consult as best we can on that. Obviously, we're never going to change a company like Accenture and the bigger businesses who have got a five-stage, five-stage process, but we, you know, we try and advise them how we can. Yeah, but you're right. That's another good point. In a sense, hot technical jobs and areas technically are much like real estate in the US. They're exploding off the map. And just like real estate, what used to be a quote, a six-month process to sell your house is probably never going to be more than about three or four days in many markets today. And the same thing, you're right. If you can, if you have hot technical stuff and you have a candidate pool, the faster you go through the candidate pool, the more likely you're going to, in a sense, be successful nailing a candidate you really want to be with. Next question is defining the candidate side and the other way. You're the company and you're trying to find candidates and build a pipeline. So, it's one thing to have, say, my company has a job and I want to get one person in, fair enough, but when you're large enough that you, in a sense, have a quote of relatively ongoing demand for resources, even if it varies a little bit. The question is, how do you traditionally find candidates that make sense and how do you create a pipeline process in effect? So, Gary, thoughts on that? Yeah, I guess on the finding candidates, it's always, one, it's always important to know what your job description is and what exactly what you're looking for. And we tried to be not as, I guess, we always tried to be a little bit broader, but then sprinkle in some specific things to sort of blockchain. And I guess a number of companies out there, obviously, you're doing this and I think the only way to do it is to really use folks like Ben, Brian, and whatever. I think it's a big market for external recruiting. I think you're just not going to find companies that have the expertise to do it or the time to do it themselves, so that they may have their developers who can do the interviews. So, we sort of did that. And you have to kind of know what your growth spectrum is. So, are you in a development phase? So, is that what you're really looking for? Are you looking for hardcore developers? Are you opting out? Because it can take a while to find candidates. So, you have to kind of like plot out where you are and what roles you want to bring on and when you actually need them. And it's going to be a mix, early on it's going to be a mix of development. So, we did that. But at the end time, we were looking more for, we had enough developers, we were looking for product managers, because we just needed some new age thinking of how do we, we've made all this investment. Now, how are we going to, and we've had fun, but at some point the business wants it to make money. So, how do we do that? And you want people who have like new thinking. So, you've got to start scanning and looking for people out there. So, see what's out there, see who's out there, see candidates that you like, and then use those as sort of profiles, future profiles that you might sort of put out there. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, a lot of good points. I'll say, but the thought of saying, gee, I want to build something, and therefore I need builders, makes sense early on to something. But the ultimate thing is anything that you put money into is an investment. And so, in the world we live in, that's run by capitalism, you eventually have to say, somewhere, I've got to see a real return on this thing. And there are multiple types of returns. I recognize that we have, in a sense, social responsibilities. We're looking at stakeholders and lots of other things that we can do. We can deliver value, I'll say, in many ways. But the concept is, you can't just say, I'm going to deliver value without, in a sense, figuring out a way to be long-term profitable on something. That's usually not a sustainable model. So, given that reality of having to figure out how to monetize something, like you said, one of the, it sounds stupid, one of the, well, I'll say you, your career actually, when I knew you at IBM and what you were doing, here's a dumb question. How many, in a given three-month period, how many companies did you, in your role, when you were the blockchain CTO, how many companies did you actually get to talk to about what they were trying to do? From their perspective, what kind of problems were they trying to solve? In a sense, how could you help them? How many different companies, not conversations, but just different companies would you talk to maybe on average in a three-month period? Three-month period? 20 to 30, probably? 20, yeah. Yeah, so here's what I'm picking on. I'm now doing this thing called future food test. All I'm doing is, we're trying to research up with the food supply chain. We're trying to understand, you know, what, all the different roles from these different companies. We're trying to understand, tell me about your company, are you responsible at USDA for regulation and compliance or something? Are you a supplier or a packager? Whatever you are, talk to me and just tell me what you're interested in. It's a much more open-ended conversation. What amazes me is when you listen to these companies like you were doing, the stuff you learn is phenomenal. And you talked earlier, you mentioned about, we want people to think differently. Oh my God, if you spend three hours in a quarter having the right conversations and asking the right questions, in a sense, I think you get a world shift in how you think. It just, it's literally, you can work on something for a year, get locked in a box and have no great thoughts other than your own ideas. Gee, I can improve this algorithm. Look at me, thumbs up. But short of that, you're not going to be, as you pointed out, innovative from a revenue or a profitability perspective if the only thing you're working on is an algorithm. But once you have that view of the business, not the business perspective from one company, but multiple, it just opens up your eyes so much in terms of what you can come back with as input. So I would flip it around and say, for all those conversations you had, if I asked the people who you were talking to, they just said, oh my God, his ideas, he had a lot of ideas. But the trick to it is that you were having a lot of conversations. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? So anyway, the ability to have conversations, I think, a lot of conversations. And back to Bobby's point earlier about the hyper ledger stuff in the community, that's one of the other things you get there is you're going to hear a lot of perspectives, whether it's you're jumping into the healthcare domain, supply chain, you know, a climate action, whatever it is, there's tons of input you get. And that, outside of your own skill set and your own experience is really going to open up some ideas for you, I think, and increase your value to contribute back. So Ben, your thoughts? So I mean, if the shoe was on the other foot and I wasn't working for a consultancy and I was working in-house, there's a lot of businesses that are building huge in-house technical recruitment teams at the minute for fast-growing businesses. Even those businesses sometimes have to hedge their bets and reach out to a recruitment partner like myself for either like a really niche or an ad hoc role. But if the shoe was on the other foot and I was internal, I'd be utilising my existing staff for referrals. And I'd also, you know, certain development roles you're going to need more than one. So I'd just be constantly building up a database and even networking around those candidates, even when there isn't a live roll there, letting them know about the business, what we've got coming