Peter’pet3rpan’, the founder of MetaCartel, teaches you how to find excellent community builders.
Original title: “How to evaluate new community builders for the token network”
Written by: Peter’pet3rpan’, founder of MetaCartel, working for 1kx, a cryptocurrency investment institution
Translation: Shirley
🎈Appetizers:
Roles in community building (settler, explorer, planner)
Community building is a process of bringing people together to achieve a series of common goals and missions.
This is a vital task for every token network intended to be operated by a decentralized community of token holders and contributors.
When recruiting team members to promote community building, there are usually three ways to consider candidates:
Value consensus: Do they agree with the values ​​and mission of the community?
Past experience: Do they have experience in building crypto communities? If not, do they have the potential to become outstanding community operators?
Execution: How about their execution and task follow-up?
🎈 Do they agree with the values ​​and mission of the community?
When recruiting community builders, the most important thing is to review whether they can fully grasp the tasks of a project and the knowledge of related fields.
This kind of compatibility and being able to assume one’s own responsibilities with a sense of ownership is the key to the success of the community.
When possible, you want to recruit people who are already involved in the community. If so, they are most likely to have done something for the success of the community to a certain extent.
If candidates come from outside the community, what needs to be concerned is whether they are willing to learn and immerse themselves in the mission of promoting the community. In any case, as time goes by, you gradually build a relationship with the candidate, and you will become more aware of the importance of the probation period in the recruitment process (discussed later).
When people care about the work they do, others will naturally notice that this is especially important as an ultimately human-oriented role.
For example: A person who is deeply fascinated by decentralized finance and has strong writing skills is likely to produce better content than someone who has operational experience but lacks interest in the field of decentralized finance. Become a better community evangelist.
🎈 Questions for candidates
Why do you think this job is important?
What kind of values ​​do you think the project should protect and maintain?
Why enter this field? Why do you want to come and work for the community?
What impact has the community had on you personally?
### 🎈 Do they have experience in building an encrypted community? If not, do they have the potential to become outstanding community operators?
Although past experience is not a necessary condition for a person to be able to build a good community, it is a big plus. The more you want to avoid detours, the more you should spend time recruiting more senior people to lead the work to reduce execution risk.
With this in mind, the crypto field is a place of failed communities. More often, candidates’ past job titles and experiences on paper rarely represent their actual achievements. Those who claim to be “community builders” or may have held senior titles such as “community leaders” should be treated with caution, or due diligence should be done.
🎈 Understand the results of their past work
Figure out what their previous roles did? When did they join the project? When they joined, what was the status of the project (in terms of product, community maturity), and how did they promote community development? Is the community already very well developed, or did they change the community from 0 to 1? Ask them to outline how their community thinking has changed during this time and how they measure progress and success?
🎈 Assess how much it has a direct impact on the output result
Can they cite the specific measures they led to promote the progress of the community or solve the growing pain points that the community was facing at that time? Try to assess whether the candidates’ past actions have directly resulted in positive results, or have they appeared when and where they are needed? Generally speaking, if a person is not really responsible for these things, they will not be able to tell the details.
🎈 Misunderstand influential people and mass builders as community builders
Many times, good mass builders are mistaken for qualified community builders. Although mass building is part of community building, it is only one part of the whole process. We can think of the masses as a group of people. The relationship between them and the central person is “one-to-many”, while the community is more like a group where the network of relationships is “many-to-many”, and essentially emphasizes collaboration .
To build a mass base, you need to be able to attract people’s attention, but to cultivate a community, you need to create something that people are willing to put in their time, effort, and energy. Over time, the masses can form communities, but many founders often hire mass builders with the expectation of building a community, which leads to inconsistencies between expectations and results.
Community building is a protracted battle. Temporary attention is one thing, but forming a meaningful network and calling on the entire community to continue to contribute their time and energy is another.
In the token network, if we simply build a mass base, we may end up with a large number of token holders, most of whom are very passive. And if we focus on building an active contributor community, we will eventually have a decentralized team of contributors who can manage and operate this network.
Although it is good to be the community with the highest social attention, in most cases, this super attention will gradually disappear over time. In the end, it is the true believer of the ecosystem who persists when encountering difficulties in the bear market.
And what you have to work hard to find is the right person, not the attention.
Be wary of candidates who have founded many communities but have a short duration. More often-they may be very good at marketing, but often lack the operational rigor and execution commitment required to build a community. Make sure you are consistent on this goal!
Many mass builders are actually very good community builders. The above considerations are more to clarify the difference between the two.
🎈 Evaluate the candidate’s community building experience
When evaluating candidates’ past experiences, I don’t necessarily have to focus on their special achievements, but around their self-awareness in their work, and the lessons they learned when working with the community.
🎈Questions you can ask include
When did you join and start working in the community? Where was it then? How has your understanding of community building changed in the course of your work?
In your current position, what initiatives have you proposed and implemented? How do you plan, measure and activate them?
(If the candidate creates a community) What is the goal of your community? Why create it? Have you successfully fulfilled the community mission? What did you leave behind?
🎈 expectation
The experience of holding a formal position is not only an indicator of individual potential, but also an indicator of their participation in other communities.
Community builders come from various backgrounds, including former project founders, as well as people who are engaged in business development, operations, customer service, content creation, and writing.
In many cases, some of the best emerging community builders I have come into contact with are often those who do not have much experience, but they have witnessed firsthand how a truly prosperous community develops from birth to gradual development. Usually They themselves are participants in the community.
🎈 Arrange a trial period for candidates
Although the fit of values ​​and past experience may be important indicators for measuring candidates, there is usually nothing more important than working with them first.
Find the work tasks that the community needs, and divide them according to goals, success indicators, timetables, and general methods of execution.
Let the candidates estimate how much time they need and provide 2-4 weeks of part-time or full-time work compensation.
Examples of work challenges include: “Currently, the governance participation of the community is at the lowest point in history. We have not done well enough to actively involve community members and ensure proper communication processes, and we are not even sure whether people understand what DAO/how? Get involved. Please outline a three-month plan to solve this problem.”
In the recruitment process, the ideal approach is to quickly assess whether their values ​​are suitable and to review their past experience, but the main goal is to reach a trial stage where you can rest assured to provide them with paid work. At this stage, you can better measure whether this role is suitable for the candidate.
When recruiting community builders urgently, prepare several challenges, problems, or goals for potential trialists to try to solve and implement them.
🎈 Summary
Community builder talents will continue to emerge as a key talent force in the crypto world and web3 world.
Hope the above content is helpful to you.
Thanks to Nichanan Kesonpat for editing, and Jiho (Axie Infinity) for his suggestions.
Source link: medium.com
