Crypto hiring has got a whole new focus in 2023
When people think of the work being done in the crypto space, more often than not their minds go towards the engineering jobs. Crypto engineers work with innovative technology and in the past few years at least, they earned penny doing it.
More recently, however, there appears to have been a shift in crypt hiring priorities. Post-FTX it's not about hiring the top engineers to create trading algorithms or proprietary stop-loss technology. It's about hiring someone to improve your image. Big firms in the crypto space are all about....marketing.
The most obvious example of this is Ripple. In January, the crypto payments firm appointed Monica Long, its former SVP of marketing, as its president.
Similar things are in evidence elsewhere. Binance, for example, is building its branding base from the bottom up and currently has 44 open positions across its marketing, communications and customer support divisions. Kraken is not currently hiring for any engineering roles but wants a director of retention and lifecycle marketing and a senior product marketing manager.
Along with Ripple, Binance is one of the two major recruits of interns within the crypto industry but while Ripple focuses on engineering, Binance want young marketing talent, recruiting roles like 'creative program executives.'
We also spotted a number of marketing and partnerships professionals moving to crypto from social media giant TikTok. For example, Binance brought in Viane Wong, formerly Tiktok's creator programs lead for gaming, as an operations lead for content back in December.
Now that systems are built, the implication is that crypto firms' needs are changing. Meraj Bahram, managing partner at recruitment firm Durlston Partners says "we've also seen a move towards crypto firms hiring for more customer facing positions."
However, Rob Paone, CEO of crypto recruitment firm Proof of Talent spotted the opposite trend saying "hiring for technical talent is still strong."
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