Please describe your proposed solution.
At this solution's core is the fundamental and firm belief that job seekers must unilaterally own and efficiently manage their personal identity and career credentials. This belief underpins and guides the proposed solution. The foundational construct of our solution is the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) implementation of the W3C standard for Decentralized Identity (DID). In addition to DID infrastructure, several protocol layers will encapsulate a decentralized web3 ecosystem that amalgamates a more comprehensive digital recruiting solution. These interconnected layers include (from top to bottom) Web3, Anonymity, DID, and blockchain.
-
Web3 layer
-
The Web3 layer is the top-level UI-facing part of the ecosystem that enables talents, employers, community members, etc., to interact directly with the various artifacts of the ecosystem. This layer’s primary goal is to create a user experience that offers convenience, ease of use, and one source of truth. It allows the ecosystem users to seamlessly interact with various Web3 components like their wallets, DID, rewards, etc. In terms of problem-solving, this layer attempts to solve the burdensome and bad user experiences in the current online recruiting model.
-
Talent Shield layer
-
The Anonymity layer is the Talent Shield application protocol layer, immediately below the Web3 layer. All the necessary core and sub-protocols exist within this layer that manages the application’s business rules. This layer attempts to solve the problem of anonymous interaction for the talents and credential substantiation for employers. On the one hand, this layer would maintain the anonymity of talent by preventing identity leakage, collation, and exploitation resulting from repeated interactions. On the other hand, this layer would also enable employers to verify talents’ credentials upon talent's permission. In addition, this layer would provide the shield that enforces temporary (expirable) alias contacts and credentials to protect talents after specific recruiting engagements end.
-
Career Decentralized Identity (CDID) Layer
-
“Thanks to DID, users now have the tools to issue, hold and control their identifiers and attestations once again” (Decentralized Identity – Ethereum). DIDs are a trust framework that enables talents to securely manage and validate their PII without relying on a centralized or federated third party like Google, LinkedIn, LastPass, etc.
-
The CDID layer is the recruiting trust framework that enables all the required parties to play their roles in substantiating a digitally reliable trust registry. Atala Prism agents will reside in this layer. This layer would provide the collaborative infrastructures that collectively allow the necessary individual parties to compose a digitally trustworthy recruiting model. In this DID layer, the players include:
-
Talent (jobseeker) – the holder or owner of the career credentials and personal information. For example, Jane Doe is a person (with personally identifiable information) looking for a job who claims to have Law educational credentials, career experiences, and qualifications as a lawyer.
-
Credential Issuers – legitimate institutions or entity that issues and asserts a talent’s credentials or claims as valid. For example, A university might assert that they gave Jane Doe, the holder, a Law degree diploma. In another instance, the credential issuers might be a former law firm, or former employer, who attests that Jane Doe has five years of work experience qualification as a former employee.
-
Governance authority – Accreditation institutions, licensing boards, professional agencies, etc., that have the legal authority to oversee and grant legitimacy to credential issuers. For example, a state’s or country’s university accrediting board lends legitimacy to the credential issuer, the university issuing the law degree diploma. Another instance could be the BAR association that grants and revoke law license to lawyers like Jane Doe.
-
Verifiers – third-party entities coordinating the validity and checks of the holder's (Jane Doe) claims and credentials. For example, the verifiers could be a potential employer (in the recruiting process) who wants the BAR association and the University to digitally sign (witness) that the holder's (Jane Doe’s) claims are valid.
-
Employer – Another DID holder or owner without personal information. In this case, holders are institutions or entities interested in recruiting talents for a job vacancy. For example, it could be a new Law firm looking for experienced lawyers.
