We spoke with the two people who are part of the team behind the popular website, Bitcoiner Jobs, geared toward the orange-pilled workforce. Nathan Dennis and Cory Klippsten cocreated Bitcoiner Jobs with the goal of connecting Bitcoiner employers with Bitcoiner employees. Many Bitcoiners are interested in making the leap from the fiat-mining jobs and finding a career in Bitcoin. Often, those people are unsure of where to start. It’s not common to find a college program in “Bitcoin Studies” churning out candidates, and most companies are looking for prospective candidates to demonstrate proof of work as opposed to having fancy credentials anyway.
Working full time in Bitcoin can mean various things and not all roles are related to software development or coding. This author found work through the website as an editor at Bitcoin Magazine. Categories on the Bitcoiner Jobs website range from engineering to marketing to finance to legal to customer operations to logistics. There are a wide variety of opportunities for those interested in working both remotely and locally. Bitcoiner Jobs provided us with statistics for their site below:
- 898 jobs posted
- 3,530 direct job applications using native forms
- 140+ employer accounts approved
- 2,580 job alerts created for their weekly jobs letter
- 1,269 job seeker accounts signed up
We sat down with Klippsten and Dennis to learn more about the story of Bitcoiner Jobs and how they plan to continue its growth.
What prompted you to start Bitcoiner Jobs?
Klippsten: Like many of the best products, we built something that we needed, and it turned out others needed it too. We were getting so many job applicants in the first half of 2021 that it was turning into a part-time job to help them try to find roles across the many companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. I needed a platform to facilitate that and take me out of it.
My first attempt to scale was posting candidate profiles as Twitter threads, and that quickly resulted in a few matches. Serendipitously, within a week or two I was randomly introduced to the CEO of a SaaS [software as a service] company specializing in niche job boards as a service, and it fit the bill perfectly. The next step was to find someone who could build what we needed, and I was lucky to find Nathan in the Bitcoin Twitter community. He quickly outpaced a couple of other candidates in terms of ideas and output, and built a beautiful first version for launch. After we got to know each other better, it was obvious that he could add a lot of value at Swan in addition to Bitcoiner Jobs, so by the end of Q3 we agreed to roll both Nathan and the site under Swan.
I wanted to do this on the side, and Nathan just took the reins and was absolutely crushing it and delivering a beautiful work product and was passionate about it. He had human resources experience, so he understood the pain points and exactly where to spend time, so we just had a very natural collaboration right out of the gate. It moved really, really, really fast. Once we had Nathan in place and the SaaS tool, we were able to get a product out pretty quickly. We determined the branding, Bitcoiner Jobs, which fit with this message that Bitcoin’s going to be fine; Bitcoiners need lots of help.
What’s been the reception among the employers and potential employees?
Dennis: The response has been great from both sides. Employers have shared that one of their biggest challenges in recruitment is finding candidates that are aligned with their mission; Bitcoin has fixed this, so it’s no surprise that the majority of Bitcoin projects and companies — around 140 of them — have signed up with Bitcoiner Jobs to find talent as our site meticulously filters out any non-Bitcoin companies. Another key feature that has been helpful is we do not charge companies to post their jobs and they have unlimited slots. This is very important for startups as they have more important things to be allocating budget to and in most cases would end up having to pick one or two jobs and pay hundreds of dollars per post with no guaranteed value-add. As Gigi says, information wants to be free and job posts are just information that lives on company websites. This is also extremely important for open-source projects looking for more contributors.
For employees, providing a place for all Bitcoin jobs has been a game changer for job seekers looking to work on Bitcoin and Bitcoin only. Before Bitcoiner Jobs, it would take a lot of time and research to find out who was hiring in the space; this is a struggle I personally felt when I knew I wanted to dedicate the rest of my working life to Bitcoin.
As we know, the Bitcoin community rocks and this has worked its way into the job seeking community. We celebrate Bitcoiners who have landed their dream job and we promote those looking to leave their fiat job, so we can band together and help as many Bitcoiners as possible.
With it being so early and the number of job seekers outweighing available jobs, a lot of Bitcoiners are looking at how they might transition into the Bitcoin ecosystem, as their professional career to date may not align to current needs. This is something we are very aware of and are working hard at providing a solution for.
What kind of growth do you see for Bitcoiner Jobs?
Dennis: Bitcoiner Jobs has been growing in lockstep with the Bitcoin industry and will continue to do so, with a push to go beyond Bitcoin companies and working its way into Bitcoin teams at companies across an array of industries.
The U.S. currently leads the way with companies and hiring but this is starting to level out with companies popping up in all regions across the world and the beauty of working on Bitcoin is that we are already global, the mindset is there and so is the talent.
A key area for growth over the coming months and years will be education and being ready to support multiple companies as they enter hypergrowth stages. This is going to be very exciting.
What types of features do you hope to add to the website?
