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Fresh out of ICO and running a multi-million dollar blockchain firm. You canât seem to find qualified employees. The recruitment market has long been failing the technology sector in general.
Letâs understand the problem.
Job references were formerly a useful tool for evaluation quickly and cost-effectively the suitability of a candidate for a job before the interview.
But due to widespread abuse and misuse by recruiters and agencies, references have lost their valueâââin the eyes of employers, professionals and recruiters alike.
Increasing competition in the recruitment industry drew recruiters to tactics like
- Online spam
- Misusing work identities
- Abusing personal data
- Intrusively phishing for leads
Rather than skilfully matching professionals and employers, as expected, recruiters these days abuse information to pitch business.
For example, a recruiter says that they need to collect employment data from a professional to match them a job, but then uses the contact information to call up the former employers and ask if they are looking for new staff or a new job themselves.
As a result, professionals are disinclined to share any personal data, leaving a huge information gap.
In 2010, 75% of employers would reference workers for technical jobs, but today only 25% of employers take references.
To confound the issue, employers also have little incentive to provide references for former employees.
âDid the service give me any motivation to offer helpful answers? Why would I say anything negativeâââand risk being sued?âJay Goltz in New York TimesâââThe Quagmire of Checking References
And so, although pre-screening is expected by companies seeking to fill a job position, it either never takes place or, if the recruiter does obtain a reference, itâs often near useless. Companies must then unnecessarily go through a dragging and costly interview process with many unsuited candidates.
The recruitment process has therefore lost valuable tools and data assets to guarantee the best candidates for companies from the get go.
What about LinkedIn?
The reliability of information on community driven employment platforms without a built-in trust mechanism depend on the integrity of the person creating the profile. As is clear from the state of the industry, this is a major vulnerability.
Itâs worse, if a scammer obtains access to an employeeâs account. They could potentially gain access to sensitive corporate information and compromise thousands of professionals, as was the case with the breach of a Department of Justice email account that resulted in a data dump of more than 9000 peopleâs personal information.
Rather than invigorating, the advent of the Internet has run the $400 billion recruitment industry into a standstill.
The top 10% of technical professionals have given up with LinkedIn and other online hiring platforms.
Loss of confidence in references, recruitment services and social platforms have resulted in a lack of verifiable data on which to base important hiring decisions.
The industry has reached a stalemate.
But blockchain technology can save the day.
With intimate insider knowledge and understandingâââborn out of the frustrations of a career in recruitmentâââZINC founders have a novel focus for the blockchain ledger that solves key issues in the recruitment industry.
ZINC simplifies, accelerates and reduces the cost of the hiring journey within the technology sector.
ZINC have some powerful partners already interested in using their servicesââârumours about Booking.com, QualComm and GoCardless trying out the ZINC testnet are now confirmed by admins on their official Telegram group.
Many describe ZINC as the LinkedIn of blockchain. But itâs so much more than that.
In this âcareer ledgerâ, professionals will own digital fingerprints consisting of references and other employment data that function as powerful identity claims. These identities come together to form a fully anonymous and, therefore, unbiased hiring network, which is much more powerful than a simple social job network.
Looking to understand the industry, ZINC commissioned an independent company to conduct a study on professionals working in technology and asked whether they think they wouldâve gotten more interviews, if employers knew how strong their references were.
Turns out 79% of respondents said they believe they would get more interviews if there was an effective and trustworthy way to supply references upfront in the hiring process.
This is exactly the spot ZINC decided to place its focus.
ZINC will bridge the gap of trust between employers, recruiters and professionals by rejuvenating referencing with blockchain technology.
According to the same independent study mentioned earlier, 80% of companies say they would save time using ZINC and cut down significantly on the 3 month average that is currently needed to fill a technical job.
By reinstating referencing as a credible tool, the hirer can establish the candidateâs competence before they meet. By only interviewing suitable, pre-screened and verified candidates, all sides save time and money instead of going through substantially more expensive and time consuming interview protocols.
ZINC helps workers secure jobs and companies select the best candidates, while maintaining the candidatesâ and refereesâ trust and integrity.
Focusing on reference credibility is ZINCâs advantage over other emerging blockchain solutions for hiring.
Other benefits of using a blockchain ledger in the recruitment business:
- ZINC empowers professionals by giving them the opportunity to own and secure their employment data from misuse.
- By owning their data, professionals are also able to directly monetise it by becoming searchable and contactable.
- And tokenization enables ZINC to put the right incentives in place for former employers to share quality reference data.
- The blockchain ledger will also ensure the network has immutable data, guaranteeing the users, references and all other employment data is credible.
- And that there is no need for a tampering middle-man, as the blockchain is automatic and peer-to-peer.
Currently, our attention and data is monetised for the benefit of centralised internet companies, like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Hired. Many say the future, however, is headed towards individuals owning, controlling and thus also directly earning from their own data. Solving the key issues of data abuse, ownership and verification in the recruitment industry makes ZINC a visionary project in this case.
Iâm also excited for what their anonymous hiring network can do for equal treatment in employment.
Because of the gender gap, the average working woman will have lost more than $430,000 by the age of 65âââenough to buy a semi-luxury house for retirement. The even wider wage gap for women of color raises further questions about the combined effects of gender, race, and ethnicity on discrimination.
With blockchain technology, professionals on the ZINC ledger will be judged on their experience and skills only.
âNo professional should be subject to prejudice over age, gender, birthplace or the university they went to â and seek to create â an ecosystem without prejudice, one which youâre solely judged on proven skills.âLuke Shipley, Founder of ZINC at The Zinc MissionâââMedium.com
Overall, Iâm very impressed by not just the project itself but also the business ethic of the company behind this cryptocurrency.
Readers should note that 50% of the founders stake in the company is pledged to charity in a legally binding contract.
Fulfilling its corporate social responsibility is a beautiful gesture by a project that is sure to benefit immensely from the explosive growth of the blockchain industry, as so many have already.
To recap
With ZINC, you will get everlasting proof of your work history, dates and positions; verified formal references that you can use over and over, backed-up by blockchain; hold previously inaccessible proofs, such as tests or assessments collected whilst interviewing; and suffer no spam or time wasters, as itâs a network with proven information and no hiring bias.
Rather cool is that you also get a personal identity (smart) contract deployed on the decentralised web that you own and control. And with which you get intelligently matched with employers, based on skills and fit, and see in full transparency how information has been collected and whoâs proofed it.
LinkedIn has been quite successful, but ZINC will surely be an even more appealing network to hold work data and interact with companies.
So be sure to check out ZINC, folks. For sure, this altcoin is in cahoots with the good ones.
See the ZINC platform testnet in action yourself.
Besides Hacker Noon, Iâm also on: Quora / Steemit /Â Twitter
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Full disclosure: Nele Maria Palipea is an advisor for CLOAK, a privacy focused cryptocurrency from 2014. This is not investment advice nor is it an official representation of the projects mentioned. Itâs an opinion piece. So please consult official sources and contact the projects for fact verification.
Impressed by LinkedIn? See What A Blockchain Upgrade Can Do was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Disclaimer
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