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Information & Management xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Information & Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/im

Investigating the Demand for Blockchain Talents in the Recruitment Market: Evidence from Topic Modeling Analysis on Job Postings Chunmian GE, Haoyue SHI, Junhui JIANG *, Xiaoying XU School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, 381 Wushan Road, Guangzhou, P. R. China 510641

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Blockchain talent IT professional skill job posting topic modeling recruitment market

The demand for blockchain talents has surged in recent years, and there is a pressing need to understand what core skills and essential qualifications the blockchain talents demand and how employers value them in recruitment. This paper aims to reveal the crucial facts and patterns regarding the status quo of the recruitment market for blockchain-related jobs in China and clarify the heterogeneous nature of professionals demanded by blockchain-related jobs. We propose a data-driven approach by combining descriptive statistics, topic modeling, and regression analysis based on large-scale job posting data collected from a nationwide Chinese recruitment website. By this approach, we provide an overall picture of the landscape of the recruitment market for blockchain-related jobs and identify 11 skill sets that are most in-demand for blockchain-related jobs. On this basis, the skill sets of Blockchain Development and Cryptocurrency have emerged to be the most valued ones that affect salary levels: the talents mastering these two skill sets can obtain 21.4%, 10.4% higher average salaries, respectively, than those without these skills. The analyses also provide evidence that employers could attach importance to job candidates with T-shaped characteristics. Drawing on the findings, we also provide implications for blockchain practitioners.

1. INTRODUCTION The concept and prototype of blockchain can be traced back to 2008 and was first proposed by a mysterious user named Satoshi Nakamoto as the solution to double-spending in cryptocurrency [1]. After more than a decade of continuous development, the concepts and applications of blockchain have gone far beyond cryptocurrency and demonstrated great potential to reshape various industries [2]. However, the development of blockchain and its application continues to face many obstacles. In particular, the successful implementation and broad penetration of blockchain technology in various organizations and industries largely depend on the supply of talents with the necessary knowledge and skills, which works with the technology [3]. Seeking and having competent professionals in the field has become one of the most salient challenges faced by the adaptation and deployment of blockchain in industrial applications, and the demand for blockchain knowledge and skills has surged in recent years [4, 5]. According to a report by Zhaopin.com, a nationwide recruiting website in China [6], the country’s demand for blockchain talents surged by 636.83% from Q3 2017 to Q2 2018.

As an emergent general-purpose technology, blockchain is bound to bring substantial changes in talent demands and skill requirements [7]. The underlying technologies used to develop various blockchain applications may appear similar, while integrating and utilizing the applications can vary across different business domains, demanding talents with relevant knowledge, skills, and qualifications. Therefore, it is crucial to understand what qualifications and skills the talents should possess for blockchain-related business. For either start-up firms or existing enterprises intending to initiate or expand their blockchain-related business, a better understanding of this issue will facilitate their effective adoption and utilization of blockchain technology. By knowing the actual demand of the market, employees will also find it easier to cope with the accelerating pace of technological changes and secure their careers through learning the relevant knowledge and skills or obtaining the necessary qualifications. While there is a pressing need to understand what core skills and essential qualifications are necessary for blockchain talents and how employers value them when recruiting blockchain talents, little is known in the existing literature. As Zhao et al. [8] concluded by reviewing the research on blockchain adoption in business, most

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. GE), [email protected] (H. SHI), [email protected] (J. JIANG), [email protected] (X. XU). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2021.103513 Received 30 July 2020; Received in revised form 19 July 2021; Accepted 24 July 2021 Available online 28 July 2021 0378-7206/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Chunmian GE, Information & Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2021.103513

