Blockchain and Recruitment: Harnessing the Revolutionary Power of On-Chain Authentication with Seekr's Morgan Stone

Morgan Stone

Our vision with Seeker is the long term goal is to create the deepest, most verifiably qualified pool of talent out of any platform ever. Welcome to season two of from the blockchain, where we speak to today's most innovative entrepreneurs and thought leaders to unpack the true potential of smart contract technology, web three and the digital Frontier. I'm your host, Ashley Smith from Fame Lady Squad, and I'm thrilled to have you join today's top tier community of forward thinking trailblazers. We're here to foster a culture of idea sharing, creativity and innovation that transcends industries, revolutionizes business, and drives meaningful conversation. If you're ready to forge a path to becoming a thought leader in your industry or organization, think of this podcast as your compass.

Ashley Smith

Don't forget to subscribe, share and be part of our amazing community. Oh, and please note that this podcast is for informational entertainment purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. All righty everybody, enjoy the show. Hello everybody. Welcome back to from the blockchain.

I'm your host Ashley Smith. I'm super excited to be speaking with our guest today, Morgan Stone. Morgan actually was on our show, oh jeez, early, early days and is actually, and I don't know if he knows this because I'm not sure if I told him, but it is the most downloaded show we've had to date. So very popular guy in the web three space, big community that follows him, but also obviously provided a ton of interesting insights in that first episode. But we are going to be diving much deeper into some of the things he's working on today.

I'm going to tell you a bit about Morgan before we dive in. So Morgan Stone is the CEO of Rue Labs and Seeker. He is at the forefront of blockchain innovation. Rulabs focuses on nfts and blockchain powered tools, while Seeker, which we'll be talking about predominantly today, is pioneering a new model of web three recruitment, revealing niche talents that don't typically surface on traditional platforms. Through proof of experience, Seeker enables job candidates to transparently present their verified credentials and work history to potential employers.

This approach has facilitated hundreds of placements, including roles for esteemed organizations like FC Barcelona. With a deep understanding of the web three space and its dynamic hiring trends, Morgan brings critical insights into the present and future of web three recruitment. Welcome to the show, Morgan. Thank you so much for coming back. Thanks for having me, Ashley.

Morgan Stone

And that intro is fantastic. I didn't know we were the most downloaded show when we initially came on. That's super cool to hear. I think at the end of the day, this is because we've got folks who are really keenly interested in the types of things that are happening. And you definitely are someone that's been involved in this web three ecosystem since early days.

Ashley Smith

You've done some really neat stuff which people can kind of go back to the other episode to listen to, but you've stuck around and you've continued to build on your original vision, which was really this. How do we integrate web three technology into the job placement ecosystem, but also solving some of the problems that comes with job searching and finding talent and finding a good fit for your company? That might eliminate some of the things like costs and other things associated with bad hires. So before we dive a little bit deeper into that particular issue, because I want to dive into that problem that you're solving, why don't you tell me just a little bit more about yourself? Morgan.

Morgan Stone

I'm Morgan. I am a 27 year old american living in New Zealand as of a year and a half ago, lives here in Auckland, grew up playing competitive tennis, was a college tennis player for a couple of years, then got into the sales and biz dev world. Eventually found myself in the NFT and web three rabbit hole and haven't turned back since. So spend most of my time working on Seeker and root troop initiatives in my free time. Like to hang out with my girlfriend, I hang out with my dog, I hang out with my best friend who I live here with in Auckland.

Just really in a time of my life where I'm trying to put a lot of focus into stuff that can set me up later on. So that's a little bit about me, I guess, but happy to dive in anywhere you see fit. Cool. Well, I will say that I don't know if popular is the right word, but a highly regarded person in this web three ecosystem, you've been very front and center from the beginning, at least as far as I've known you in terms of people know who you are, they can see your face, they know what your vision is and things that you're wanting to build. And I think you've been highly engaged with those people who've supported you along the way.

Ashley Smith

But I want to dive a bit into sort of the vision of Seeker, where that sort of started and where it's going. And I know you've got some exciting things kind of on the go with Seeker right now as well. So why don't you tell me first a little bit about the problem you're looking to solve with Seeker. I think first it's important to call out a little bit of context as to where this idea came from, because that's kind of when we uncovered some of those issues and inefficiencies in recruitment and talent acquisition, which is, it dates back to around October of 2021, which is when we started community building for our NFT project, Rootroop. And Rootroop eventually minted in January, early January, and served as a couple of things, the initial community building efforts to set us up and position us to launch Seeker later on.

