Proponent: David (DuckDegen) from JobStash
Requested USD: $98,900
Requested DOT: 17081 DOT (EMA7 DOT price on 16:20 Jun 25th ‘24 @ DOT/USD 5.79). Any excess funds at the time of exchange will be returned to the treasury.
Estimated Duration: 6 months, with initial delivery of the launched portal 3 months after engineering kickoff.
This proposal from the JobStash team introduces a new initiative for ecosystem-specific job indexing within the Polkadot network. Our mission is to offer ideal tooling for distributing, discovering, and applying to job opportunities, maintaining a free service that curates job listings while safeguarding the interests of both organizations and applicants. We will always prioritize quality applicants over quantity of applicants.
JobStash (http://JobStash.xyz) is a crypto-native job site operating as a public good. Over the past 1.5 years, our platform has leveraged AI to structure data and scrape websites, indexing data for over 6,500 organizations and tracking approximately 3,000 live jobs across the crypto ecosystem. Our primary funding sources include public good funding from platforms like GitCoin and RetroPGF3.
Why We Exist: Traditional job sites and talent sourcers are value extractive and gatekeep information as it is their only edge, and operate with misaligned incentives that do not serve the ecosystem well. This results in fragmented job opportunities, confusion for job seekers, and multiple fees for companies. We fix this by being an unbiased, neutral public good that curates a comprehensive, safe, and data-complete dataset of the entire crypto ecosystem. We do not charge job posting fees, placement fees, or interview fees, and only allow organizations to feature their job posts for extra visibility if desired.
Furthermore, since the Polkadot treasury is currently funding lots of projects, lots of these are looking to hire new talent, yet there is no place where this can be accomplished in a way that both gives proper exposure+distribution and which also attracts new talent into the ecosystem. The pie needs to grow.
What We Are: JobStash.xyz is a crypto-native job site provided as a public good, indexing data for over 6,500 organizations and tracking approximately 2,500 live jobs across the ecosystem. Our goal is to achieve near-complete coverage of the crypto ecosystem. Our funding comes almost entirely from public good funding sources like GitCoin and RetroPGF3.
This approach positions us as curators rather than matchmakers, focusing on data correctness, accuracy, and safety rather than quick monetary gains from job placements.
PolkaDotJobs (https://polkadotjobs.com) will be a dedicated job platform for the Polkadot ecosystem, aiming to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity in the crypto space by providing a comprehensive, safe, and data-complete dataset of all job opportunities within the ecosystem. The underlying data will be fully integrated with all our other projects, so it will not be an isolated website, but rather part of a growing and well visited suite of platforms (on Telegram alone we have over 17k combined subscribers across our distribution channels, plus 4k unique visitors per month on our website) which all operate as public goods, further increasing reach, visibility and discoverability.
Current Situation: There are a few job sites servicing the polkadot ecosystem. None of them operate as public goods, and none of them are really good. Let’s take a look.
https://careers.substrate.io/jobs and https://polkadot.getro.com/jobs are Getro.io embedded job boards, which charge a monthly fee based on the count of organizations which are included in the index. They are a generic Web2 solution, and have absolutely no awareness of categorization of protocols, networks or finer details.
Here is a screenshot of careers.substrate.io :
Here is a screenshot of polkadot.getro.com :
The three major web3 job boards service polkadot as well.
https://cryptocurrencyjobs.co and https://cryptojobslist.com currently list 15 and 3 jobs for polkadot respectively.
https://Web3.careers has a higher job count, but their product never removes filled or killed vacancies, and can thus be considered a graveyard of jobs.
Here is a screenshot of web3.careers:
Here is cryptocyurrencyjobs:
Here is cryptojobslist.com:
These three platforms fundamentally do the same thing: they import jobs from greenhouse/lever/workable APIs, do not improve the data or the user experience at all, and hope that companies they do not cover will come to them to add their own job listings and will then charge fees to post jobs for a certain period of time. The ecosystem coverage such an approach offers is pretty low, and even assuming all companies would pay the fee once, their information will be lost the moment the publishing period ends.
