Every bad hiring experience is a brand problem

The horror stories of crypto hiring are everywhere these past few weeks. Every day I see them on the timeline and in the private groups I'm part of.

Someone applies for a job at a project, does four rounds of interviews and then spends the weekend on a take-home project, only to be dumped or even worse, ghosted after.

I've seen dozens of these posts and many of them from people I actually know. The frustration and anger is real.

I look at this from a customer angle.

Every single one of these people these projects have mistreated and ghosted was also a potential customer.

Most projects have a very narrow idea of who their customers are. They picture somebody already circling the product, with their wallet out, and a step or two away from buying.

Everybody else to them is an NPC: A non-playable character. A terrible term my daughter told me about last week. What people online call other people they think they don't need or can't get anything from.

So to these projects an applicant is just a candidate to screen, run through the wringer, and then leave on read.

Because who cares right.

Such a narrow view with no vision.

This is crypto, and the pool of real users is small enough as it is.

The person sending in a CV most likely holds multiple wallets, uses three things that look a lot like what they're building, yet here they are, dumping on them.

So when a project treats a person badly it's spending probably the most valuable asset they will ever have.

Trust.

Of course nobody is gonna hold them accountable in public, but you can bet your bottom dollar, that applicant is never touching that product.

And anybody they trust, anyone they can actually name and shame the project to, they will absolutely tell them what happened and those people won't use that product or service either.

It's shocking to me a lot more projects don't seem to realise this.

Being in advertising, we see firsthand the value of trust and how much is takes for somebody to actually convert to a product or service. Especially in crypto.

If your job is growth, then this should matter to you.

Because regardless of how good your marketing is, if you've already got a bad name, your ad is never going to get the job done. Most of the time the decision's made long before anyone ever even sees your ad.

This is where a lot of projects get it backwards. They treat advertising like the thing that creates the demand, when most of the time it is just harvesting trust that is already there.

If you haven't built that trust, there's nothing for the ad to work with.

And that trust gets built everywhere.

In your support replies, your docs, the way you talk to a stranger online, and yes, the way you treat the hundred people who applied to work for you.

Every one of those interactions either adds to your reputation or takes away from it. Make sure it's a positive and works in your favour.

Missing that is a real weakness, and you do so at your own peril.

This is where it hits close to home for me, and where I want to give Ross and Madusha their due.

The instinct to look after a customer instead of taking advantage of them was never something I had to fight for. It's simply who they are.

When we sat down to build Specify, good proper service came first, and it still does. They got it from the start, because taking advantage of anyone was never in them to begin with.

At Specify, we sometimes tell a project we won't take their business yet, because we can see the market doesn't know them well enough for a campaign to convert.

That's easy money we're walking away from.

But charging for a result we already know won't land is another way of burning trust, and the person who gets that report and has to justify it to their superiors is never going to believe us again.

It's also why we start every project on a small test campaign rather than a big spend. That's worth a newsletter of its own, but maybe next week. For now it is enough to say that nobody should have to bet real budget just to get a proper read on the market.

None of this is complicated. It's just logical, and ethical too.

The projects that usually make it are the ones that figure out early that every touch point is an opportunity to build trust.

Including during interviews with new hires.