Morgan Stone

So we weren't starting from ground zero, right. That's like the main benefit of launching an NFT project and using kind of web three community in our perspective. It also served as the initial funding round so that we could spend time developing this platform and also the initial proof of concept that there was a need for something like Seeker in the market. And so what I mean by that is this actually started the day we opened up our discord back in 2021. We realized we had a lot of people in our community that were looking for web three jobs, whether they were solidity developers, community managers, discord moderators, product managers, you name it.

We had a lot of really talented professionals looking for work, but they didn't know where to find that work. Now, myself and some of my former and current team who had been in the space for quite some time, we had been doing project consulting for other founders who were looking to build web three projects. And that involved coming in and building out their roadmap, helping them with branding and community building. Someone would help them with their smart contract development and smart contract auditing. And what we found on that side was that every single person we worked with needed to hire at least one person.

Again, it could have been a moderator, it could have been a solidity developer. They needed people on their team, but they didn't know where to find them. And so fast forward a couple of years, there's a lot of great web free job boards and a lot of places that are really nice for talent and employers to congregate and find each other. Back then, there wasn't that many options and there wasn't any central option that people were using to find each other efficiently. And so that's where we stepped in.

Every opportunity that we were in front of on the employer side, we brought into our discord server and we were like, hey, here's an opportunity. This is the pay, this is the team you'll be working with. We would field applications from our community, we would narrow those down. We would interview people, we would select someone, and then we'd actually work with them and train them up in the context of working on that project specifically. So we did that for about twelve or 13 people.

And as I'm sure you can imagine, it was very inefficient. Right. It was very time consuming. And so we decided, okay, let's launch this free job board. And that's what the initial proof of concept was, was a job board under the Rootrup brand, because Seeker as a name and as a brand wasn't unveiled until the middle of last year.

So we've been working on it since beginning of last year. So that job board was a great success, free to the community. We saw over 1000 job listings come through, including some from the likes of Time magazine and DraftKings. But along that way, we uncovered a lot of inefficiencies in the recruitment process, specifically in web three, talent acquisition. One being, again, it was just very inefficient.

Right. Employers were posting jobs, they'd receive 50 applications and they'd have to spend time sifting through those. It's just not very targeted to post a job on a site that anybody can apply to. The second is resume dishonesty. Over 50% of applicants admit to lying on their resume in subcapacity, whether it's their years of experience, their length of past employment, or just their downright skills and capabilities.

And then a third big one was people weren't getting paid on the talent side, all of these problems exist in recruitment in general, but in web three, where it thrives on anonymity and people's identities are a little bit more shielded, a little bit less known, and very international, these problems get exaggerated heavily. And so we found that talent would come in, they'd work on a job that they said they were going to get paid for, and then the founder would ghost, they would scam them, they wouldn't pay them, and that was a real issue. Right. And then another one that came out down the line, which is really important, one that we're focusing on is the fact that applicants were just sending application after application after application and not getting any sort of feedback back. Right.

If you're posting a job listing, you're only hiring one person, and if you're receiving 50 applicants and hiring one person, then you've hired 5% of the people that have applied. Right. And so the other 95% of applicants, they just get ghosted. They get no word, they don't get noticed that they didn't get accepted. And it's just a very discouraging environment to operate in as a job seeker.

And so that's where the idea for Seeker came about was, okay, we've got this job board now, how do we solve these inefficiencies? And so I got with Corey, who is my CTO of Rue Labs and the co founder and CTO of Seeker. And you know, look, these are the issues that I'm running into. I'm getting feedback from both sides. Is there any way we can leverage something on the blockchain side to make this more efficient?

Similar to how NFTs provide proof of ownership. That's why we can all price them, sell them, trade them however we please and see that digital ledger that is undeniable. And this was right around the time that Vitalik put out his memo about soul bound tokens. SBTs and Corey had just read that. He's like, well, this just came out.

It's really interesting tech. We could probably leverage soulbound tokens to verify work history, job experience and skills as they are established. And so that's where the idea started. Development for Seeker began in around April of 2022 and we launched a waitlist for it in January of this year. Now, fast forward several months later.

We've got about 1600 users on the platform. We just released a whole suite of updates where users can jump in, create their profiles, add roles they're seeking in the market. They can add their job history, but then they can also receive verified credentials for any work they receive through our platform. And we call those proof of hire credentials. So, yeah, I mean, the whole initiative came about very organically.

It was a very quick snowball effect, so to speak, where we jumped in, we saw something that we could add value to the community on and then we just ran with it and uncovered problems and created solutions around it. Now, a year and a half out of the initiative, we've successfully placed around 330 talents in web three jobs. Some of those are web two jobs, but for the most part, web three jobs worked with fresh startups in the space, all the way to global brands like some you've mentioned. So it's been a great journey so far and nowhere near finished or the final product of what this is going to be. So I will be asking you in a minute about soulbound tokens.

