Summary
This proposal aims to establish a formal process for hiring into leadership roles at the DAO. The 8-step process outlined below has been constructed to provide a mechanism to ensure that the concerns of all parties at the DAO may be considered, ensure transparency at all times during the selection process, and allow for a candidate to be elected democratically. By ensuring that all concerned parties have the opportunity to voice their concerns and influence the candidate selection by voting in accordance with their views, the DAO may better equip itself to elect the best choice from the pool of available applicants for any vacant leadership position.
Abstract
With the expanded scope of authority granted to workstream leaders by SCP-92 and subsequent superseding proposals, workstream leaders at ShapeShift DAO have an outsized impact on the strategic trajectory of the DAO, its internal operations, and its cultural environment. The influence of any workstream leader extends well beyond the team that he/she is responsible for overseeing, and workstream leaders at ShapeShift DAO have historically had opportunities to assist in organization-wide decision-making processes often far outside the specific domain of his/her technical expertise. As such, it is of critical importance that ShapeShift DAO exercise great care in choosing individuals for leadership roles. Once a candidate has been hired into a leadership role, it is also important that the community is able to retain confidence that an appropriate candidate was elected through a process that is fair, transparent, and democratic - a process that allows the entire community to participate in the hiring process and make their opinions heard. This proposal aims to establish a mechanism that will preserve the DAO’s ability to exercise collective agency, self-organize, and self-direct.
Motivation
No formalized process for hiring workstream leaders currently exists. Furthermore, the process has historically only provided the opportunity for DAO-wide input on the hiring decision in the form of a binary “for/against” vote offered to the community for a single candidate. Effectively, the DAO has not been given the opportunity to elect a candidate for these roles, but instead presented only with the option to veto a selection previously made by a small number of DAO members through an opaque process with unknown selection criteria. This proposal aims to formalize a democratic process that simultaneously satisfies the concerns of both ShapeShift DAO leadership and the community at large.
Specification
This proposal outlines the following process for conducting hires for all leadership roles at ShapeShift DAO. These steps are to be taken in order. Should this proposal pass, this policy will go into effect immediately; any ongoing hiring process must be modified to comply with this specification.
1.) For every open leadership position, an ad-hoc application review committee shall be established. The application review committee should include, but shall not be limited to, members from the workstream that the new hire will oversee.
2.) The application review committee shall draft and publish to the ShapeShift Forum a well-defined job description before accepting applications for the role. The job description should outline the responsibilities, expectations, and technical prerequisites required for the position. Optionally, the application review committee may compile a technical screening examination, which will be used to assess the technical abilities of prospective candidates. If the application review committee chooses to give a technical screening examination to applicants during the application review process, the contents of the technical screening examination must be published to the ShapeShift Forum immediately after all qualifying applicants have completed their initial interviews.
3.) Upon publication of the job description, application submissions shall be accepted for a pre-determined period, as established by the application review committee.
4.) Once the application acceptance period has expired, the application review committee may begin screening applicants. All applicants who meet the criteria outlined in the job description and have passed the technical examination (if one was given) shall advance to the initial interview round.
5.) A group of interviewers selected internally by the application review committee shall conduct a recorded video interview with each applicant who has advanced to the initial interview round. Neither the interviewers nor applicants shall be required to show their faces on camera during the recorded video interview. This interview is meant to assess the behavioral, cultural, (and optionally, technical) attributes of the applicant. During the interview, interviewers from the application review committee shall take notes on the performance of each applicant. The notes may describe the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses and may contain a hiring recommendation from any or all of the interviewers present during the interview.
6.) Once all applicants have been interviewed by the application review committee, the application review committee shall post a proposal with the title “[SCP-XXX]: Selecting Candidates for the Role of ”. This proposal must contain the (optionally redacted) resume of each applicant, along with the applicant’s recorded video interview and interview notes from the application review committee. This proposal must utilize the Snapshot weighted voting strategy, with options listed for each applicant interviewed by the application review committee. This proposal shall bypass the RFC stage and advance directly to ideation. This strategy will allow voters to split their voting power among any number of applicant choices. Upon expiry of the voting period, the applicants with the three highest vote counts will advance to the next interview round. If three or fewer applicants are available, this step may be skipped with all applicants advancing to the next interview round.
7.) Each candidate advancing from the previous round will host an AMA session on Discord. During the AMA session, the candidate will have an opportunity to make a personal introduction to the community, and members of the community will have an opportunity to ask the candidate questions of any variety.
8.) Once all candidates have completed their AMA sessions, a final hire proposal shall be published by the application review committee with the title, “[SCP-XXX]: Electing a Candidate for the Role of ”. This proposal must utilize the Snapshot basic voting strategy, with options listed for each candidate who advanced from the previous round. This proposal shall bypass the RFC stage and advance directly to ideation. During the time that this proposal is active, community members may vote for one of the remaining candidates. The candidate who has received the greatest number of votes at the time that the voting period ends shall be elected to the position. In the unlikely event of a tie between the two top candidates at the end of the voting period, the candidates shall conduct a joint AMA debate session, and a subsequent final hire proposal listing only these two candidates shall be presented to the community. The leading candidate from this proposal shall be elected to the position.
Privacy Considerations
Several conceivable situations could arise in which the candidates might wish to maintain more privacy than allowed by the process as written above. For instance, a candidate who is currently employed elsewhere in the industry might reasonably not wish for his/her application to be published to the ShapeShift Forum during the interview process. To account for this and similar situations, any applicant may elect to interview anonymously. In this event, the candidate will be referred to in all materials published by the application review committee under an alias, information about the applicant’s current employer will be redacted from the published resume, and the recorded video interviews may either be published without the face of the applicant shown or as audio-only files.
Benefits
The policy above provides increased transparency during candidate evaluation and democratizes the candidate selection process, enabling the community of FOX holders to self-organize and self-direct by electing candidates that the community believes will be best suited for leadership roles at the DAO.
With this process, the application review committee has the opportunity to make a strong case for or against any applicant, but the final selection will be determined by the community, with all options available at the time of voting.
Likewise, any member of the DAO will be able to make a case to the community as to why they believe that any particular candidate is or is not well-suited for the position. This ensures that the community can consider all available opinions regarding candidate selection and may make a well-informed decision on which candidate is best suited for the leadership role.
The mandatory AMA sessions outlined in the specification above will provide the community with an opportunity to assess the candidates’ personality traits, allow the community to evaluate the candidates for culture fit, and will give the community information on the candidates’ viewpoints regarding strategic decision-making. Productivity can be optimized if this information can be gleaned ahead of the hiring decision rather than afterward.
Drawbacks
The process outlined above requires that the application review committee manage recorded interviews, applicant information, and review notes during the interview process.
The proposed hiring process also requires that two proposals be presented to the community to elect a candidate instead of the single proposal typically presented at the end of the informal process currently used in practice