Dennis: We are actively planning version two and recruiting a team of Bitcoiners to make this a reality. There are many key features we want to work on. By improved searching and matching functionality for employers and job seekers, we can help streamline the shortlist for employers and a shortlist of jobs for the job seekers. As this balloons — and we know that it is going to balloon — it’s the Bitcoiner industry rather than just the Bitcoin companies. Bitcoiner Jobs is focused on the people. We plan to have that functionality because people aren’t going to be able to search through thousands of jobs.
A big issue with LinkedIn is the model for companies and recruiters to contact you is a monthly cost so what you find is you’ve effectively got recruiters and a talent team spamming anyone that has one word that matches the search in their profile. They haven’t done any research; they haven’t read the candidate’s profile. They’re just saying, “Right. You’ve got this word on your profile and we’re going to spam you.” I know this because this is a process that I used to use in my previous days in HR and recruitment. I’m thinking about how there needs to be an economic incentive for people or a cost for people to reach out and engage.
There is a potential to have a messaging function where people that want to talk to you need to put in their own work rather than just posting a wide net and hoping that people reviewing come back.
We also want to adjust the UX [user experience] to account for Bitcoiners looking to hire Bitcoiners at any company; this is a big focus for us as the current supply of jobs is not enough to satisfy the demand from jobseekers. What we have to understand is that not every Bitcoiner should just go and retrain to be a software engineer because then we’re going to end up with too many software engineers and not enough people building houses or wiring houses or fixing things. It’s all of these different lines of work that people are passionate about, and they shouldn’t lose that passion just because Bitcoin is there. Bitcoin is for everyone, so it would be really cool if I was a construction manager and I want to hire an electrician, but that electrician is a Bitcoiner. Like how much fun are we going to have on site? Wiring the house, having fun, but we’re listening to podcasts instead of the local radio and all these different things. It’s about collecting the people. It goes far beyond just Bitcoin product companies.
We want more engagement with the open-source community and connecting contributors to projects. Lightning can be integrated in features such as headhunting bounty programs, where people unlock certain sats as they work their way through the bounty and it gets accepted by the project. It’s important to understand how misaligned incentives are in the recruitment industry. If you’re a really good recruiter that’s got a network in the Bitcoin industry then you can do headhunting bounties powered by Lightning escrow where if they [the candidate] get interviewed, that’s a little [reward]. You get paid for that. That’s how the recruitment industry could be cut up into segments where you’re not just doing all of the work upfront for free. The employer is actually seeing that there’s a cost to the recruiter and they’re not just sending 10 resumes with buzzwords on profiles and just hoping that one person gets the job so they can get that recruitment bonus.
There’s lots of funky ideas that we can realign incentives from a recruitment perspective using Lightning.
We also want to extend partnerships with educational partners to help scale engineering recruitment across the industry. I think the key thing is continuing to give back. It’s the building of a network of open-source projects so that the people who are available to work in Bitcoin can have an easily accessible directory of all the open-source projects in one place that’s constantly being updated with bounties. We want to help people understand how they can get involved. It doesn’t have to just be contributing to open-source by coding. It could be documentation. It could be testing.
A big majority of the big Bitcoin product companies are going to build the tools and solutions that we need, so as Bitcoiners, we need to be aware of the bottleneck of engineering talent that isn’t just experienced in our industry, it’s something that’s experienced [everywhere in tech]. As technology takes over, everything is building relationships with educational programs, like the Chaincode [Labs] seminars, Base58, Qala, Summer Of Bitcoin. So that as they train these engineers in Bitcoin, we can then propose those trainees to the Bitcoin companies and just have a slide with all of the engineering talent coming through and we can be a hub to connect that network.
Do you have an estimate of how many people have found work through your site?
Dennis: This is something we are not able to track as we support multiple application processes. We have native application forms, email and external job application links, depending on how the employer manages their recruitment process.
However, we have heard a lot of success stories from employers on the site and we have personally experienced the power of Bitcoiner Jobs at Swan. Some of our favorite feedback from companies who hire through Bitcoiner Jobs:
- “Bitcoiner Jobs is a lighthouse in the fiat storm, a refuge where those who value freedom can find one another and build together.” – Start9 Labs
- “Bitcoiner Jobs got us access to hundreds of applicants within days. Highly qualified individuals, culture fit, and talent that we could not find anywhere else.” – Voltage
- “Bitcoiner Jobs is how I landed a game-changing career in an industry that aligns with my personal interests and values. Best of all, the first person I went on to hire also found us through Bitcoiner Jobs! There’s no better way to find high-quality talent from around the world who have put in the work and decided to become laser focused on the same standard.” – ZEBEDEE
- “Bitcoiner Jobs has been an amazing place to post our open roles! In the few months we’ve posted there, we’ve been able to fill multiple roles. Highly recommend using them if you’re hiring!” – Blockstream
- “Bitcoiner Jobs has a unique ability to deliver mission-oriented, high-quality individuals across a wide range of job disciplines. We have thoroughly enjoyed the diverse pool of talent that Bitcoiner Jobs has delivered and they have helped us improve our time-to-hire on multiple positions at Strike.” – Strike
Have you found a job in the industry through Bitcoiner Jobs? Email us your story!
This is a guest post by Craig Deutsch. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
