One of the key components of the ARK Ecosystem is our partners. We work every day to forge strong relationships within the industry and support as many blockchain projects as we can. For this industry to succeed, it requires resilience, cooperation, and a willingness by all to put aside the greed and corporate backstabbing that has ruined traditional industry, and instead, push forward with the camaraderie and spirit with which Bitcoin was founded.

As such, we would like to officially announce a recent partnership that we are really excited about: Hiway.

Hiway is a blockchain based hiring platform focused on helping find highly qualified candidates for critical openings in the blockchain industry. With the explosion in interest and a mountain of new projects completing ICOs daily, qualified blockchain and cryptography engineers, as well as marketing specialists, project managers and technical writers familiar with the concepts at the core of blockchain are in limited supply.

Hiway is looking to solve this problem by being the go to HR marketplace for hiring in the blockchain industry and we are excited to partner with them to fulfill our hiring needs here at ARK.

We met Hiway’s founder Simon at Consensus 2018 and were immediately intrigued by his pitch. If you follow ARK at all, you know we are expanding and looking for new talent for both development and business management. Through our partnership with Hiway and our relationship with Simon, we are getting custom tailored candidates for our job openings and it is helping us to find qualified engineers in a tough marketplace.

Once Hiway’s platform officially goes live, you will see ARK related job openings listed at Hiway on a regular basis and we will be working with Hiway to determine if we can integrate ARK tech into the platform where possible to help build out the Hiway platform and integrate it with our ever growing community.

To give you all a better understanding of what Hiway is aiming to accomplish, we did a brief Q&A with Simon Rikmenspoel (Co-Founder & Head of Product):

Q. Until now, the blockchain industry has been able to grow rapidly, why is there a specific need for a new HR platform?

A. That’s an interesting question because you are not wrong, the industry has been able to grow and find the right talent when needed. I do however think that the industry is slowly getting to a size where more professional scalable solutions are needed. Of course companies like Ark can go through the more traditional routes and ask a recruitment agency but our experience is that they often don’t even understand what is meant with a “blockchain specialist”.

We at Hiway aim to bring everyone who has heart for the blockchain industry together. One place where everyone offers their skills and where companies or projects go to find their talent.

Our power will mainly lay in the fact that we are focussing solely on the blockchain space, meanwhile using that same technology in re-thinking how a work marketplace should operate.

Q: How do you think the Hiway platform and Ark can work together?

A. I think there are many possibilities but first of all we would love to help Ark grow, we are long time supporters of the Ark project and even though it has seen a lot of growth we are certainly expecting a lot more growth is to come. Helping Ark through that growth by finding the right talent is something we are eager to be involved in. We find the Ark infrastructure fantastic and we are still looking into ways to use the power of your network in the development stage of our marketplace. There are however still some technical hurdles to take before this would be possible - but we are very open to this idea!

Q: What can we expect from Hiway in the following months?

A. Well we’re really getting the show on the road right now. Development of our prototype is well under way and in a couple of months we’ll host our crowdsale. We can’t wait to show everyone what it is we’re building and onboard more and more blockchain companies. Hiway is really dedicated in becoming that go-to place for work!

We have been talking with Lars Rensing, Ark CFO about doing an AMA within the Ark community, something we would love to host but we will see what the future holds!