up a little bit about our company, our company ethos and, you know, our values as a business. And then when an opportunity does come up, just like I would do with my network of candidates, you know, pick up the phone, have a conversation or vice versa when the time's right, they'll reach out to you. Yeah, awesome. You're right. And that's the perspective of saying, yes, you're able to see there's both sides of that. I'm an outside or external recruiting service, how can I add that? But you're right. You think about what, if you're internal, what you're trying to do and deliver and the process that you set up for the company on the other side of the fence. Brian, at your end, I know you have at least one large client that you work with. So I assume that you understand more about their process on the inside. Yep. They do a lot of referral bonuses. So they'll ping the entire, you know, organization. Hey, if you know anyone, please refer them. Here's how the referral bonus program works. You know, if they make it to their 90 days, you get X amount of dollars. The other thing is I like what everyone's saying about just having a conversation with somebody, because oftentimes I will see recruiters, they're focused so much on one role, and they'll have a candidate say, oh, I don't actually have JavaScript. I'm more, you know, C sharp. And then the conversation ends there, right, where that recruiter could just say, oh, hey, cool. I think we should still have a conversation if you're interested in looking, because we also have a couple C sharp roles. So I think the conversation is important and not kind of have the blinders on and just go after the one role that you're assigned for that day. In terms of the question here, how companies find candidates, university recruiting is pretty big up here in Seattle, where you'll get involved with one of the departments at the big college here, while the two big colleges, and, you know, you'll have a recruiter specifically work on campus and try to get those candidates right out of college. Yeah, you hit one big thing. Going back to my own history, it was the concept of using employee referrals. And there's a normal process for that in most companies. I had my own company that was manufacturing business. And I was desperate to find good people to work for me. And I thought to myself, you know what, the only thing I can afford to do, and the only thing that even made sense was to look at my own company, say, who do I like in my own company as workers that are working for me? Who's doing a good job? I'd say, oh, Ben's doing a great job. Okay, so I like Ben. All I want to do is say, Ben, do you have any friends? I'll pay you. And your friend both will get a bonus. If your friend sticks for the 90 day deal kind of a thing. But I did find that was a win. Because basically, if you were referring a friend, if I like the work you did, and you were referring a friend, what happened was your friend is probably somebody that's similar to you in many ways. So I'm going to win on the person side. And on the other side of it, when you recommend a friend, and yeah, you'll collect your bonus in 90 days. And he will too, or she will too. The bigger thing is that you don't want to say, oh, look, and my friend Bob, you know, quit four months into this thing, right? Even if you've got your bonus, that's a bad deal for you. So you're going to actually help me properly recruit. That was the one thing that really was effective for little companies, I think, if you can, if you don't have what I call a lot of money, it's look around for that referral concept and see if that work. Bobby, any thoughts? I have some slides coming up that talk about the diversity of your candidate pool. It's not just looking at the people that you know, but sometimes it's even opening up and broadening your search to places that you wouldn't think of going before. Yeah, it's a very good, right. Actually, I did see you have a lot on that. And that is a huge point, because you're right, some huckle at some ponds are relatively shallow, and some are going to be deeper. And if you're, if you're only looking at one or two places, you're going to lose a lot of opportunity to find good candidates for sure. And so you're right, figuring out a strategy on how to do that is a really important part, and I don't want to move too deep into that, because you're going to hit it later, so I'll let that go. Actually, this sort of hits it again, but I'll say managing diversity, just a thought in a sense when you think about companies. And it's not just I'll call it typical identities, it's beyond that. It's getting a mix of thinking, not just roles, but perspectives and everything else to get views into a team, if you will. So somehow companies and managers and departments and so on have to say, hey, I'm trying to get additional thought into the place, additional views and so on. So somehow they have to set goals for that and then try to manage against those goals. Gary, any experience with that? I'm probably not the right one to do on that one. I think that's more of the corporate stuff. I mean, to me, I always just kind of went with, yeah, get the right mix of people from a lot of different places. So I probably didn't think about this the right way at the time. All right, fair enough. I mean, I would say when I was hiring, it was many, many years ago, the only thing I was looking for was, and I'll say, Gary, because you run teams. And what, to me, a healthy team was a team that could argue in a productive way with itself. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, you really want people who are, yeah, you want to get diversity. I mean, diversity means a lot of things, right? So if you can get diversity of opinions, backgrounds, you know, whatever it may be, right? And then take your time to make, and I always kind of mixed, you know, combining diversity and inclusion to a degree, right? Because a lot of times, you know, you need to have, you want everyone who's going to be willing to speak, right? You want to have, you know, a team that's in there. So I guess, you know, part of the other side is, I think, you know, we used to, we had some hires that didn't fit in for a variety of reasons, right? Because they were just kind of hired not by the people, the people who they were actually going to work with never got to meet them, right? And, you know, I think that that's kind of a, and some of the teams and things like that, it is important, right, to see that a team will actually gel, right? Just to see if you'll kind of fit in as sort of personalities, right? And how that becomes pretty important. Yeah, good point. One of the things I'll say in my experience being on teams is that sometimes a really bad sign, it's almost a, it's almost a health issue. You can have a, upload a bad meeting where you have a meeting and you have a team and you're expecting a lot of input and discussion and you don't get it. It's either, either I have 90% of the input or somebody else, Bobby has 90% of the input, but you realize that whatever the problem you put out there was meant to, in a sense, be solved in a team manner. And somehow you're not getting enough input. If it's only one meeting or something like that, fine, it's not a problem. But when you realize that successively, that you're getting what I call a lack of, I'll quote diversity in views and opinions and so on, then at least in the experience I've been, you have a really potentially high risk that something is going wrong in the organization itself. And that doesn't matter about the code you're delivering or the commits you're doing and what's getting tested is bigger than that. You have risks that you may be way off track in a lot of things. And I just talked to another company last week that actually had that problem