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.

Introduction and Key Considerations

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.

Organization Background

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.

Our Impact (Year to Date):

Facilitated an average of 150 job applications per day.
Over 20,000 job applications, 28,000 job card expansions, and 137,000 pageviews since the beginning of this year.
Community includes 7,000+ Telegram subscribers and approximately 1,000 weekly website visitors.
Platform indexes several companies active in the Polkadot ecosystem.

What Value We Provide:

Visibility: Equal platform with access to talent for all organizations, regardless of size or budget.
Transparency: Combat information asymmetry by prominently featuring all available information about organizations, including fundraising, financials, deployed protocols, hacks, audits, and more.
Safety: Safeguard talent by not publishing anonymous job posts and curating the dataset to exclude malicious actors.

How We Are Different:

We pull jobs from career sites regularly, using bespoke generalized AI based scraping infra we built ourselves, rather than requiring organizations to inform us about vacancies.
We structure job posts using AI to make them easily understandable
We publish/unpublish jobs automatically, with no input required by organizations.
We can import data from almost any web source thanks to our AI based scraping infra.
We import and list organizations and their jobs for free.
We have open APIs and are composable by definition.
We distribute jobs to an audience of over 7,000 subscribers on Telegram (@jobstash) for free and have additional 10k in partner channels which periodically redistribute our content
We do not charge placement or referral fees.
Most companies do not know we exist; we index them and send candidates without requiring their input or needing action from them.

This approach positions us as curators rather than matchmakers, focusing on data correctness, accuracy, and safety rather than quick monetary gains from job placements.

Project Description and Context of Proposal

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 :

careers.substrate.io

Here is a screenshot of polkadot.getro.com :

polkadot.getro

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:

web3.careers

Here is cryptocyurrencyjobs:

cryptocurrencyjobs

Here is cryptojobslist.com:

cryptojobslist

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:

jobstash jobs

This is how we display an organization:

jobstash organization

This is how we display a project:

jobstash project

Solution Proposal

PolkaDotJobs will provide a dedicated job portal for the Polkadot ecosystem, indexing every hiring organization, project, and available job. Our platform will offer:

Visibility: Equal access to talent for all organizations.
Transparency: Detailed information about each organization.
Safety: Strict organization vetting processes to ensure legitimacy and safety.

Key Features:

Job Indexing: Regularly pull job listings from career sites.
Free Listings: No fees for job postings or placement.
Open APIs: Easy integration for various platforms wishing to consume our data
Community Distribution: Jobs distributed to over 8,000 Telegram subscribers.
Specificity: Polkadot specific metadata will annotate the chain type for added clarity
Organization / Project / Chain presentation: Our platform has a unique taxonomy which connects organizations, their projects, and the chains they deploy on, to the jobs an organization is hiring for.

Workflow for Organizations:

Registration or Discovery: Organizations register or are proactively discovered and indexed.
Job Listing Import: Custom AI-based scrapers ingest job data on a daily basis
Data Structuring and Enrichment: Job data is structured and enriched using GPT-4o.
Publication: Job listings are published and distributed.
Continuous Monitoring: Our ETLs keep the database updated on a daily basis

What's in it for the Community

Having a specialized job board for the Polkadot ecosystem which is integrated into a larger distribution ecosystem will:

Grow the developer community of the Polkadot ecosystem by attracting new talent
Increase visibility of projects within the ecosystem.
Provide coverage for every organization hiring within the Polkadot Ecosystem, regardless of size and budget, for free.
Offer granular information about chain protocols, enhancing informational value for job seekers and others.
Ensure free flow of information & talent thanks to no commissions, no publishing fees, and no gatekeeping of talent or information.
Distribution of new job opportunities across dedicated and generic distribution channels, across multiple platforms (telegram: https://t.me/jobstash) , twitter: https://x.com/jobstash_xyz , warpcast: /jobs and /jobstash , our webapps: https://jobstash.xyz & https://ecosystem.vision (in active buidling) & soon https://polkadotjobs.xyz )