We differ from any of these because we perform organization and job discovery on our own, and that is one of our core value propositions. Our aim is to maintain a comprehensive and as complete as possible dataset, and thus we spend a considerable amount of time extending our dataset and maintaining it.
Having us maintain a Job Board means that the burden of identifying which organizations are part of the polkadot ecoystem is shifted from parity / polkadot to us, and organizations don't strictly have to come and identify themselves to us, we find them on a regular basis.
Lastly, these job boards come with a common downside: they are mainly frequented by non crypto natives, and in general the applicant quality is pretty low.
Problems we aim to solve: Traditional job sites are rent-seekers and focus on pay-per-job post fees, creating barriers for small organizations. Information asymmetry and lack of transparency often lead to candidates handing over their private data to middlemen, contrary to crypto ethos. Additionally, crypto job boards targeting all ecosystems miss the nuanced knowledge required by Polkadot-specific tools and protocols.
Traditional job sites are unable to import data from smaller organizations which do not pay hundreds of dollars per month for an ATS (applicant tracking system) which has open APIs. This means that smaller orgs receive no coverage, and this is evidenced by performing a quick search for “polkadot” on most career sites.
Even a specialized job board like JobStash is currently unable to capture the full breadth and scope of the Polkadot ecosystem, and we would love to tackle this problem from the ground up building an ecosystem job board that is worthy of such a great community, while maintaining a high quality of talent that applies through our distribution channels.
Our Solution: PolkaDotJobs will be a fee-free, crypto-native job board provided as a public good. We curate a comprehensive dataset of job opportunities, ensuring transparency and safety by vetting all organizations. Job listings are imported from primary sources only, regardless if as an ATS API integration or if imported by a custom website template, and additionally organizations will directly be able to input and manage their listings. We provide APIs for our job data for others to use, and distribute jobs across our distribution channels, increasing the reach of opportunities within the Polkadot ecosystem. The backend service which powers these APIs is OSS and already published at https://github.com/jobstash/middleware .
We also provide a permanent index of organizations and projects within the ecosystem, which comes with full metadata, financials, and other custom metadata which we manually research. This can be seen here for example on JobStash.
This is how we display jobs:
This is how we display an organization:
This is how we display a project:
PolkaDotJobs will provide a dedicated job portal for the Polkadot ecosystem, indexing every hiring organization, project, and available job. Our platform will offer:
Having a specialized job board for the Polkadot ecosystem which is integrated into a larger distribution ecosystem will:
Website Traffic Year to Date:
Applicant Stats Year to Date:
Telegram Stats past 3 months: (Subscriber spike caused by Telegram “similar channels” algo)
Telegram follower stats past 3 months with “similar channels” disabled:
We are committed to open source principles and have two repositories that will be foundational for this project:
Both repositories are licensed under GPLv3, ensuring that the software remains free and open for the community to use, modify, and distribute.
Implementation ($48,400):- Rewrite JobStash with the new NextJS App Router to build PolkaDotJobs.com
One time fee for Integration, DevOps, Hosting & LLM ($12000):- Set up and maintain dev-staging-prod environments, including a contribution to cost for other data pipelines and backend services.
Design, Polishing and Testing ($12,500):- Design new PolkaDotJobs-specific landing pages in accordance with Polkadot ecosystem brand guidelines (https://polkadot.network/ecosystem/brand-hub/)
Marketing and Outreach ($14,000)- Cross platform social media campaigns to spread awareness of the platform among job seekers performed by a Marketing Consultant ($14,000)
Organization & Project Data Acquisition ($12,000)- Organization + Project Discovery & Processing & Ingestion (Every organization in the ecosystem needs to be added to our registry, and needs to be manually processed to correctly import its full range of metadata, projects and career pages ($12,000). This is a manual process and consumes tons of time.
Total Budget in USD: $98,900
Total Budget in DOT: 17081 DOT (EMA7 DOT price on 16:20 Jun 25th ‘24 @ DOT/USD 5.79)
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