Ashley Smith

So anyone in our audience wondering what those are, we are going to dive into that a bit before we get there. Can you give me an overview of just what Seeker looks like today? So you've got, people can go to the website they can sign up for the waitlist, they can put in their information as a prospective seeker. I'm right so far. And are we matching people like our employers putting in jobs right now and things that are happening within that ecosystem today?

Morgan Stone

Yeah. So it's a little bit more manual than it will be eventually. And though it still says join the waitlist, the waitlist is kind of outdated. We're in the process of updating the homepage to reflect where we're currently at. That was kind of a previous business model.

We had planned to let people in slowly, but you click join the waitlist, you're basically signing up for the platform. There's no waitlist at this stage. Yeah, basically anybody can go on seeker IO and sign up, create an account for free. You can do this using a blockchain wallet. If you already have one, you can connect with Metamask wallet, connect Coinbase, ledger, et cetera.

Or given our integration with web three auth, you can actually create an account with your email address, with your Twitter account, your discord account, your Google account, anything on the social side, and we will create a blockchain wallet in the background for you and link it to your account. And the reason that I say this is for two things. One, every account on Seeker needs a blockchain wallet because of the fact that we are built on the blockchain and we are utilizing soulbound tokens which are essentially nfts that can't be transferred out of a wallet once received. We're using those to verify job experience. So everybody needs a wallet so we can attach those credentials to their profile.

But job search persists everywhere, not just in web three and not just with the crypto native people who know how to use blockchain wallets. So we've integrated every blockchain functionality, like creating a wallet, like minting a soul bound token, like sending a soul bound token, like paying in crypto in a way that you don't have to understand crypto, you don't have to understand blockchain. You don't even have to know you're interacting with a blockchain application to the end user. You're just jumping on a job site and you're reaping all the benefits of the blockchain's capabilities without actually having to understand the complexities of it. So today you can sign up for free as a job seeker.

You jump on, you build out your profile. It's kind of LinkedIn esque profile at this stage. You include a bio about yourself, you include all the skills that you have, any coding languages. For example, you can add tiles for jobs you're in the market for. You can add all sorts of parameters to those listings, such as your desired pay, your desired location, things of that nature.

And then you can add all of your job history as well. And so the really cool thing is when we receive a job from a client and we successfully place talent from our pool in that job, you're actually going to receive a proof of hire credential, which is that SBT credential we were talking about. And then that gets highlighted on your seeker profile, and it's differentiated from user inputted work history so that a potential employer and our system can know. This is undeniably true. This is verifiable work experience with the start date, the job listing, the title, the company, the project, no personal information because you can remain anonymous on Seeker, another problem we are looking to solve.

It's a really cool way to highlight your professional credentials in a way that makes it really easy and trustworthy for potential clients, potential employers to pick up on and hopefully hire you. And so today, Seeker as a platform is really only useful for job seekers on the company side. They still have to come to us and we manually sift through our talent pool in the back end. Employers don't have access to the pool today. In the future, how it will work is an employer will come on, they'll post a job, and they will automatically receive a shortlist of ten candidates that are highly matched to their job description based on everybody who has signed up for Seeker, created a profile and has specified that they're in the market for that type of role or similar.

And we've got a really cool integration with this new AI company called endorsed AI that we've been working on for the past couple months. That basically takes our entire talent pool on seeker and weighs it against a job instantly and gives you a ranked list about who is perfectly matched and why and why or why not. So it really just makes the talent acquisition process so much more efficient than just posting a job to a random site and you as hiring manager, which in the startup space is typically just the CEO who has no hiring experience or no recruitment experience. It makes it so much easier than them having to go on and sift through 50 applications where they may or may not know the best things to look out for. Our system just efficiently does it for you, presents the best candidates, you click on them, you want to interview them, it sets it up.

Then you hire them through the platform and eventually you'll be able to pay them through the platform as well. There's a lot there to unpack. I'm really glad you brought up AI. That was something I wanted to ask you about. Just that sort of intersection and integration of this technology, because it does seem like very useful tool that I'm sure will only develop and get better in terms of positive impact on something of this nature.

Ashley Smith

And just in case people missed it, SBT soulbound token, I love that you brought that up and thank you for explaining it to our audience. I think it also highlights just really how this technology is evolving and how it goes way beyond market speculation of jpegs. So thank you for that. But I also want to dive a little bit deeper on the structure that you have today because what I'm hearing, I think, and you can correct me, is if folks are seekers on your platform and they're looking for jobs and they're getting this proof of experience, they've been hired through your platform and it's validated and you can see that this person, even if they're anonymous, has accomplished, done something in certain roles and it's there. It feels like it really lends itself to sort of the gig economy type of work.

