How Bondex is Applying Decentralization to Fix an Ailing Recruitment Industry

The changing landscape of the workforce following the Covid-19 lockdowns has seen more potential employees forego the office in favor of working from home, while advancements in AI and cyber-crime has seen recruitment platforms become prime targets for hackers who are enticed by the treasure-trove of valuable data held on those sites.

Indeed, the personal data of an estimated 500 million LinkedIn users are currently up for auction online, while AI is wreaking havoc on the same platform thanks to its ability to cleverly subvert and modify user profile images. 

Combined with major recruitment firms laying off up to 5% of their staff amid the realization that traditional recruitment norms no longer apply, the entire recruitment industry is being forced into a rethink of how it approaches matching potential employees with the right employers.

How Web3 is Addressing Recruitment Industry Weaknesses

Much of that rethinking is currently taking place in the Web3 space by innovative platforms seeking to redress the issues plaguing the recruitment industry.

Founded in August 2021 by CEO Ignacio Palomera, Bondex is a next-generation talent network which applies the principles of Web3 — namely, decentralization, autonomy and user-ownership — to the direct-referral hiring market. In the short time since launch, Bondex has seen its mobile app downloaded over 3 million times, with >1 million total active users, and more than 300,000 daily active users. Bondex has raised over $3 million since launch, from notable investors such as Chainlink, IBA, ZBS Capital and others.

One of the main drivers of Bondex' rapid growth is its gamified, crowdsourcing approach to recruitment, which sees the platform's users act as recruiters, enabling them to refer potential hires to open positions in return for monetary rewards of up to $10,000 — paid either in U.S dollars, or stable coins.

Through its decentralized approach to credential verification, Bondex swiftly chops down two of the foremost obstacles facing the recruitment industry at present — cost-effectiveness and security. Thanks to its use of blockchain technology, there are no centralized databases of user data for hackers to target, thus nullifying the security risk that has plagued so many recruitment platforms in recent years.

Incentivizing Growth Through Revenue Sharing

On Bondex, users create professional profiles which will move on chain according to their roadmap and become fully owned by the users themselves. These profiles are subject to a rating score defined by bond points, which increase as the user adds value to the broader network by adding their resume, updating their education and work history, and inivitng friends and referring candidates to open positions. 

By allowing users to also act as recruiters, Bondex achieves levels of outreach which are currently impossible on typical recruitment platforms, buoyed by the incentivization of monetary rewards. Should users choose to accept rewards in the form of the platform's native $BNDX token, they effectively gain a share in the platform's profits and benefit from its future growth.

Future of Decentralized Recruitment

Bondex aims to onboard another 10 million users by 2025 in its venture to challenge the hegemony of internet-based recruitment platforms like LinkedIn, and has already partnered with industry titans such as Chainlink, The Graph, Figment, Blockchain.com, Ankr and others. 

Some obstacles remain in the quest to advance the decentralized recruitment model to the broader industry, in particular the same obstacles that face most industries poised to be revolutionized by the Web3 approach — namely, user education and familiarity with new technologies. 

However, with a simplified user-interface that resembles existing recruitment platforms, and a natural user-experience which leaves most of the blockchain mechanics in the back end, these obstacles may not be so hard to overcome. 

For a recruitment industry struggling under the weight of societal reorganization following Covid, and the onset of more sophisticated cyber-criminals, the decentralized, social approach to hiring may be coming along at just the right time.