where everything was very smooth. They had an organization. It was all there. And kind of like when you dropped in and say how things are going, they were always saying fine, fine, fine. And then you say, well, where are you now? And it's like, oh, so something wasn't happening that should have. And you realize that there wasn't any real controversy. It was really an easy going environment kind of a thing. And they weren't getting enough of what I call challenge all around the place. And you want it in a respectful way, but you want it to be a healthy thing that, you know, I say something and you got to come back and challenge me. And if that's not happening, you know, it's probably not a healthy environment. Anyway, I'll quote my experience in that. Ben, any thoughts? I looked at this question more from a diversity and inclusion perspective. I think from my side on that, a lot of the larger enterprise clients, it's such a major thing for them and such a huge push and shift that they are moving towards, as is obviously women in tech and things like that. We've partnered specifically with a couple of businesses just from a women in tech perspective where they've approached us. And all they're looking for is female developers to diversify their teams. And then most of those, like I said, do come from an enterprise level. I find it sort of an interesting example, if you will. There was a candidate who was a hyperledger candidate recently. He was halfway through the interview process and then decided to withdraw because the company, when he checked them out on LinkedIn, looked for the people, wasn't diverse enough for him. And it was a four person startup. So, you know, it kind of wears both ways from a candidate and a client perspective in holding up. Yeah. And that's true. That is a good point. And so the deal is, when you talk about companies that have a strong focus to build a more diverse team at any level, then they have to have a way to, two things. One, they have to figure a way to measure their progress in that one. And two, I'm asking to your point, do they, as you said, women in tech, women coders, whatever their focus is going to be, I assume they're also probably making investments to try to support those causes. Absolutely. And I think from the business's side as well, there are certain developers that I speak to. And, you know, sometimes I'm looking at a CV, I mean, even realize that it's a female developer. And obviously, when I speak to them on the phone, for them, it's obviously very important that they are going into a business that is going to obviously support them and help them and share the same views and values. And when you find that match, you know, it's great. It's great for both parties. Obviously, you know, if you then just working with that candidate and, you know, working them in their local area, you don't know what type of business they could be going into. Whereas if you matched the candidate's values with the client's values, technical skills aside, that's going to be a great fit. Yeah, a good great point because the reality is it's no fun being what I call the first diverse candidate into a team if you think the culture is not going to be right. So if you're right, if you're doing your job, then you've got to be looking both sides of that and say, hey, as the recruiter, you know, I've done enough to say it's not just that they're looking to hire somebody with a label, they're actually looking to provide support for a more diverse workforce in an operating mode, not just the hiring process. So that's a good point. Exactly. Brian, any thoughts on your? I can tell you this, almost every company that we work with when we have that initial intake call, they always say, you know, okay, here's the skill set. Here's what we're looking for. We want them on site on a hybrid model three or four days a week. And please, please, please, if you can find diverse candidates, send those, you know, first. So I'm hearing that every time from the companies, but I'm starting to see a trend from the candidates saying, what's the leadership makeup? What do they do in terms of diversity training or, you know, how diverse are they? So the candidates are starting to become more aware that they want to be part of an organization where the leadership and their peers are going to be from different backgrounds, different companies, stuff like that. So I'm starting to hear that more and more. Yeah. And Bobby, I know you have a lot more on this. If you want to give me some thoughts now, but if you want to hold it off till we hit your section, it's up to you. Yeah, the section I'm going to talk about is how you can build a diverse pipeline with a slide. But I just want to do this, mention something on a personal level. Someone just in the chat mentioned being over 50. I'm obviously a woman. And someone asked me in an interview the other day, what are the challenges in being female and, you know, breaking into this new field? And I guess they wanted me to say, oh, there are horrible challenges there. And I spoke honestly and instinctively, and I said, it has been the blockchain arena, the most welcoming workforce I've ever entered. No one has questioned my work. Again, a lot of it is remote, so people don't see you in the office. They just see the work that you do online or how you involve yourself in the community. And it doesn't matter where you come from, who you are, what you look like, as long as you are interested in doing the work that's in front of you, you're accepted in this community. Yeah, as a community statement, that's been my experience too, because you're right. I'm closer to hyperledger than I am any other kind of a community in the technical space at this point for sure. And within the hyperledger world, I would say, yeah, that looks that way to me. And a lot of the companies that I talked to, I'll go to fit that profile, that they're just interested in finding people who are motivated and want to learn, want to work, and they want to support them. And they're not going to knock you down and say, you're too old, you're the wrong gender or whatever it is. I don't see a lot of that. At least they don't hear about a lot of that, I should say. Good. Excellent. Hiring process real quickly. Gary, you did talk about, and I guess we can pick on Google as an example. I don't know if that's normal or different, but your thoughts, if I see a job out there and I fill out an application or I talk to Ben at some point and Ben's got a hold of it, somehow I'm coming in the door to an organization like Google saying I want to have a job, or some other organization that you have experience with. What does the hiring process typically look like? I'll try to be quick. Google's process you can read about, it's hard, but the Google, it is, and it can be long and time consuming. The model there is right, they're looking for the right candidates. It's a lot of interviews, a lot of skill tests. I will say that in some of the, I interviewed it a few other places too. There's a lot on testing what you know. On the development side, it's harder. At some of the bigger companies the fangs and the whatever, bigger companies, even some of the startups are trying to go this way as well. You can fake it, but then you better make it. You may not have any experience in the job. It's fine. If you've learned on your own, it's a catch 22. I don't have any experience doing it a job, but I just want to say I know Rust. Well, they're going to come in, and you're going to have to code Rust, and you're going to do algorithm testing and stuff like that. There's a lot of, that's tougher. I think on going for those type of companies, I think consulting companies and even the IBMs and whatever, they're a little bit different on that side. They more believe what you