And so maybe you can tell me a little bit more if I'm right, but I would also assume that there's room for some of these more full time, permanent type of placements. And then I have more questions after I hear what you have to say. You hit the nail on the head, Ashley, being that initially at least, we will definitely cater more so to the gig economy, to the freelancer economy, right? We see this as high level web three upwork, right, where you've got a project, maybe short term, that you just need a freelancer to come in, get the work done, pay them sorted. What seeker does for the freelancers is chasing quality references is very tough for freelancers, especially in web three, where I think we've moved past the phase of believing in Wagme, right?

Morgan Stone

We're all going to make it. It's kind of a load of bs. A lot of people are out to extract and just out for themselves. And I've run into this with a lot of freelancers we work with, being that they work with a project, they work with a founder who's seemingly very supportive, very positive, and as soon as their work completes, even if they got paid and the relationship was all smooth, they never hear from that founder again. Even when they go back to them, they're like, hey, I'm trying to get this work, could you provide me a quality reference?

No word or just kind of a mid tier reference? So something like Seeker. For a freelancer who is continuously completing projects and gaining proof of hire credentials, they no longer have to go out and chase references. A potential employer, a potential client can just go to their profile and see what work they have completed, what type of work, when they did it, who they did it for. Again, all we list in the credential is the company, the project under the know, something like Ugalabs being a company board, ape yacht club being a project under the company, the title of the role they did or the type of work they did, and a job.

So this makes it really easy for a freelancer to say, hey, here's what I've done, without necessarily needing to get biased opinions from people they've worked with or spending copious amount of time just to receive nothing, right? In the future, we see this as being beneficial to everybody, mind you. Now, we work with a very solid mix of both short term projects and full time roles, though our focus is on full time roles just because of our fee structure. Right? But our vision with Seeker is the long term goal is to create the deepest, most verifiably qualified pool of talent out of any platform.

And so obviously there's a bit of a ramp up period to get there. Hence why we would work with freelancers, more so on project based initiatives. But say in five years, once we've got a really big pool of freelancers who have been leveraging seeker and earning proof of hire credentials, now all of a sudden big name companies can come in and hire full time employees from a pool that has all of these verifiable credentials attached to their profile. So it's kind of multifaceted. We're taking it on a tiered approach, mainly starting with freelancers, eventually opening this up to be for everybody.

Ashley Smith

Because I do think that the solution to the problems that you mentioned are obviously they don't exclude any sort of job environment, right? Any sort of company that's going out looking for talent. They've run into some of these challenges. When I'm thinking of the vision, and I haven't talked to you about this, but I think in the future you can have references like actual deep references on chain perhaps, where that particular source is verified. For example, maybe an eo of some company, soulbound tokens showing certificates of completion, of education that's been taken.

And the reason I'm saying this out loud is really for the audience. If they're not necessarily looking to hire in web three, and they don't necessarily need freelancers right now. It's to kind of give them the scope of where this can potentially go 100%. Look, we position ourselves as a web three talent acquisition platform because this is where we got our start, right? Like you said, I've got a decent following on social media.

Morgan Stone

It's predominantly made up of web three players. And so to position ourselves to be able to expand and scale to the best of our ability, we need to cater to the people who we're in front of right now. But like you said, these problems persist outside of web three. And something that we found is that the transferability between web two and web three skills going both ways is way more fluid than people realize. We've got probably 60% of our talent pool is made up of engineers and developers, right?

And just because they're a full stack engineer in the web three space doesn't mean they can't go code a website for a web two firm or work on applications for web two firms, right? A lot of those skills are very transferable from one domain to the other. And so what we anticipate happening eventually is, again, just having a pool of verifiably qualified talent. They don't necessarily have to position themselves as web three talent. They're just talent that has verifiable experiences for employers to pick up on.

And something you mentioned is something we absolutely plan to run towards in the future. Right now, we don't deal with any education credentialing. We don't deal with any course credentialing. It is only work experience credentialing through work that was gained through our platform. There is no reason why we can't partner with other communities who are working on the education initiative or course initiative.

And we have left the door open so that if other companies, other projects are credentialing using soulbound tokens, they can display those on seeker eventually. So that a profile who may not have work experience could go over to communities like, let's say, surgeons. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but really big fans of what they're doing, they could go to surgeons, upskill themselves, complete a couple courses, earn soulbound token credentials, jump on a seeker, create a profile with the wallet holding those credentials, and all of a sudden they've got a leg up over the people who have no experience and no course credentials as well. So the idea of credentialing in a way that is undeniably verifiable, transcends just work experience and does go into education, it goes into upskilling, it goes into university diplomas, et cetera. So the possibilities are really endless.