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existing studies focus on the conceptual level that conceptualizes blockchain innovations in business and in the prescriptive level that outlines business applications of blockchain, rather than the descriptive level that provides observational facts, empirical regularities, and explanations underlying blockchain phenomenon. They highlighted that “there is a need to ascertain the economic and social validity of blockchain applications”. In the literature concerning the demand for IT professionals’ skills, it has been long recognized that IT professionals must face ongoing changes in technology and business practices [9], and it is increasingly crucial for them to keep their skills up to date by knowing what skills are in demand [10]. Given the vital role played by professionals and skills in the implementation and adoption of blockchain technology as well as the lack of research concerning the issues in the literature, a primary goal of this research is to investigate the demand for blockchain skills and talents at the descriptive level. Specifically, this study aims to reveal some crucial facts and patterns around the status quo of the recruitment market for blockchain-related jobs and clarify the heterogeneous nature of professionals demanded by blockchain-related jobs. Notably, we propose a data-driven approach by combining descriptive statistics, topic modeling, and regression analysis based on large-scale job posting data collected from a nationwide Chinese recruitment website. First, a series of descriptive analyses are carried out to unveil the employers’ demand for blockchain-related jobs concerning temporal and geographical distribution, job categories, average salary, educational qualification, work experience, and popular majors. By doing so, we provide an overall picture of the landscape of the Chinese recruitment market for blockchain talents. Second, by applying LDA-based topic modeling techniques to analyze the job descriptions in job postings, we identify 11 essential skill sets required for blockchain-related jobs. Furthermore, we utilize regression analysis to investigate how employers, in terms of the salaries offered in their job postings for blockchain talents, value the skill sets and qualifications. Our results show that Blockchain Development and Cryptocurrency have emerged to be the most valued skill sets that affect salary levels. This study could enrich the literature on IT labor and jobs by enhancing our understanding of the blockchain-related recruitment market and talents. To the best of our knowledge, this study is among the first attempts to address the concerns raised by blockchain practitioners on the skills and qualifications required to facilitate the adaptation and deployment of blockchain in industrial applications. The findings could also contribute to blockchain literature by enhancing our understanding of the adoption and diffusion process of the technology from the perspective of talent recruitment. Moreover, this study contributes to the research on human resource management by demonstrating a novel approach to identify the core skills and qualifications demanded by jobs related to emerging technology. In addition, we also draw important implications for blockchain practitioners based on the findings of this study.

The few studies on blockchain adoption in a business environment, according to Zhao et al. [8], can be roughly divided into three levels, including conceptual, prescriptive, and descriptive levels [13]. Most existing studies by then were found to focus on the conceptual level that conceptualizes blockchain innovations in business and in the prescriptive level that outlines business applications of blockchain rather than the descriptive level that provides observational facts, empirical regularities, and explanations underlying blockchain phenomenon. The focus of more recent studies on blockchain technology in businesses remains to be on the conceptual level (e.g., [14]) and the prescriptive level (e.g., [15-18]), with only a few exceptions that look at the descriptive level (e.g., [19, 20]). As Li et al. [21] conclude in their scoping literature review on blockchain technology in business organizations, most of the research in this field are conceptual and focus on “how” blockchain technology works or “what” its potential applications are in the business context, while few studies are concerned about “whom” questions that address people affected by the blockchain technology and “why” questions which investigate the incentives for adopting the technology. This research focuses on the descriptive level and investigates “whom” involved in implementing and adopting blockchain technology in industries, i.e., the demand for blockchain talents and skills in the recruitment market. 2.2. Blockchain Technology and Demand for Professions The incredible power of blockchain technology will be achieved mainly through “its ability to support trustworthy transactions via networked computation in place of human monitor and control.” It may eventually result in millions of jobs phased out because of blockchainbased automation [8, 22]. However, before that happens, organizations must first create blockchain jobs and hire employees with the necessary skills and knowledge for working with the technology [3]. For all organizations, the conversion or change from raw materials into goods and services depends on employees’ effective use of necessary skills, knowledge, abilities, techniques, tools, and other equipment [23], and the organizations engaged in blockchain business are no exception. In other words, to harness the power of this new technology and even lead the way with blockchain-related business innovations, an organization must have talents who master the relevant qualifications and know-how to utilize blockchain technologies in an innovative way for a specific business. For instance, Khwaja Shaik, IBM’s Thought Leader, has stressed the utmost importance of blockchain skills and called the lack of blockchain skills “a top concern and significant inhibitor to blockchain adoption in companies across a variety of industries” [24]. With successful applications of blockchain technology in business by early adopters and increasing clarity of the roadmap for utilizing blockchain technologies in industries, more organizations will look to seize the opportunities and put forward their demands for blockchain talents and skills. Therefore, as a disruptive innovation, the adoption and utilization process of blockchain technology in industries will further spur the demand for professionals and skills in related fields. According to LinkedIn Learning, an educational portal of the world’s largest professional social network, blockchain emerged as one of the most in-demand hard skills in 2020, with growing demands from most businesses and very few supplies in the labor market [25]. While there have been reports from the industry, which indicate a great demand for blockchain talents and the supply is relatively insufficient [26], the current literature does not inform much about the details and patterns of such demand. In the field of IT labor research, the critical skills and knowledge necessary for IT professionals, in general, have received attention from the literature since the initial introduction of information technology into business. IT professionals must face ongoing changes in technology and business practices [9], and it is increasingly crucial to keep their skills up to date by clearly knowing what skills are in demand for the jobs [10]. In this strand of research, a

