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Proof-of-Talent is a reputation protocol for measuring talent and showcasing personal achievements in an objective, transparent way. It empowers people to build their professional reputation based on achievements verified with on-chain and off-chain records.

Existing methods for evaluating talent are insufficient for modern online-based work like freelancing, open source contribution and contributing to DAOs. Especially the people at the beginning of their careers are usually measured based on status symbols like education diplomas, job titles, and previous organizations’ reputation instead of their actual skills and willingness to learn. This results in hiring to happen on exclusive groups of people and omitting talented people from accessing jobs they’d otherwise be capable of. This is all due to legacy methods of talent measurement and signaling.

Organizations repeatedly point to hiring and finding talent as one of the fundamental challenges they face. This results in making non-optimal recruitment decisions when either the match doesn’t work out or the skills of the candidate are not strong enough. A common approach to the problem is to increase the recruitment budget, typically dedicated to talent sourcing. This leads to a rising amount of cold contacting, spam in-mails, and paying unnecessarily high premiums for headhunters that mostly use the very same validation tools as companies’ HR departments themselves. This ends up being a huge cost across industries.

These problems are common for traditional organizations and people working for them but also apply to the web3 community. Even the recent public discussion of decentralized identity and on-chain reputation has more or less lacked the discussion of talent measurement and signaling. As a result, most web3 companies and DAOs still rely mainly on web2-native talent discovery methods.

To make talent measurement more objective and transparent, we represent the Proof-of-Talent protocol to aggregate people’s contributions and achievements in a trustless environment, blockchain, in a form of on-chain credentials, mainly Soulbound Tokens (SBTs). The core principle of the protocol is being modular and community-led to allow custom solutions to be built on top of it, and always represent wide acceptance of which credentials best represent one’s skills and how much they account for them.

The benefits of the Proof-of-Talent protocol follow the same pattern as with the decentralized identity. You own your data and your reputation is automatically generated based on the credentials in your wallets. Each person can link multiple wallets to their unique identifier and hence generate their multi-wallet identity. People can also bridge their off-chain achievements to their wallets with custom oracle services. Ultimately, there’s no need of verifying one’s skill set multiple times and to manually update their “resume”.

Organizations and recruiters can use the protocol’s skill scores to validate candidates anonymously in an objective and transparent way, ultimately resulting in better hiring decisions and more accurate matches between the organization and the candidate. Proof-of-Talent API and UI can be used to fetch always up-to-date, verified information.

Each person’s Proof-of-Talent reputation consists of Skills. Each skill is constructed from various achievements so that each of them contributes to your skill score.

The core of the Proof-of-Talent protocol is the Attestation Registry which is based on the modular Attestation Protocol initially developed by Sismo.io. To map an individual credential to a Skill, a person requests to have their achievement recorded on the Registry by presenting a claim and a proof to the Attester. Attester are the custom contracts validating requests and guarding the Registry. Attestations support both on-chain and off-chain checks and are available for open contribution and evaluation.

After making a successful attestation, the attestation value is linked to a person’s unique identity. Each person has one unique identity in the Attestation Registry. A person can link as many wallets as they want to this identity. Based on stored attestations, people can further mint badges to showcase their skills and achievements across the decentralized web. Badges are minted as Souldbound tokens - SBTs – which are non-tradable, self-revocable NFTs which follow the stateless ERC-1155 standard.

Protocol is deployed on Polygon Mainnet.

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