We're starting with a very small scope, but leaving the door open to integrate on a wider scale. I can certainly see a future where this idea continues to grow and where institutions, perhaps as an example, begin to put universities, even their course completions and grades or who knows what, whatever other metric you want to use on chain. I am just going to pause and take a minute as an example for our audience. Like I come from the real estate sector, I have a variety of reasons why I think the real estate profession is going to evolve over the next five years. I think the experience for the consumer with their professional is going to change.

Ashley Smith

But up until now people might niche, they might showcase that, they provide certain type of specialty service or specialty value education, whatever, but it's kind of like you've got a bunch of random course offerings as an example and who knows? How would the consumer know what's real, what's not real, what's maybe of deeper value versus superficial value, or even experience in terms of what a professional has accomplished and things they've actually done to showcase expertise. And so I think this idea goes, it stems and it's going to grow out of this concept that you have and that you're building on. But I think there's just so many layers that can be added on top to benefit job seekers, employers and even potentially the public when they're looking to deal with professionals in any capacity, which I think is really interesting. Let's move forward.

I'd love to know, maybe you can give my audience a little bit of a better understanding of just the basics, but the tech side. So this is all on chain, you're building this on polygon, is that correct? Correct. Polygon and Ethereum. Polygon is the default chain we send you to just because it'll be cheaper for us and quicker transactions all around.

Morgan Stone

But also Ethereum is an option. So maybe for folks where this is still fairly new, can you explain? I think we use the term transactions quite loosely and I think to me what it feels like is interactions with the blockchain for a variety of reasons. So Polygon, what are the benefits? Just generally speaking, and obviously there's going to be other alternative options.

Ashley Smith

But why did you choose Polygon? Yeah, we chose Polygon for a whole slew of reasons. And I won't go as deep into the tech as my co founder Corey might, just in fear of botching it slightly, but the main one is the scalability, right? As I said in the beginning, we want seeker to be utilized by the masses, not just blockchain experts. So with that, we've wrapped every single blockchain interaction so that you don't actually have to transact, you don't actually know you're using a blockchain service.

Morgan Stone

But in the back end there's still transactions going on which we are covering as a company. So things like account creation, things like payments will eventually be in crypto, in the back end, things like minting and sending out soul bound tokens as credentials. Those all involve transactions being sent to the blockchain which cost money. And if you're familiar with Ethereum, transacting on Ethereum just, it's unsustainable. It costs an arm and a leg, gas spikes, you're going to be paying a ridiculous amount for small things, whereas Polygon, you're paying a fraction of a penny for pretty much every transaction you send through.

And given that we're fronting it as a startup and eventually hoping to be a large company, we wanted to position ourselves to be able to scale in a way that wasn't going to break the bank and run us out of business, right? The second is that the speed of Polygon and the security of Polygon, we're building on Ethereum as well. So we get to leverage that security with the polygon speed and efficiency. Another big reason is relevant to what's going on today that we talked about before this chat. The Polygon team is so collaborative and so helpful.

And I'm not talking just about random biz dev reps that they hired who have no say in the company. I'm talking about the fact that we got in touch with Polygon and we've got a telegram chat with twelve people in it, including several higher ups and executives. And so this is massively different than a lot of chains, specifically Ethereum, where unless you're developing an open sourced application, Ethereum doesn't really give a shit about you. Polygon, on the other hand, has developed an ecosystem where they support builders, they support developers, and they do everything they can to help amplify your initiatives, whether it be funding, marketing support, development support. They're there and they're there very quickly.

So there's been countless occasions where we've run into a little snafu on the tech side. We want to do some co marketing, we want to raise some funds, and we've hit them up and they've been so helpful. And aside from that, they're really tapped into their own community of developers. And so if we need to leverage some sort of service, we hit them up and they're like, oh, here's twelve founders who are building products that you could utilize and you're probably going to get a discount because you're also building on Polygon. So as a startup, having that community of other startups, having them in the network that we can get in touch with efficiently is so helpful.

We see huge brands coming into the space every day leveraging Polygon and that just affirms our decision to use Polygon. Right. Starbucks is on Polygon. FC Barcelona is on Polygon. So many different initiatives are leveraging that chain because of the reasons that I described.

Ashley Smith

Speaking of Polygon, I saw that today at the time of this recording, you are actually in the process of applying for a Polygon grant. And I think it is one where the community can come out and support that application. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I would love to. Thanks, Ashley.

