Proof Over Promises: How Bawar Hamad Built Deciml to Fix Crypto Recruiting

Bawar Hamad says he spent years inside the hiring rooms of Meta, Scroll, the Arbitrum Foundation and the Sentient Foundation before he built his own recruitment software. Across every desk, he heard the same complaint from software engineers and executives. Candidates sat through weeks of technical interviews and met silence after a rejection. Compensation bands swung wildly between competing offers. Applicant tracking systems built for standard software startups missed the specific signals of blockchain engineering.

Hamad, 34, decided to build the tools himself. Alongside co-founder Julian Al-Mushadani, with whom he founded London artificial intelligence recruitment agency Birch & James Associates Ltd. in April 2015, Hamad launched TechChain Talent and its matching platform, Deciml. Operating out of London's Chiswick Business Park, the firm pairs a seven-stage algorithmic matching engine with embedded human recruiters.

Deciml tracks 21,814 verified candidates across 21 active hiring teams. Nearly 3,000 professionals hold a verified Deciml Card, a digital credential that scores identity, technical skills, GitHub code repositories, onchain wallet history and job availability. Candidate matches surfaced exclusively through the software have generated more than $500,000 in placement revenue for the firm, according to TechChain Talent.

Those figures come from TechChain Talent alone. New York's state comptroller, auditing the city's AI-hiring disclosure law in December 2025, found enforcement lagging across the industry that supplies tools like Deciml. “Job seekers deserve a fair and transparent process when they apply for work, and that includes knowing if a company is using artificial intelligence to evaluate their resumes or video interviews, and whether the technology was vetted to eliminate biases,” Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said⁶. A similar audit has yet to reach TechChain Talent or Deciml.

“Time and time again I spoke to candidates interviewing at other projects saying they never heard back after being rejected, no meaningful feedback loops, no emphasis on candidate experience, so for them something as simple as having a recruiter who held their hand throughout a process or gave them honest direct feedback on why it was a no, meant the world and allowed them to improve,” Hamad said in an October 2026 interview with CryptoLately¹. “Tbh its a big reason why ive been able to have such an amazing network, i really dont do much business development these days, over 90% of my clients are ex candidates.”

Capital Concentrates and Hiring Restructures

TechChain Talent's 2026 Crypto Hiring Report draws on internal data from 247 placements across 89 funded companies between 2024 and the first quarter of 2026. That report documents a sharp structural shift in blockchain employment. Bitcoin surrendered more than a third of its value following its October 2025 peak of $126,000, finishing 2025 down 6 percent. Ethereum dropped 11 percent in 2025, Solana fell 34 percent and the median alternative token declined 79 percent, according to Pantera Capital's January 2026 market letter⁵. Coinbase posted a $667 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2025. Across the sector, named layoffs reached 5,120 workers, including 180 staffers at Coinbase, 150 at Kraken parent Payward Inc. and 40 at MARA Holdings Inc.

Venture capital reorganized around larger checks. First-quarter 2026 crypto venture deployment reached $4.8 billion across a smaller number of rounds. Prediction market Kalshi raised $1 billion, Polymarket secured $600 million in a round led by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., and stablecoin card issuer Rain raised $250 million led by Iconiq Capital. Custody provider BitGo completed a $213 million New York Stock Exchange initial public offering at a $2.08 billion valuation. LMAX Group raised $150 million led by Ripple for institutional stablecoin liquidity. Overall United States crypto venture funding rose 44 percent in 2025 compared with 2024.

Hiring managers adjusted their mandates to match those capital flows. Job listings requiring artificial intelligence proficiency hit 53 percent in early 2026. Roles combining artificial intelligence and crypto engineering grew 180 percent year over year, covering agent infrastructure, machine learning for risk engines and onchain inference. Compliance and regulatory hiring expanded 2.4 times following the enforcement of the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation.

Real-world asset tokenization and stablecoin settlement drove the rest of the expansion. By mid-December 2025, real-world asset total value locked reached $16.6 billion, representing 14 percent of decentralized finance value, according to Pantera Capital⁵. Global stablecoin supply passed $240 billion, according to research by Dragonfly, Artemis and Castle Island Ventures. Public companies and governments held $148 billion in Bitcoin across 164 entities by late 2025.

“Hiring in crypto is all about trends, it can honestly change month to month,” Hamad said. “Who sets the trends? Sometimes its regulators, sometimes its institutions, sometimes its traders, as an industry we often go wherever the money flows and in so many ways were still in an POC and experimentation first, so not only do we not know who the highest bidders are, we dont even know how much their likely to bid. But with institutions showcasing a real appetite for stablecoin and tokenization, from an engineering standpoint there continues to be scope for engineers working on the cutting edge of stablecoin and rwa infra. But soon we will see crypto projects actually selling these solutions for real hard cash, thats when sales, marketing, gtm roles will really blow up!”