say. They're going to ask you more skills, type of personality and fills like that. Just be aware going in, ask how long the process is going to be. Know your timeframe and that type of stuff because some of these, some of the bigger companies, like somebody's thinking about Coinbase, Coinbase has a pretty long hiring process. A startup might not. They're going to be looking, they're going to want a new fast, so they need to be intense, so the interview process could be intense. Yeah, no, that's a great point because all I can say is when I talk to startups, what you just said makes sense, and you're right, these bigger companies that have plenty of options are not looking just to fill somebody in two weeks to fill a slot. Typically, they're going to be a lot more selective. So following up on that, Ben, your thoughts? Yeah, so I mean, from the job intake stage, I try and consult as much as possible to say, look, can we consolidate certain stages? Can we have a first stage and a second stage on two consecutive days? If I send you a CV on a Monday, can you interview between Tuesday and Thursday and get an offer on the Friday? And you just try and consult and advise, you're not going to change every company. And there are certain businesses out there that are very rigid and old school, which you just, you are never going to change. But as long as you ask the question and as long as you're educating the client that these candidates do come and go off the market very, very quickly, at least you're doing your part. Sometimes it works, and sometimes they'll work with you, sometimes they have to stick to what they have to stick to, and that's just, that's just the layer of the land sometimes. Yeah, Brian? Well, my answer is probably going to be a little different because I am out of the process. Once the candidate accepts the offer, I slowly fade out. So what I typically do is obviously call the candidate, congratulate them, see what start they, that they arrived at, introduce them to the in-house recruiter, and then maybe follow up once a week just to see, hey, any questions, anything I can help with? Have you been in communication? How's the onboarding going? But their HR internally and their recruiters internally handle that post, hey, I signed the offer letter. And candidates nowadays, they typically want to give two weeks notice, take a week or two off. So they're not even starting until a month out. So I'm doing about a weekly touch point. Yeah, cool. All right, great. All right, I know we've hit this. I don't want to spend too much time on this. I'll just go through everybody fairly quickly. But we've talked about skills and experience earlier a little bit. And Gary, you mentioned that I'll start with you, but you did mention there are different ways to measure candidate skills and experience based on the way the company wants to work, as you said. Any response there? Yeah, I mean, I think we looked for, on the development side, we looked to see that you could develop and do something. I mean, I wasn't as hardcore on my coding test. We had some basic tests of thinking and things like that. And I think on the more product management side, we would just look at, it was always more experiential. So what would you do scenario-based? What would you do in this scenario? And maybe some of your background. I think we moved away from, we used to ask people to tell us stories about what they had done in the past, but then we started to take more of leverage. They should leverage what they did in their past, but apply it. So come up with some story of how would you solve X? What would you do here? So that was kind of what we judged more than anything else, right? It was just that. And then we decided that fit for team, like you measured earlier, was a skill. We decided that the skill was how well you got along with the team actually as well. Yeah, cool. All right, Ben. So in regards to candidate skills, I'll come at it from a slightly different angle and say like there's sort of skills on the resume when you're either sending it to a recruiter or for a role. I would say keep it as simple as you can. So a pet hate that I get from a lot of hiring managers is that candidates send every single language framework that they've even heard of on a resume sometimes. I say just keep it simple. Show what you're strong at, whether it's beginner, intermediate, expert, rank it like that. Keep it simple and just make it nice to read, nice and simple. And when you're discussing your skills, that's what they'll focus on. They're not going to focus on something that you're weak at. They're not going to call you out on it unless they're a really difficult hiring manager. But focus on your strengths and accept your weaknesses in times of your skills. Yeah, Brian. Well, if someone defines themselves as a full stack engineer, then what I typically like to ask is tell me about a project you worked on, tell me what you did on the front end, and then tell me what you did on the back end. And hopefully they can succinctly tell you exactly what they did on the front and exactly what they did on the back. Because sometimes someone calls himself, you know, a full stacker, but maybe they're 90% back in and only 10 on the front. And really it's a little lighter because the rule is 50-50 or whatever. Yep. Cool. Bobby, any thoughts on skill fit? Well, I look at it more from the candidate's perspective and I tell all the people who are working to build your LinkedIn profile so that people can look at what you've been up to for the past year, say. So if you don't have, I was at this meetup, look at my picture, you know, like promote yourself on your LinkedIn. So people say, wow, she's involved in this community or he's been doing this. And the easiest way to do that is just put it out there. Yeah, good point. And then now the other side, which is maybe a little more challenging, which you guys have talked to as well, but is the concept, depending upon who you are, small startup, big company, temporary role or full-time long-term hire for a career kind of a thing, is understanding how important the culture fit is between the candidate and, in a sense, your team, your company. Gary, thoughts? Yeah, I'll just give two ones. So Google, whether you're on any role, one of the interviews you'll get at Google is one they call Googliness. You can look at what Googliness is. But there's basically a method of set of questions that they have that are kind of in there that they have interviewers asked, that determined, right? And then people write their responses and then a hiring committee kind of decides, like, do you fit that? And it is as important as any of the other categories. And as I said, I think we move to, I generally more move to, can you fit with the sort of team, right? Mr. Moore, sort of just some inner parts. So maybe we test teamliness or whatever, separate thing, but I always think that, you know, can you work with the team, right? So it's always good to get feedback from the people, you know, let the people who are going to work with the people, like, let them meet, right? Don't just blind hire people, right? I think it can result lead to bad things in the end, right? So if you can, like, have your team, the team they're joining, they don't have to go to the interview process per se, but at least have them meet, have them chat, have them do whatever, right? That's how you can determine if there's a, yeah, that's a really strong point. I'll say, because I've been in multiple jobs in my life, and I've been in a couple of cases where I did get hired by a company that I thought was a good company. But the funny part was, out of the interview process, maybe I talked to five or six different people on interviews, and it turned out I only got to work with one of them. So I had five people