WhiteBIT’s CHRO on why Web3 companies are moving beyond traditional HR

The piece, posted on the WhiteBIT blog, draws on her direct experience running the people function at one of Europe’s largest crypto exchanges. Throughout the editorial, Hrachova argues that companies need to rethink how they view their employees.

Human Resource Management treats people as a unit allocated to tasks. 

Human Capital Management asks a different question: what knowledge, experience, and judgment has this person accumulated, and how does that translate into value for the organization? 

Fast-moving Web3 companies can’t afford to operate on the first model. 

“I work in a space where products launch faster, markets shift faster, and competition gets fiercer. That changes the demands not only on the business, but on everyone responsible for building teams,” she writes.

Why the traditional HR model falls short in Web3

Many Web3 companies are hiring for roles that barely existed a few years ago, leaving them with a limited pool of experienced candidates. New areas of development often appear before specialists have had time to build expertise in them. Teams scale before stable internal processes can form around them. Decisions regularly get made before complete information is available.

As a result, teams often take on responsibilities that would normally be spread across several functions.

“You often have to simultaneously act as a project manager, analyst, communications professional, change facilitator, and someone who helps the business scale through team development,” Hrachova notes.

What human capital actually consists of

Hrachova identifies several elements that make up human capital: domain knowledge and product expertise built over years, experience making decisions under uncertainty, team collaboration, the capacity to take on new roles quickly, initiative, and institutional memory. That last element gets particular attention. Crypto companies deal with high turnover and rapid growth, and the cost of losing a senior specialist goes well beyond filling a vacancy. 

“When a company loses a strong specialist, it loses much more than a person in a particular role. It loses context, expertise, connections, speed, and, in many cases, a valuable part of its institutional memory,” Hrachova writes.

These qualities are built gradually rather than through a single hiring decision or training program. They accumulate through the environment a company builds over time.

Team collaboration as the hardest thing to replicate

One of Hrachova’s key arguments challenges the idea that hiring top individual performers is enough. High-performing individuals don’t necessarily form a high-performing team. Teams of highly skilled specialists can underperform because of poor communication and blurred accountability, while groups without standout individuals work faster and more precisely when their internal trust is better developed. 

“I’ve seen situations many times where a team of very strong specialists failed to deliver expected results because of poor communication, blurred accountability, or a lack of trust,” Hrachova writes.

Collaboration is also one of the few competitive advantages that cannot be replicated quickly. Technology can be licensed. Processes can be documented and transferred. A group of people with years of shared decisions, product context, and built-up trust takes considerably longer to reproduce.

People and business interests aren’t competing priorities

HR professionals have long debated whether their primary responsibility is to employees or to the business itself. The editorial’s position is that framing the two as separate interests creates a false problem. According to Hrachova, the two objectives are closely connected rather than competing priorities. When someone gains new competencies and takes on more complex work, the company gains flexibility and capability alongside them.

That requires HR leaders to understand the product, business model, finances, and market trends well enough to plan future hiring needs instead of reacting only to immediate gaps.

The full piece is available on the WhiteBIT blog.