13. Meet Trist - Product Lead @ HireChain

Welcome to product3 - where we decode the art and science of building in web3 with the people making it happen.

Meet Trist (@trist_adlington), Product Manager at Hirechain - a web3 recruitment platform that's tackling a fundamental challenge: connecting quality talent with the right companies.

With a unique focus on referral-based hiring and reputation systems, Trist has been navigating the complex balance between automation and human judgment in a space where every decision can make or break a company's success.

In about 500 words, he shares:

• Balancing AI automation with human oversight in hiring

• Unique security challenges in web3 recruitment

• Scaling quality control while maintaining growth

• His take on crypto adoption trends

What's been your approach to balancing automation (like AI screening) with human judgment in your product, especially when reputation and trust are crucial in the hiring process?

There's actually an important legal component that many people aren't aware of here. In numerous jurisdictions, including the EU and several US states, AI cannot make final hiring decisions. This means human oversight is required by law, which aligns well with our approach at Hirechain.

Every referral is reviewed by our team. We've developed our own platform with AI tools that significantly enhance our reviewers' efficiency. We also surface the referrer's reputation (an internal metric) as a summary of the referrer's performance on Hirechain, as it provides important context and mimics how referrals work in the real world.

What are some unique challenges you have faced building a web3 recruitment platform, and how did you tackle them?

One challenge that's often overlooked is the security threat posed by bad actors who apply for positions at crypto companies. Rather than attempting external breaches, they go through legitimate interview processes, hoping to gain employment so they can create internal exploits.

The challenge here is that there's no automated solution we can fully rely on and outsource this to. We cannot have AI flag potentially suspicious candidates due to the risk of false positives and the legal reasons I stated above. Therefore, this remains primarily a manual process, which we have streamlined as best we can. We have multiple workflows in place for reviewers to investigate a candidate's legitimacy before they are sent to the client for review.

What's been your biggest product lesson in scaling quality control as your referral network grows - how do you maintain high candidate standards without bottlenecking growth?

Our waitlist exploded very early on, and honestly, we weren't ready for that kind of scale. We're onboarding more and more referrers, but the real challenge is keeping quality high. To help us with this, we built our own reputation system. This awards and deducts points to referrers and recruiters based on their actions and results. It’s designed to help us spot good and bad referrers early on.

In your opinion, what are the most exciting or influential trends shaping the future of web3 at the moment?

The most exciting news for me recently has been the adoption of crypto by companies such as Shopify and Stripe. The acquisition of Privy, in particular, could be hugely impactful in making wallet-based login a more standard auth method.

I also think that AI adoption in our daily workflows is making people more security - and privacy - conscious. I believe crypto will be involved in the technology that ultimately solves this problem. Massive data leaks and hacks are so commonplace now that I don't really want to be uploading my data anywhere anymore - particularly for KYC, where I'm uploading a photo of my passport or something equally sensitive.

This all needs to become much more secure. I'm not sure what the UX or specific technology will be, but I'm pretty confident crypto will be involved. I think it's a very exciting use case for crypto and an important improvement to the internet in general.

If you've enjoyed this micro interview, share it with fellow web3 product people and give Trist a follow on X (@trist_adlington)!

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