Seven Stages of Onchain Verification

Standard recruitment tools struggled to evaluate those specialized roles. Commercial applicant tracking systems, software platforms that manage job postings and interview scorecards, treated blockchain languages as simple text keywords.

"Compensation fluctuated so much that there was no source of truth," Hamad said. “I used ashby, lever, greenhouse, you name an ats ive used it, none of it was tailored to hiring in crypto. So we built ashby a bespoke ats designed and built by crypto recruiters for crypto projects.”

TechChain Talent offers its custom applicant tracking system free to startups. Employers pay fees only when they retain TechChain recruiters to run searches. At the center of the software sits Deciml, which processes 4,841 candidate scores a week across 14 technical stacks, including Solidity, Rust, Vyper, Move, Cairo, Go, Foundry, Hardhat, Anchor, OpenZeppelin, Viem, Wagmi, The Graph and Chainlink.

Hamad built Deciml's architecture across seven distinct stages to eliminate resume keyword stuffing and recruiter bias.

Stage one maps a candidate's background against a taxonomy of more than 800 standard skills and scores public GitHub code repositories alongside opt-in onchain wallet activity. Electric Capital's developer report counts 20,914 active open-source crypto developers working globally across 671,000 repositories and 88 million code commits. Established developers with at least two years of tenure grew 27 percent to 11,158 contributors and commit 70 percent of all blockchain code. Ethereum leads with 31,869 total active developers, Solana ranks second with 17,708 after growing 83 percent in 2025, and Bitcoin holds third with 11,036 contributors. Deciml verifies those code contributions directly from the repositories in under two minutes.

Stage two converts the candidate's technical history and the employer's job description into mathematical vectors. Vectorization measures semantic overlap across past projects and protocol architectures.

Stage three classifies the role family and checks hard eligibility gates. Filters verify geographic location, base salary bands, seniority and work authorization before scoring begins.

Stage four runs the profile through a large language model for matching and evaluation. Personal identifiers, names, contact details and social media handles stay stripped from the file, preventing demographic bias during algorithmic review.

Stage five executes mandatory requirement checks. Applicants missing a required skill receive an automatic score cap of 69 out of 100. Candidates scoring 50 or above meet the shortlist floor, and profiles scoring 70 or above route directly into the recruiting team's sourced column.

Stage six calculates a composite score from 0 to 100 across four weighted dimensions: skills overlap, onchain proof, ecosystem fit and compensation alignment. Every match displays up to three specific reasons for the score alongside documented strengths and skill gaps. Candidates who pass on a suggested role select a rejection reason, feeding a calibration label back into the scoring engine.

Stage seven puts every profile in front of a human recruiter.

“We have invested a lot of time perfecting our model, its accuracy continues to improve every day, it can be a little harsh at times, and intuition is still paramount in giving those diamonds in the rough candidates a real shot that often pays of,” Hamad said. “I have used juicebox, metaview, ashby, all of their AI. Ours in my opinion is far more accurate than all of those! This is because our AI is multilayered.”

Human Intuition Meets Algorithmic Speed

Automation serves human recruiters at TechChain Talent. Across the firm's eight-person core team, every candidate match receives manual verification. Co-founder Al-Mushadani brings 30 years of commercial leadership, working alongside senior recruiter Joseph Jarvis, growth manager Sophie Al Hindi, embedded talent partner Lukasz Czabocko, recruitment consultants Luke Leon and Patrick Grant, and specialist sourcer Sumit Gaigawali.

“Every candidates is reviewed by our team of recruiters, we can just do it a lot quicker now,” Hamad said. “The human element of recruitment is here to stay. Do you really want to be interviewed by some ai avatar. Fuck that. But we have generating over $500,000 in revenue as a result of surfacing candidates we would not otherwise have surfaced using deciml. The number of candidates who hold a deciml card to continues to rise but currently were fast approaching 3000 people.”

Each Deciml Card packages a candidate's verified record into five interactive layers: identity, skills, GitHub history, onchain proof and availability. Users toggle their status between three states: actively looking, open to selective offers or paused. Candidates control who sees their profile, and active job seekers can log a daily dashboard check-in streak to signal readiness to recruiters.

TechChain Talent reports that weekly matching runs across 42 live openings from employers including Circle, Squads, Etherealize, Ellipsis Labs, Hyperbolic and The Better Money Company. During an October 2026 weekly cycle, the company says Deciml matched 156 active candidates across 12 major hubs: 31 in New York, 23 in London, 20 in Dubai, 17 in Singapore, 14 in Bangalore, 10 each in Austin and Delhi, eight in Los Angeles, seven in Sofia, six in Buenos Aires, and five each in Lagos and Porto.