-
Blockchain Layer
-
The Blockchain layer attempts to solve the problem of lack of compensation and rewards to talents and other players for their roles in a healthy recruiting business model. For example, talent should be rewarded for access to their career profile, identity, and engagement in the recruiting process. The employer should also reap a discount or the cost benefits of a direct (employer-to-talent) business model. The verifiers, credential issuers, and accrediting institutions add value to this recruiting trust ecosystem. As such, they all should be rewarded for their contributions or work. The blockchain layer provides digital ledgers and cryptographic infrastructure that records the exchange of economic rewards for contribution to the recruiting trust framework. This layer also integrates autonomous smart contracts that provide transparency and audit of the ecosystem's meaningful assets (economic and artifact) exchange. This layer processes smart contracts, utility-token transactions, and a publicly decentralized blockchain ledger. This layer is the base layer upon which the entire application solutions rest.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
To fully appreciate the potential impact of this proposed Web3 solution on the Cardano ecosystem, it is worth exploring a snapshot of the current web2 online recruiting sector. Research and Markets’ Online Recruitment Platform Market Intelligence Report states, “The Global Online Recruitment Platform Market is projected to reach USD 73.11 billion by 2027 from USD 39.04 billion in 2021, at a CAGR of 11.01% during the forecast period. ” The global online market sector focuses primarily on talents, career data aggregation, recruiting, staffing, and job placement. One of the major players in this LinkedIn alone has over 310 million monthly access users, according to Market.US. There are other big players like Indeed, Career Builders, Monster, etc. If the proposed solution is implemented and successful, it will directly compete to siphon job seekers and companies from Web2 recruiting platforms into the Cardano ecosystem.
Adoption of Cardano
The proposed solution can bring millions of job seekers and companies into the Cardano ecosystem. Based on the market size discussed above, let's assume the proposed solution conservatively captures a 1% market share of the online global marketing sector over a year after production release. Based on LinkedIn alone, the proposed solution would onboard at least 3 million monthly active users into the Cardano ecosystem via a Web3 ecosystem.
Showcase Atala Prism Scaling Potentials
This project implements Atala Prism's decentralized identity at its core layer. This implementation showcases a commercial use case for institutions—the project intends to implement Prism as L2 nodes, which embraces true identity decentralization. Using L2 Atala Prism's nodes has the benefit of scaling based on the growth of users' interaction. If implemented correctly, the Cardano ecosystem will have a use case that substantive informs commercial entities that Atala Prism and Cardano are scalable.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
For this Fund 10 (F10) phase, the project intends to measure its success by tracking three primary and import metrics:
Growth of members in the Web3 Recruiting Trust Consortium
The project's success vitally depends on creating a Web3 Recruiting Trust Consortium (WRTC). This consortium will consist of diverse members directly and indirectly related to the online recruiting sector. Potential members include employers, recruiting firms, universities, talents, etc. The WRTC's working group members will collaborate to create a digital recruiting trust framework and governance standard. Measuring an increase in the membership of the WRTC is a sure way the project intends to measure success on behalf of the Cardano ecosystem. At a minimum, the WRTC should begin its initial work with 12 working members to include the following:
- three employers
- three recruiting firms
- three credential issuers
- three accrediting boards or institutions
- three talents (job seekers)
The Project Community's Growth
One of the project's primary goals in this F10 phase is to bootstrap its community. The growth of community members is an essential overall litmus test that determines if the project's idea is gaining traction among and contributions from a wider audience. An increase in the number of its community members is another key performance indicator that the project intends to measure its success. Over the next ten months, the frequency of measurement will be monthly.
Digital Recruiting Trust Framework & Governance Documents
The project also intends to measure its success by producing reports on the ongoing finds, conclusions, and results from the WRTC routine collaboration. As the WRTC members collaborate, they will be tasked with tackling recruiting domain issues and providing their finds or output. The project will capture these outputs in regularly published documents. Regularly producing these documents is a crucial performance metric measuring the WRTC's success.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The project plans to share its outputs from the WRTC, its operational results, and progress in the following ways:
Accountability & Advisory Board
The project will share its initial outputs, results, etc., with its accountability and advisory board. Initially, sharing with this board is the project's first checkpoint with a smaller subset of internal/external domain experts. This checkpoint aims to help the project gauge progress and solicit initial feedback on outputs and results. The board's objective is to serve as an internal oversight to which the project team can report monthly. The board's input and recommendations will be used to continue the course or redirect the project operations.
The Community
As an open-source project, outputs and results will be released to the community every quarter. These results will be based on the project's quarterly roadmap goals, finds, and research. The project intends to release its quarterly progress to its community via its website, social media, real-time Q&A sessions, direct contact, etc. Sharing our output and result with the community is to enable community members to provide the project with improvement feedback.