saying, yeah, you're the guy. And yet none of them were going to be involved with me. You know, it's like, maybe you're the only person I work with. So that's a bad deal on both ends because a candidate doesn't know what he's getting into for sure. I only talk to one person. And the reverse of it is the company has, the team that I'm going to work with doesn't know anything about me either. That's a big quote, a red flag, I think. Ben, your thoughts? Yes, I think on the candidate side of that, a lot of it comes down to just how well you know your clients as well. So if you are speaking to a candidate and, you know, you get their goals and their aspirations, and, you know, it should just click in your head if you're sort of well in depth in your market. And, you know, your clients, well, from speaking to a candidate, I'd be like, I'd do it really like this, like this guy, send them over. And then, you know, we always say, and it's a bit of an old cliche, if you will, but you know, you can teach technical skills, you can't teach someone to be a good team and culture fit. And sometimes I've had candidates who are technically very strong, not get the job to someone slightly less technically strong, with less years experience, just because they've been a better fit. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Bobby, at your point of view. Again, it depends. I think the most important thing you have to realize is some people aren't going to work well in certain circumstances. I know you could have a team that looks great on paper, but they just can't seem to get stuff done. And I think speaking to your point, Jim, the ability for someone in charge of that team to notice that and make the proper adjustments, minor adjustments, it might be a team, one of the players on the team is just not going to work with the rest of them. But you have to be able to analyze that and make judgment calls. Yeah, yeah, good point. Offers, I think we did touch on this lightly. Gary, obviously recently had an offer that you accepted your input. Yeah, I think the blockchain space is tricky, right, for hiring, right, to a degree, right, you know, with when there's a shortage of people that are around, right, I think there's a lot of expectations. So I think if you're a person who's hiring, know what your limits are going to be and know who you're really looking for. And then only when there's really, really a candidate that you think is like super, super awesome, right, go outside of it, otherwise you get into, you know, you can't end up like overpaying and overpriced out of it. On the candidate side, I think you have to be aware of what the type of company you're going with is right, I think people see all these great salaries and all these coins and all this great value and potential in here. And sometimes it's not always going to be the case, right, be aware of whether you're going for a startup, you know, the right mixes, right, I think those are always key, right, is understanding the makeup of things, you know, cash versus equity, etc., etc. The challenge as a, yeah, I guess the challenge is on the hiring side, right, is that, you know, you may lose some candidates, right, you know, in the space, I think the challenge on the, my advice on the candidate side is, if you want to try to challenge an offer, have more than one offer. The only thing that's ever going to work there, right, is showing another offer, right. I'm never going to believe that you have another offer unless you show it to me. Yeah, good point. I actually was lucky enough once I had that in my career, the thing that made it easy was it was the same company that had two offers. It wasn't like you had to say, oh, go call Google and see if they really want me. No, it was within the same company. So one HR department said, no, this is the deal and that makes it simple if you get multiple from one company. Ben, your thought. So with offers, I do prefer them to come through sometimes me as a recruiter as opposed to being extended to the candidate directly. And there's obviously a few reasons behind that. Some clients don't like it, but there is a few reasons behind that. Sometimes the candidate may not necessarily be a sort of strong negotiator. He may want the role, but the salary might come in just slightly below the expectations. They could end up then losing out on that candidate to another opportunity. So if it does come through us to the candidate, to the candidate, it will be a lot more open and honest. And obviously if we need to go back, then we will. Sometimes clients are adamant that they manage it and obviously that's fine, but it does come with some risks. And sometimes when they're putting out budgets and things like that for roles, there is always an element of flexibility there, just like there's always an element of flexibility with the candidates. But no, I prefer to have involvement in the office stage. Sometimes I do and sometimes it works perfectly. Sometimes I don't and it still works. Sometimes it obviously doesn't. It's never an exact science. Yeah, good point. Brian? Yeah, our clients prefer to do the offers because they've invested so much time. They want to have either the hiring manager present the offer directly to the candidate or their internal recruiter present it directly to the candidate. Yeah, good point. Yeah, that's interesting. And I assume as part of that process somewhere in there, Brian, the candidate's going to wind up with a number when he gets an offer that says, hey, here's your base salary. Around that, all the other stuff has to come into play on the benefit side, right? So the client needs to measure a full picture, right? I know what my mortgage payment is. I say I got to have this for a base salary and you come back and say, well, we're whatever, 2% below your base salary requirement. But, you know, do you understand the full package of benefits, you know, tax deferrals, bonuses, and all that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, ideally the benefits conversation happens. And later on in the day, the hiring manager comes in with the actual number of the offer or vice versa, but they want to get two touch points on that candidate in the same day. So they understand the equity, the bonus, the Simon bonus, the base annually increases, PTO, all that stuff 401. Great. Bobby, any thoughts? No, I'm good. Okay. Last thing, and now you've got the job, you're in there and just recommendations. You're starting up. So, Gary, bad news is Google hired me and stuck me on your team. So I'm the new guy on your team. What should I be thinking to do well on your team in the first 90 days? Tips? Yeah, I guess I would say this. I won't use my example because I'm different, but I think you should always, a good thing to ask is like, can you speak to somebody like, you know, on the team right after you're accepting the job or whatever, right, spending on thing, right? And ask them what it's actually like because some companies have good onboarding, some companies don't have good onboarding, right? You know, I would say that we weren't very good at IBM. IBM was good from an HR perspective of onboarding people making all that stuff simple. Don't get me wrong. But our team, we weren't prepared to onboard people, right? We were just working at rapid pace, right? We slowed down and then we're prepared to onboard people, right? Make them feel included, et cetera. So, you know, identify whether there's a process or not for onboarding when you get there and then, you know, find a, you know, make a friend, you know, make a friend or two, right? Because they're going to prove your key resource to kind of, you know, take through there. And I guess don't get overwhelmed, I think, generally speaking, you know, most companies, bigger companies don't expect you to