Morgan Stone

So really cool initiative that Polygon's got going on right now. They've got a couple grants that are live and so we, as in Seeker, were one of the accepted submissions to be able to move into the next round of this grant process. And so voting opened up last night. 100 winners will be selected to move on to actually start receiving funding. And as of a minute before we started this podcast, Seeker is in the number one spot.

So things are looking really solid right now. If you're listening and want to get involved, just shoot me a DM on Twitter. You're going to see it blasted all over my page anyway. But if you guys would be willing to support us and throw us a vote, we'd really appreciate it. Basically what happens is 100 winners are going to get selected from this round and we move on to be eligible to receive funding.

The way I understand it right now is if we move into this next round, each team is eligible to receive up to 170,000 Maddox as a matched donation from Polygon. As a matched grant from Polygon. So I believe there will be a bit of crowdfunding going on if we move into this next round in about four and a half days, and then any amount we receive up to 170,000 Maddox will be matched by the Polygon Labs team. So super cool. Which is it would be massively beneficial to us.

We are a very lean team. Like I said, we minted the root root project at the beginning of last year. We minted for about half the price as other projects in the space we minted at zero point 42 eth and we gave out a fifth of our supply for free to the community just to provide some value back. So, reason I say that is we didn't bring in that much funding and we have essentially bootstrapped this with the amount that we brought in almost two years ago. So this grant would propel us forward in a way that we honestly need and would bring us to the market way quicker than we are currently able to get there.

So, yeah, a little bit about the grant. If you guys are able to vote, check your eligibility, vote for Seeker, I will be massively appreciative. Might even send you a rue for doing well. I wish you good luck and all the best in all of your building initiatives moving forward. But that being said, in terms of bootstrapping it and initiatives, it is interesting to see a someone like yourself continuing to build, especially in right now, your focus really leans into the web three community generally in terms of talent and skill set.

Ashley Smith

And then of course Polygon doing something like this where they have an initiative really looking to help support companies and projects that are building in the blockchain space. And so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask. Clearly, the last couple of years we've seen a lot of ups and downs. We do see that crypto is feeling a little more positive, generally speaking, and a lot of that tends to tie into the narrative around web three and NFTs and blockchain technology. But I'd love to know your insight and your thoughts on, just like where we're at.

And again, I'm not asking you on your thoughts on the crypto market, more on the technology and it being an important piece to business and infrastructure and how things are done, kind of moving ahead, let's say, over the next five years or so. Yeah, I think things are looking really good from that perspective, which is the opposite of my view on the market. Right. I think when people talk about the crypto market, the NFT market, web three market, they're talking about the speculative asset side, right? The degenerate gambling side of the market.

Morgan Stone

But we've had a pretty unique perspective on the space over the last two years, being that we work with builders, right? Companies come to us to hire talent because they are building applications on the blockchain. And these are applications that for the most part have not even launched yet. So we've got a really cool perspective, being that we get to kind of see what's going on in the ecosystem, beneath all of the noise and hype and speculative trading and whatnot that's going on. So from where we sit, things are looking really positive, right?

It takes time to build applications that are of use and can actually be useful and provide value to the community. And these things don't happen overnight, like NFT mints or meme coin mints. And that's why you don't necessarily see them at the forefront of the news and all the headlines, because they're still being built. I think over the next couple of years we're going to start seeing a lot of these dapps come out. And when I say dap, I mean decentralized application.

We're going to start seeing them come out and visions come to fruition. And these builders that may or may not have platforms who have been silently building in the background for years, they're going to start to get some of the spotlight and industries are going to start to shift. Like you said, we're working in the job sphere, but you coming from the real estate realm, there's big use case for NFT soul bound tokens there as well. So I'm really bullish. I hate saying bullish, but I'm very optimistic rather, on the future of the space.

And I think a big part of that is people are maturing too. We've gotten out of that euphoric gambling stage and people took big hits. They made a lot of money. But for the most part, a lot of people have matured and they have gained a lot of knowledge over the last couple of years. So I'm also optimistic that these people who have been building real products that provide tangible value will start to get the support that they might not have gotten over the last few years.

They might have gotten brushed to the side for the 17th shiny thing of the week, whereas I think the builders, the people who are building stuff, are actually going to receive that support and spotlight very soon. Love to know. If I was a fly on the wall in your office, Morgan, would I be hearing conversations with mainly web three native companies and startups, or would there be a fair mix of more traditional companies looking to integrate web three technologies into what they do? If you're sitting in my office, you would definitely hear more web three conversations. If you were reading my emails and coming to in person meetings with me, then you would be seeing a good mix of web two traditional businesses looking to understand how they can leverage web three tech as well, which I think is a funny nuance, right?

A lot of us in the web three sector. We operate off Zoom and Google meets all day, every day, whereas people in the traditional world who have these huge corporations, they say, all right, come to our office this time, this day. This is the address. Parking is here. Get it validated, yada yada.