Current Traffic and Metrics

Website Traffic Year to Date:

traffic source stats

Applicant Stats Year to Date:

Applicant stats

Telegram Stats past 3 months: (Subscriber spike caused by Telegram “similar channels” algo)

Telegram subscriber stats

Telegram follower sources

Telegram follower stats past 3 months with “similar channels” disabled:

telegram followes no suggested chans

Open Source Commitment

We are committed to open source principles and have two repositories that will be foundational for this project:

Middleware Repository: This repository exposes public APIs providing a list of all jobs, organizations, and projects.
Ecosystem.Vision Repository: This repository will serve as the base to build PolkaDotJobs. We will opensource PolkaDotJobs from the beginning of its development.

Both repositories are licensed under GPLv3, ensuring that the software remains free and open for the community to use, modify, and distribute.

Development Tasks and Budget

Implementation ($48,400):- Rewrite JobStash with the new NextJS App Router to build PolkaDotJobs.com
- Implement the new designs and landing pages.
- Add support for common Polkadot wallets (Nova, Talisman, Subwallet) for sign-in. Sign-in is optional but necessary to gatekeep jobs which should only be made available to talent which needs to meet certain minimum requirements as to not overwhelm companies with spam applicants. It also allows for bookmarking of jobs and a more customized experience, as well as to let talent create a profile which is only visible for internal recruiters at verified crypto organizations.
- Extend current backend and frontend to accommodate organizational signup.
- Extend the current backend and frontend to accommodate organizational profiles.
- Extend current backend and frontend to accommodate direct job input by verified organizations.
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.
- OpenAI costs to power automatic data structuring on a daily basis pinging every jobsite daily
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/)
- Refine the user interface and experience.
- Additional design refinement.
- Conduct extensive testing and bug fixing.
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)

Timeline

Month 1:

Project planning & kickoff.
Design UI.
Extend Project & Organization Taxonomy & Integrate into ETL.
Begin engineering of PolkaDotJobs.xyz by porting jobstash a new codebase optimized for SEO.
Begin integration into existing data infrastructure.
Start building signup, organization, project and job administration features.
Begin organization onboarding and importing efforts.

Month 2:

Continue engineering and integration.
Continue building signup, organization, project and job administration features.
Ongoing organization onboarding and importing efforts.
Onboard marketing staff & Begin marketing research

Month 3:

Finalize organization signup flows and integration.
Begin marketing and awareness efforts
Launch online advertising campaigns.
Continue marketing and awareness efforts.
Ongoing organization onboarding and importing efforts.

Months 4-6:

Beginning of month 4: Launch PolkaDotJobs.xyz
Continue marketing and awareness efforts.
Ongoing organization onboarding and importing efforts.
Bug fixing, testing, and refinement of the solution.

Months 6-12:

Ongoing organization onboarding and importing efforts.
Continue Marketing and awareness efforts
Bug fixing, testing, and refinement of the solution.

Team Members

David L (DuckDegen), Technical CoFounder: A veteran consultant with almost 20 years of Web2 industry experience, multiple own enterprises behind, exposure to large corporates [ING, ABN, Equens], agencies [Reaktor, MediaMonks] and Microstartups [soup.io], from fintech to blockchain [Connext Protocol, Gearbox]. He’s worn many hats, from Dev to Sales Director, DevRel and Engineering Manager. Builds and maintains the AI pipelines as well as some of our data ingestion services.
Enrico B, Technical CoFounder: MSc in Data Science & AI from University Cote d'Azur. Is maintaining all our data infrastructure.
Obafemi T, Lead Backend Engineer: Loves functional programming and would rather code in Scala than in Typescript. Currently maintains all our backend services.
John B, Lead Frontend Engineer: UI builder supreme, is a veteran dev with a dedication for building high performance and low bundle size webapps in React/Next
Cristiano C, Senior Frontend Engineer: Our Pixelfucker, crafter of flawless UI and experiences
Deniz K & Gintare K, UI Designers: Our design team. Deniz is referred to as the “king of dribble” as he used to be in the top % of users on the platform. Gintare is our Design queen.

References

JobStash.xyz