have massive impact in your first 90 days. Startups might be slightly different. And, you know, you'll have to go through that in your sort of like hiring experience, right? They're going to expect you to get started like right away. And I think part of it is, you got to know whether or not you're a self-starter or not, right? So anyway, I would say, so my tip is be prepared, right? Think about what your 90 days are going to be at any given company as part of your decision-making process of going there in the first place. Yeah, yeah, perfect. Ben? Yeah, so I would just say just be as open and honest as you can. You are going to, you're going to have problems, you're going to have challenges, things you're not used to at your comfort zone, different methodologies, ways of working. It is completely natural in the first 90 days. Don't throw in the towel. You will hit a few walls. Keep going. Part of the service that we offer as a recruitment company is an aftercare service, but we do check in very regularly with the candidates in their first three months, because those are the times where they are most prone to dropping out of the process. And, you know, after a couple of months, it's always very sad to see it does happen, but we just try and mitigate that as much as we can just by having as much involvement in that transition into the new role. Yeah, Brian? Well, I know that when I worked in-house, when I was a corporate recruiter, anytime we brought on a new engineer, we gave them a buddy for the first 90 days. So, hiring managers often are busy in meetings or whatever. So this is like someone dedicated that's going to literally work side by side with you for that first 90 days so that a new hire doesn't feel like they're on their own island and they don't know where to go for help. That's a pretty cool concept. That is a great idea. Yeah, you can, especially if that person that you're budding up with has some understanding of your job role, they're somewhat related. You know, it doesn't help me. I learned about the company, if you budding me up with somebody who's in marketing and I'm a developer, I might learn a lot about the company, but I'm probably not going to learn a lot about my specific job and how to be successful. But if you have people that are in my domain, my area, my workspace, my team, then you're right. That process would probably be a payoff and awful lot in making me productive fairly quickly. That's pretty cool. Bobby, your thoughts? Just be your own advocate. If you don't understand something, speak up, communicate with the people you're working with and let them know what you don't understand and what you like about your job. So be your own person. Yeah, that's a great thought. Okay, cool. That's literally one last thing. I thought of this on the pandemic. I don't need a long answer. This is the short answer. If we looked at 2019, say there was an old world and now we're coming in, we're coming out of a pandemic into a different world. Any quick thoughts, Gary, on what's different about jobs hiring from your point of view after the pandemic now? Yeah, I guess I would say the short term ones are there. There's just some that were short term. Some people aren't back to a hybrid. They're going back to more normal or whatever. I'd say longer term, there's probably more of a sort of hybrid market. But I think the most important point is there's a ton of companies now that we're never hiring remote people that are hiring remote people. So there's a lot more opportunity out there. Yeah. And you see that across the board. And that's pretty interesting, right? Because you now no longer have to move to Silicon Valley to work for companies that are out there. So it really expands the opportunities for the market. And I think that's here to stay. Yeah, that's great. You're right. From the company's point of view, when they did say we would accept full-time remote with some travel, whatever the deal is, as opposed to you got to be able to drive to the office within an hour, their candidate pulled those way up for sure. That's a big deal. Cool. So Ben? Yeah, I think it's a gift and a curse with the remote side of things as well, because so many more companies are accepting it, even longer term now, sort of post-pandemic. I think the gift and a curse, what I mean by that is there's going to be so much more choice and so many more candidates, but then you're up against so much more competition. So I know it'll end up working itself out and balancing itself out some way, but we're waiting for those walls at the minute. Yeah, no, you're right. For people on remote roles, it would be a lot more competition for sure. Brian? I think the short-term changes, what I'm saying is it's going to be either remote or hybrid, and long-term is companies really do want to get back into the office. So you have to understand the commute and the parking, and is that something you even want to do? And that's a big thing that I talked to candidates about, because it does come up. Can it be remote 100%? I don't want to come into the office. So it's going to be the hybrid 100% remote or driving into the office. Yeah, and your point is right. You better be real clear on the difference between the two terms. One is remote, the other is called COVID remote, and they're not the same. That's a, yeah, be very clear on that with candidates, and the candidates need to know that for sure. Bobby, your thoughts? Well, I just think that the short-term, the remote work is a great opportunity for a lot of people who aren't in the cities and aren't available to the big companies. And I think that when you talk about the hybrid after the pandemic and everything settles down, it's going to be more conference-based. Like people are going to go to conferences and they're going to meet for things rather than just go to the office for the sake of going to the office. So I think it will be more purpose-driven in-person meetings rather than just showing up every day because you should. Yeah, actually, that's a great point. I work for one company, maybe the best software company I've ever worked for. They only had two meetings a year. That was it. Everything else was just your team's working. And they literally worked with it. You didn't have to be together. You could be anywhere in the world, and they networked you. And that was 25 years ago, but they were focused on the idea of everybody knew what everybody was doing all the time. It was like a big brother kind of thing. You didn't have to ask. You didn't have to fill out a time sheet because you're all connected. Like Gary was saying earlier, instead of just sort of casually looking at your repo, we had an automated repository. So that literally touched everything. And everything was event-driven. You could see what the work was and what the backlog was. And you didn't need somebody sitting there looking at you or saying, can we go to lunch to talk about this. You kind of knew. And we did have at least the communication tools that we're using today that make that easier too. So cool. And that's really everything I have. So Bobby, do me a favor. Is there anything specific you see in the chat for questions that we haven't hit on yet? If not, then I'll say, because we did cover a lot of topics, obviously. So maybe what I would say is if there's nothing that jumps out at you, we should move on to your hiring plan. Yeah. And I think we should let the people ask the questions at the end. Yeah. Okay. All right. Sounds right. So do you want to take over and I'll stop to share? Sure. Most of this information I got from Grace Scalable, they just did an article on a hiring plan. So you can go to the next slide, Jim. Okay. All right. Hold on. Let me just pop it. The companies who are breaking into the blockchain space. You need to really