It's very traditional. Right? And so maybe just in case there's lingering questions from the audience, some that come to mind might be if they're hiring freelancers through your platform and they're anonymous, this would basically be like contracted work. I guess my question is around what are their liabilities or responsibilities related to tax? And obviously things would depend on where they are in the world.

Ashley Smith

But they might be wondering a bit about working with people who are not. Do they remain anonymous to that employer after they're hired out of our hands? It is up to the employer what they want to require. If they want to stay following legal regulatory practices, legal kind of compliance practices, then we highly recommend that they require their freelancer to dox and reveal their identity so that they can understand where they are, what the tax implications are, things of that nature. But it's not what we do.

Morgan Stone

Right? We are the platform to connect you past that. It is in the employer's hands now. In the future we will probably be integrating systems that shine some light, give some education, give some kind of steps to take for employers to make sure they are staying compliant and doing everything kosher, so to speak. For now, we're just a matching service, right?

That said, I definitely recommend Ndaing anybody you work with, get them under a contract. And the NDA goes both ways so that they can be confident that you're not going to share their personal information and who they are and they can remain anonymous on our platform. That's a big reason for Seeker as well, right? Is anonymity plays a big role in web three. Whether we like it or not, everybody's got an opinion on it.

There's a lot of really talented professionals who decide to stay anonymous for good reason, right? They could have a lot of assets. They could live in an area that doesn't necessarily like what they're doing. It could be a whole slew of reasons. But what we wanted to do was allow these people to shine without having to necessarily dox themselves publicly.

That's where the proof of hire credentials come into play. Because now these people who are picking up work, they don't have to chase reference checks, they just have a credential on their profile that says, yes, they worked for this company during this time and they did this work and they gained these skills from that work. Right? Again, whether they docs privately to the employer or not, that's another story. But publicly they can remain anonymous and still be confident that they are considered for work.

Ashley Smith

Right. And I do see this as kind of an alternative, as an example to maybe it's a slightly different context on something like LinkedIn, but you're probably not going to interact with a LinkedIn profile that is clearly an anonymous one. It doesn't make sense in that context. You can jump on LinkedIn today and say you are the CEO of Twitter or know, and they can't remove you for several weeks. You can do that on your own accord, and all of a sudden you can be out in the job market shopping your profile as CEO of X or product manager for Google when you don't necessarily have any of those credentials.

I do want to ask before we go again, and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to push back, but I just know that these are the types of things people might be wondering about. So let's say there's a match on your platform. Someone gains the credential, they have the proof of experience, but what if they're terrible? Like what if they were just awful? And there's maybe now this association between that awful prospective employee or person who's going to contract with the company and the previous company.

It feels like they're giving them a thumbs up. And what if they don't want to? Yeah, great question. And this is something that we didn't talk about yet, so good timing as well. We didn't mention the fact that there are actually two pieces that we're using soulbound tokens for.

Morgan Stone

The second piece is not yet live. The proof of hire credentials just being wrapped up this week. Actually, the second piece is to combat what you say. So there will be a review system after the work is completed, and the review system will be based on the skills that were shopped in the initial job description. So it's not going to be a free form review system where an employer can come in and say, ashley is the worst person ever because she went to the bathroom 17 times a day.

But they will be able to say, okay, we initially hired you for community manager role. The skills that we called out were marketing, sales, business development, ability to use discord Twitter, speak on spaces, speak on podcasts, and they'll be able to go and rank from one to five how well that person actually did in this review will be a soul bound token attached to that proof of hire credential as well. So you will be able to, you know, Ashley worked for this company, but it's not just that she worked for the company. You can drill in and see how well she did at so really implementing a kind of soul bound review system, so to speak. Really interesting.

Ashley Smith

And I imagine that as you move forward, as you get more funding and as there's more adoption you'll continue to grow and build on this ecosystem that you're putting together here, which is super cool. I'd love to know, is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with about what you're doing or what you're excited about that we haven't discussed already? Yeah, a couple of initiatives to call out. One, the Polygon grant again. Go find my Twitter.

Morgan Stone

It's Morgan Stone with three e's or go to Seeker underscore IO. You'll see it blasted all over there. Really appreciate a vote if you are eligible. Two, we are wrapping up a new UI for our proof of hire credentialing this week. So any company out there who would like to get your team onboarded and give them some proof of hire credentials up, the kind of reputation of your company, of your team, hit me up.

Would love to work with you guys. We're doing that for free for the initial bat on the platform. Eventually it'll all be free, right? People will just get hired and then they'll receive a proof hire credential in the same transaction. Yada yada.

