In part 1, we emphasized that It’s time to reinvent how we narrate the story of our professional lives. That the current tools we use to explain who we are professionally are broken. Resumes and their digital replicas (like Linkedin) were built for a previous age, when careers were linear, talent was locally sourced, and information was easy to vet within your network. But in our globally competitive, highly differentiated world, these tools fail to do justice both to the talent who need to use them to tell their stories and to the employers who need to understand and trust these stories.

A revolution in the talent ecosystem won’t come from better data processing (AI/ML) but rather from a different alignment of incentives. To take the talent ecosystem to the next level, we need to rebuild it such that we are all incentivized to expose our most vivid professional stories. We (grappa.xyz) are building a system that incentivizes everybody to work together and trust each other, not because they are altruistic but because it is in their best interest.

To align the incentives in the talent eco-system we are using concepts from game theory and building on top of Blockchain/Web3 rails. In game theory, there is a concept of “repeated game”, where players play multiple iterations of the same basic interaction. The concept of ‘Reputation” in repeated games captures the idea that a player will have to take into account the impact of his or her current action on the future actions of other players. In a repeated game (that is played a non-finite number of times), the best strategy is to cooperate and play a socially optimum strategy.

Today the talent eco-system is structured as a single non-repeating game between the talent and the hiring manager. If you interview with a hiring manager that isn’t fluent in your background (she comes from a different industry, different country, or doesn’t have context on your previous role), you will struggle to tell your story. You will want to explain your successes, show your strengths and explain why you are a unique fit for the role. The hiring manager, on the other side, will struggle to understand your story without a very long recruiting process, independent testing, or backchannel phone calls. She will struggle to trust your description of yourself, because she only has the one interaction with you and not a recurring interaction. She will many times prefer not to take the risk and hire someone from within her network or industry that she can easily understand. In this eco-system, the best self-marketers and networkers prevail. This lack of trust and understanding reduces the efficiency for everyone and aligns all players in a sub-optimal equilibrium. This problem isn’t just for hiring, the same is true for an entrepreneur raising money from a VC, a salesperson selling products, or a contractor pitching for a job.

Grappa is changing these interactions by building a recurring game within the talent ecosystem. We bring together the people that want to learn about talent (recruiters, investors, customers) and the people who best know the talent (employers, educators, peers, etc.), making sure they are incentivized to cooperate in a mutually beneficial way. Grappa’s system does this by creating a reputation for the reputation givers, incentivizing them to provide information that is valuable for future employers while ensuring their trustworthiness. By building a connection between the reputation consumers (we call them Engagers) and the reputation issuers (we call them Badge Issuers), with the Talent in the middle, we are realigning the talent pipelines.

So how does it work:

1. Throughout your career, you collect badges that represent your professional story. The issuers of these badges attest to the roles you held, the projects you participated in, and the recommendations you received from peers. You own the badges, and they are bound to your identity (soul-bounded).

2. People find Talent based on their badges and pay tokens to engage. Grappa is building a search engine to organize the badges (which are open, transparent, and publicly viewable). When hiring managers or recruiters find talent and want to reach out to them, they use tokens to send an on-chain message.

3. The talent receives an encrypted message and a percentage of the tokens. The engager’s message is encrypted such that both the content of the message and the identity of the sender and receiver are kept private. The talent receives a percentage of the tokens.

4. The Issuer of the badge receives a percentage of the tokens. The Issuers of the badges receive a percentage of the tokens based on an attestation model embedded in the smart contract. The tokens that the Issuer receives act as a reward for their role in the ecosystem. The flow of tokens also acts as a public reputation indicator for the popularity of the badge. The flow of tokens builds the reputation for the reputation giver and creates a reputation graph for all badges.

We are starting by building this reputation graph for a crypto-familiar community of developer talent. We are facilitating issuances of soul-bound tokens (badges)  for reputation indicators that are many times overlooked in traditional resumes like hackathon winners, Bootcamp graduates, and DAO contributors. These are reputation indicators that are hard to understand and assess and would benefit from a reputation graph.

We’re excited about our early adopters - a community of developers, recruiters, talent collectives, and institutional issuers of reputation signals. As we transition to building in public to our alpha community, we’re curious to get feedback on what’s working - and what isn’t - from our family and friends in web3.

Fill out this Typeform- or reach out to contact@grappa.xyz, if the future of unbiased reputation moves you to philosophical debate or build mode - we’d love to have you in our private alpha.

FAQ

1. Is this a social credit score?

No! The user needs to claim a badge for it to show up in their wallet. No airdrops. That means that the only information you have is the one you want. It also means that there will probably be very limited negative information about people. We think that is great.

A credit score is a piece of information about you that you don’t control. People trust it because you can’t change it. It is holistic but not sovereign. On the other end of the spectrum is your Linkedin. You fully control it and can write whatever you want, but because of that people don’t trust it. Linkedin is fully sovereign but not holistic. We believe in bounded sovereignty. The User can say whatever they want about themselves, but only from the pool of things other people say about them. You can trust the information is true, but the User is still in control.

2. Can’t Issuers just issue a lot of badges and collect reputation?

To ensure accountability of the system we have built into the reputation a mechanism that disincentivizes redundant and low value add information. This incentivizes the Issuer to provide only information that will benefit the Engagers. In essence, the Issuer is notarizing information about the Talent and staking their reputation on that information - if it is valuable, they get reputation points if it isn’t valuable, they lose reputation points.

In practice, we do this through a depreciation model, meaning that if you aren’t collecting reputation, you are losing your reputation. If Engagers learn that a badge is meaningless (or worse, that it is false), then they will stop engaging with it, and that badge's reputation score will fall.

3.Won’t this system reinforce biases?

We think that this system creates a true meritocracy that works against biases. Today talent is evaluated based on the strength of its self-marketing. It benefits the people that have known brands in their resumes, making those brands the gateway for all talent. It makes transitioning between countries, industries, and communities very hard.

By making reputation a derivative of the actual actions of Engagers, and making it self-sovereign and transparent, we allow anyone in the world to see the true value of your story. This system pushes people to collect achievements and contributions, not brand names. It reduces the need to make your Linkedin and Resume look good. And it makes talent across the world more mobile and opportunity more accessible.

4.How do you prevent people from cheating and exchanging identities?

Connecting your wallet to your actual flesh and bones is a problem across the whole web3 industry. Soul bounding currently ensures that tokens aren’t passed between wallets but doesn’t yet allow us to ensure that you and your wallet are one and the same. We have a bunch of ideas on how to solve this and are working with companies pushing on this problem.  this is something that is part of our roadmap but won’t yet be solved in our MVP.