look. No, go to the, do you have a hiring plan? And yeah, there you go. Next slide. Oh, keep going. I think you have the wrong slides. Okay. Absolutely. That's why I made the offer. So there you go. Okay. Hold on. Get my show done here. Okay. And let me show my screen. Okay. So basically, the idea for these companies that are starting to gear up for blockchain, basically a lot of people have to be hired for these projects that are coming about. I'm trying to get to my PowerPoint slides here. So basically, you have to have a hiring plan. And it's, in my opinion, a five-part plan. First, you have to figure out what roles and what jobs you're going to be hiring for, then how to find skilled people for these new positions, qualified applicants, and how long is this process going to take? A gentleman on the panel before was mentioning, you know, are they going to do the recruitment and the interviews in the same week, month? How long is this process dragged out? And then most importantly now is the inclusivity of the hiring process. So first is what are the roles and positions? So a lot of the popular ones that are mentioned are like the blockchain developer, administrator, architect, consultant, and engineer. So those are really the most blockchain specific. So, oh, sorry. So when we talk about the engineer, that's kind of the person who is deciding the frameworks. How is it going to be structured? What smart contracts are going to be in there? How are they going to be built? The developer, again, a lot of these jobs overlap. Now, this is the one who has to have the language in their belts, has to do the actual coding and figure out the structure, what blockchain you're going to use, private, public, you know, the whole nine yards decision-making. And the administrator, that's more looking at the company as a whole. How are you going to implement this? What's your tech stack going to be looked like? How is that going to be divvied out through the company's existing resources? And the consultant, that's more, you know, can this blockchain technology work in my company? Is this project even viable? How are we going to devise a strategy to implement a blockchain strategy? And then the architect, that's the one who like does the actual developing. How are you going to use interfaces? How are you having a cloud solution? So there's all different positions that are available. And then there's specific trainings that go with these specific positions. For this initiative, BC Employee, we've partnered with the Hyperledger Training Partner, the Indian Blockchain Institute, and they're offering classes for specific skills. So a Hyperledger fabric developer would be able to design a fabric solution. A certified blockchain architect, again, they have specific job titles and job duties. And the certifications will give you the skills needed. And then it will also give you a certificate that you can put on your LinkedIn or wherever to show that you've actually had those skills. Again, here are for the developer, these are the curriculum topics that would be covered in the classes. Same thing, the fabric developer, again, it just marks war with the Hyperledger fabric solution. And the administrator, whereas certified blockchain architect works with all different blockchain solutions, not just one specific one. And again, those would be the ways that companies could, you know, train employees. So you must have this certification from a verifiable blockchain educational facility. And there are a few reputable facilities, again, like the Indian Blockchain Institute. And then again, where are the qualified applicants? If I was looking for someone and I was developing a FinTech solution, I would go to the Hyperledger working group for trade finance. There was a capital market one, they have these meetings every week if they're open to the public, you would just go to the wiki.hyperledger.org and find out when the working groups meet and get involved in the community that way. People will know, you know, you go to those communities and you see who's the hardworking people in those communities, start a conversation with them and see if they'd be interested in a permanent position. Another good place to look is LinkedIn. A lot of people have on their LinkedIn profiles open for work. And you can search different variables in their qualifications to see if they fit what you need. And then specific employment websites, like I know ours, the BC employee website, what we're trying to do is match, I'm going to slide this over here for now, match employees with jobs. So we have the Hyperledger jobs listed, we have the Accenture jobs, we have jobs from LinkedIn that have just come out, we have all the consensus jobs. And again, you'll notice a lot of them are remote. So opportunities are all over where to find the qualified applicants. Again, we're trying to not only get them opportunity seekers trained, but we're trying to get them some kind of experience through working groups. Again, not just Hyperledger working group, that's the one that I'm familiar with, but consensus has working groups. The GBA has working groups everywhere, you know, big companies like this are trying to get solutions going. I know one person put on their resume, they wrote a white paper for one of the special interest groups in Hyperledger, and that became a key factor in getting them a job that was on their resume and on their LinkedIn profile. So again, you can get these trainings. Here's definitions for you of what the different jobs are. So again, there's websites out there for opportunity seekers in the blockchain market. And there's other recruitment firms that are out there that will help you get qualified employees. But for your plan itself, it's always good to have a timeline. So say you have a hiring for Blockchain project one, well, you have to figure out what you're going to need, who you're going to need to hire, what positions are you going to need, project managers? Are you going to need front-end designers? Are you going to need community builders? Like where are the needs for this project? And then where are you going to recruit the qualified applicants? How are you going to get these people in for your review? And how are you going to make your selections? And you should put it in a timeline to say, all right, at the end of September 6th, whoever applied for this job, that's who we're going for. And then start the review selection, calling them back and then making your decision. And you can have multiple hiring projects going on at the same time, but you just have to keep track of them. And the next factor is, is my hiring plan inclusive? There are so many things that companies don't realize they can do, little things that will make a big difference. For instance, include diverse people in the hiring process. Don't just have the same makeup of the people hiring and doing interviewing, have diverse people interview people in the community to let them know your culture is accepting of all groups, all kinds, address bias and subjectivity in the interview process. There are some words that women will steer away from in a job description. You have to be cognizant of how you're wording things to not alienate certain groups. And upper management must portray a clear message of inclusivity. Because if they're not preaching diversity and inclusion, the staff underneath them is definitely not going to be following that lead. And here's an interesting one. Next time you have a group of candidates and you're going for a process, hide all their identifying data and just give the resumes to the people deciding without any indicators, just meta data taken out and just what their qualifications are. And see if that makes a difference. Again, update your job description to avoid gender-specific