For now, hit me up. It's a manual process. We can get your team onboarded very quickly. We'll be starting that probably in the next week or two. Third and fourth thing.

If you are a job seeker looking for work, join the Seeker talent pool. Go to Seeker IO. Sign up. It takes 5 minutes to build out a profile. Literally just copy paste everything from your LinkedIn profile if you have one.

If not, do it from your resume and basically build out your seeker profile to be your resume. Let us know what roles you're in the market for so that our system can match you with opportunities and we'll hit you up as soon as we have an opportunity that aligns with your profile. Everything on the seeker side, totally free. You won't pay anything. Any funds that you receive from work you do, 100% yours.

We don't take a cut of your fee. And then the last and final thing on the talent scouter side, the hiring manager side. If you're looking for talent, hit me up. It's a bit manual right now, but if you just shoot me an email. If you shoot me a DM, I'll give you all the information you need, and we can get you a short list of banger candidates within two or three days.

We also charge a very competitive placement fee. Right now it's only 7.5% on successfully placed talent for their first year salary, whereas traditional recruiters are going to charge you between 15 and 30%. So we drastically undercut all competition. We're doing it just so we can get our positioning that we want. It won't last forever.

So if you're in the market for talent, come to me now. We can get you some talent for cheap. Very cool. I am going to ask where people can find you and Seeker. But first I want to ask if someone wants to stay in touch with what you're doing with Seeker.

Ashley Smith

And they're not necessarily deep in the sort of web three ecosystem. Like maybe they think this is something I could see myself or our company wanting to get involved in in maybe a year from now, or we want to see where this goes. And they're not the type that's going to be on x. They're not the type that's going to be in that kind of more crypto native arena. What's the best way for that type of individual or organization to keep in touch with what you're doing?

Morgan Stone

Yep. So two ways. One, if you're on LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn. It's just Morgan Stone, my real name. You'll see my face on there and you'll see secret blasted all over the page.

Shoot me a connection request. Say you saw this podcast, want to connect for future opportunities. And then the second is hit me up via email. I feel like I'm kind of the OD one out in web three, where I prefer email over all else. Also weird for my age, I guess I've been told, but I love emails.

So stone at Seeker IO. It's stone at S-E-E-K-R IO. Shoot me an email with who you are, what you're looking for, and yeah, we'll get it going from there. Very cool. Well, I'll make sure all of those are linked in the show notes.

Ashley Smith

And for the rest of the people who are like, super into web three, they're dialed in. Where's their number one or two places they should be following you and or a Seeker? Yeah, I would say follow my personal twitter account. That's where we're the most active. And then you can find Seeker, Seekr, underscore IO.

Morgan Stone

We post all major updates on there we also post them in our discord server. If you're also tapped in with the root root community, we blast everything across all of our channels. Whenever there's major updates again, feel free to email me. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn. Happy to add you to an email list for all updates.

Just find me first, tell me what you want and we'll throw you in the appropriate channels. Well, this has been great, Morgan. I've really, really appreciated our second conversation on this podcast. Lots of evolution, lots of things that you've done since our last talk. But I will say there's just so much in way of consistency since our last talk as well.

Ashley Smith

So it's clear that you've had an idea and you've been moving towards it and building, which I really admire. So kudos to you and I do think it's going to be neat to look back at sort of the early days 21 22 and seeing what really important companies are born from that time. And it's very likely that Seeker may very well be one of those. So anyways, congrats and good luck with the Polygon grant. I hope we chat again, perhaps in another year.

Morgan Stone

Yeah, thanks so much, Ashley. I really appreciate you hitting me up for this round too. It's been a pleasure and you run a tight ship. So yeah, looking forward to seeing the success of this podcast as well, and I'm sure we'll stay in touch. Cool.

Ashley Smith

Thanks so much, Morgan. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. We'll talk to you again soon, and I don't know if it'll be next week because it's like Christmas. So stay tuned. You'll know.

You'll know if it's there. Have a great day, everybody.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of from the blockchain. I really hope you enjoyed the show. If you have any ideas about future episodes, including themes or potential guests, please check for a link in the show notes. Happy to hear from you. Also, if you're interested in being a potential sponsor for from the blockchain, I'd love to hear from you as well.

Check for a special link just for you in the show notes. All right, everybody, again, thanks for being here. Love this show. Love being with you. Please remember to subscribe, review, and share with your friends until next week.

Have a great one.

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Blockchain and Recruitment: Harnessing the Revolutionary Power of On-Chain Authentication with Seekr's Morgan Stone

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1: Introduction

2: The Vision of Seekr

3: Challenges in Recruitment

4: Future of Blockchain in Recruitment

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