Crypto winter? DeFi, Metaverse, and NFT job market still hot — Recruiters

Published at: Sept. 1, 2022

The ongoing crypto winter has seen budgets and jobs slashed, but the search for top-tier talent hasn’t stopped across several Web3 verticals, according to some crypto recruitment firms.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Kevin Gibson, founder of crypto recruiting firm Proof of Search said that the majority of staff cuts in the crypto market have been from centralized exchanges, most notably the 18% staff cut at Coinbase in June, 10% cuts at Gemini in July, and the 5% cut at Crypto.com.

Despite this, he said there is “still a great deal of demand” for crypto job seekers to get work with “Game-Fi, Metaverse, De-Fi and NFT-oriented companies.”

Gibson explained that crypto job boards continue to be dominated by developer and engineer roles, adding there is also “a shortage of experienced CTO, CMO, and token experts.”

Unfortunately several crypto exchanges announced big layoffs recently: - @coinbase 18%- @Gemini 10% - @cryptocom 5%- @BlockFi 20%Despite all this several of our hiring partners are still looking for devs: Rust, Solidity, React, NodeJS... ✉️ DMs are open! #hiring

— CryptoCareers | Hiring Web3 Developers (@_cryptocareers) June 14, 2022

Gibson added that venture capital firms have continued to deploy capital “to companies with solid business models which have seen sustained hiring activity despite market fluctuations.”

These claims appear to be backed by a recent report from crypto analytics firm Messari, which showed that $30.3 billion was poured into crypto companies in H1 2022, which was more than 2021. While Web3 and NFT projects captured $8.6 billion of the total amount invested in the period.

Founder of CryptoRecruit Neil Dundon told Cointelegraph that the majority he had seen came from “non-essential areas.”

Dundon said however over the short to medium term, the crypto job market will “remain relatively stagnant for the time being until we get confirmation that we have exited the bear market,” despite there still being plenty of “great opportunities” out there for both crypto companies and job seekers.

But bear market or not, Dundon said that a crypto company’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances will go a long way towards success in this market.

“Crypto is still a nascent industry the most important attribute to have when entering this space is a start up mentality. The ability to roll with the punches when things get a bit tougher or company direction changes. Building new things is not for the faint hearted.”

Some of the world’s largest publicly traded companies have also poured funds into the crypto market in 2022. According to BlockData, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, PayPal, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs are among some of the companies to have participated in funding rounds.