language. Like, gentlemen for this job will, you don't want to say gentlemen, you want to say everyone for this job. And again, the diversity of the talent pool will directly reflect the diversity of your teams. So if you're not looking at diverse people, you're not going to have, that's obvious, you're not going to have diverse teams. And then find your way to get your recruitment strategy to people that you usually don't, go to different social media groups, try different professional organizations that usually are excluded from your interview process. And look for professional populations in locations you generally wouldn't have tried to pick from. And finally, publish salary ranges. This is key because a lot of women and a lot of minorities feel that that changes depending on their job. The worst thing an applicant wants to see on an application is what are your salary requirements? It's like, I don't know what are you going to pay me? What's the job pay is what we want to know from people to make it more inclusive. Because if I see a job salary range, I know that whether I'm a male or a female, whether I'm white, black or green, whether I'm me, she, he, they, whatever. If that's the range, I know that I can say qualified. I have a lot of qualification, so I want more towards the end of that range or to the beginning. And it kind of makes the candidate feel like they have a level playing field. And educate your team on your diverse policies. Make sure everyone knows that you are looking for an inclusive and diverse workforce. And then that's it for, I think we're on questions. Let me see if I have our questions and answer slide. There we go. So basically that's just a hiring plan to get rolling on a project. So again, if you have an idea for a blockchain project in the company and you need to get the hiring process going, do a hiring plan, figure out who you need to hire, what the jobs are, how long it's going to take you, and how to get it as inclusive as possible. So I'll turn it back over to Jim for the panel questions. Thank you, Bobby. That was awesome. And I knew I wanted to hear from you because some of the stuff is you can find anywhere, but some of the ideas you brought up, especially about inclusion, you really pull them together very well to come up with the same information would take a long time for most of us. So that was really, really good. Let me ask briefly, I looked at the chat a little bit. There was a lot of discussion in there. Are there any questions that we haven't answered that anybody has that are critical that we want to open up at this time? Okay. All right. I haven't heard any. So I think mostly to the credit of the panelists, I'll say they covered an awful lot for the time we went through, which was actually much longer than I thought we were going to take. And that's probably my fault. But I appreciate the fact that Gary, Ben and Brian all stuck with it for the whole time, giving us their input and so on. I know Gary had to leave. So he's gone. And Ben, I want to thank you and Brian. The two of you were fantastic as panelists. Gary was tremendous as well. What I would ask Ben and Brian is we're going to, obviously, this whole presentation is going to get published up on YouTube in the hyperledger channel. We're also going to wind up publishing the slide deck as well up to BC Employee. So is there anything, I'll say, Ben, Brian, that you want to send me that I can add to the slide deck specifically about yourselves or your company? Because I'd be happy to do that. Absolutely. I'm happy to pop something over. And just for anyone still listening, if there's any sort of candidates out there that do want any just help, advice, maybe want me to run my eyes over their CV and any help I can be to the network I'm here. Great. And Brian? Okay. Yeah, so Brian, if you're on mute. But Bobby did point out that this is a series. We have two more coming up, the session three, Princeton one. And then finally, the job fair. And Bobby, who again is the expert on most things, will explain that. But I think the neatest thing about the job fair idea, it's not necessarily that you're going to go to the job fair and somebody's going to say, great, I'll hire you. But the idea is, we're hopefully going to have enough input there from a wide variety of resources that if you're a candidate, you should be able to talk to people and get a much better perspective, maybe one on one or at least one on a couple. On what you're trying to do, people can listen to you and give you some real direct feedback if that's helpful. So Bobby, back to you. Yeah, and also for the job fair for anyone who's on this call who will be needing a pipeline filled, we'd love for you to have a table at the job fair to meet the people who would be candidates. So please reach out to me if you're interested in that. And we just have a few announcements to make tomorrow. There's a lot going on in the community. First, well, mine comes at noon, is the giving chain project. And if you're not familiar with that, that is a social impact blockchain project that is this year sponsored by the Linux Foundation's mentorship program. So I do have a mentor on this program. This is a picture from 2019 when we won the Big Apps Blockchain Challenge Honorable Mention and the Government Blockchain Award for Social Impact. What the project does is it's trying to make an independent decentralized supply chain for donors and recipients. So for disaster relief, this infrastructure backbone would be available for people who need to get donations to recipients. And this year, we're doing three projects at the same time. Last year, we just did one project to the farmers, to the food banks in the Princeton area. This year, we're doing that project, as well as aid to flood victims in India, and as well as the humanitarian crisis for women in India right now for hygiene products. They just, there's no supply chains for them. So this year, we're taking on those three projects. If you're interested in learning more, join us tomorrow. We meet every Friday at noon. Also, tomorrow, we have, Jim is doing at 10 o'clock, his public sector group is hosting the non-fungible tokens, which is a new field in blockchain. It's the hottest topic. Jim, do you have any comments on your event tomorrow? Yeah, I'm actually counting on a wide ranging intelligent audience, bringing all of their use cases and their experience to my presentation to actually add to it, because I don't intend to cover it all by myself. So I guess the opportunity is to hear from a lot of people. The thread is, if you show up, I might ask you questions. So certainly everybody's welcome. It is an interesting area in a lot of ways. I spent more time on the legal aspects. I work with the European blockchain. We were doing work. And I was on the legal team, not the regular NFT team, but we do sort of have a fair amount of information. But it's a strange place because unlike some things, like blockchain came out of cryptocurrency sort of very slowly and moved into the rest of the world in other applications over a number of years. With NFT, it's not like that. Yes, somebody created an art piece as NFT, but NFT literally is like sort of there's no normal progression for this. It's popping up on a one by one case all over the place. So somebody says, oh, I could make this an NFT. And tomorrow hopefully we'll give you some ideas on that and try to pull in some experience and some ideas from the audience as well. So I'll be there tomorrow and I have my favorite NFT. So that's the presentation. That's it. Thank you very much. On behalf of Ledger Academy, BC Employee Hyperledger Indian Blockchain Institute, and all the meetups for Hyperledger, thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Brian again. Thanks, Tim. Speak soon. Bye. Thanks, Ben.