2. BACKGROUND 2.1. Research on Blockchain Adoption in Business Context While blockchain technology was born with Bitcoin, its applications have gone far beyond Bitcoin or digital currency and are believed to have the potential to revolutionize various industries, such as accounting, auditing, managing properties, and protecting copyrights [8]. For instance, faced with fierce competition, the financial services industry has always been keen to seek innovative solutions to reduce transaction costs and improve efficiency and security, and blockchain technology may provide some of the most feasible options: The technology has demonstrated significant advantages in clearance and settlement of financial assets, payment systems, smart contracts, and operational risks in the financial market [11, 12]. Despite its enormous impacts on many industries, research on the implementation and adoption of blockchain technology is still scarce. 2

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seminal work by Todd et al. [27] was to track the change of IS skills over time. This study examined the skill requirements for three specific IS job positions: programmers, systems analysts, and managers, over two decades as specified in job postings in four focal newspapers. Another seminal work on IS professionals’ critical skills and knowledge requirements was done by Lee et al. [28]. In particular, they investigated anticipated changes in the IS profession and the impact of the changes on the skills and knowledge required. Since then, with the penetration of information technology in various industries and the continuous emergence of new forms of technologies over decades, the division of the IT profession, together with the required skills and knowledge, has evolved and refined much further. In line with the change, researchers have begun to look at the subsectors of IT technology and explore the skills required for employees engaging in specific IT domains [29]. In their pilot work on new job positions and recruitment related to blockchain technologies, Luki´ c et al. [30] summed up some of the new jobs created and required by the applications of blockchain technology, such as Blockchain Developer, Blockchain Project Manager, Blockchain Designer, Blockchain Quality Engineer, Blockchain Legal Consultant, Blockchain Concept Developer, Blockchain Analyst, and Blockchain Research Scientist. However, the qualifications and skills that blockchain talents are expected to master are much more complex than a list of new job titles. In one of the few studies, which concerns the specific skills required for blockchain professionals, Bosu et al. [31] gave close attention to the group of software developers. They conducted an online survey among 1,604 active blockchain software (BCS) developers to analyze BCS versus non-BCS development. In their study, beyond those required for non-BCS development, the knowledge of secured programming, networking, cryptography, and math skills have emerged to be the unique skills benefiting the persons considering to be BCS developers. As Al-Jaroodi & Mohamed [4] pointed out, “to create fully integrated blockchain-based industrial applications, the design and development teams need to be knowledgeable in various areas” [4]. However, the actual demand for blockchain talents and skills can be far beyond the scope of software developers. As an overarching concept, blockchain relates to various technologies and applications which are still in rapid development and diffusion in various industries. Based on anecdotes or personal experience, industry experts have drawn up a long list of skills to become blockchain talents (e.g., [24]). However, there is still a lack of rigorous analysis and empirical evidence on the issues in academic literature to help us better understand the particulars of the demand for blockchain talents and skills.

blockchain-related job postings. With the recent development of labor market intelligence, researchers have realized the value of a topic model to analyze labor market requirements. Various LDA-based methods have been proposed to model job opportunities and the required skills. For example, given that the skills needed by big data-related careers were not clear, De Mauro et al. [35] mined nine groups of big-data skills that companies needed based on big-data-related job postings using LDA. Gurcan and Cagiltay [29] used LDA on big-data-related job postings to identify the knowledge domains and skill sets needed by big-data software engineers. Xu et al. [41] proposed a novel approach based on the topic model and analysis of job postings to model the popularity of job skills and further proved that employees with more popular skills could quickly get hired. Colace et al. [42] proposed a novel approach to classify Labor Market Intelligence based on the topic model. These existing studies have shown the potentials of the topic model in analyzing the labor market while scant attention has been paid to the emergent blockchain area. Moreover, from a methodological perspective, there is a lack of research that utilizes both topic modeling and econometric analyses to investigate the actual demand for blockchain skills and talents. Therefore, we introduce this novel approach, i.e., integrating econometric analyses with topic model outputs, to better identify blockchain skills emerging in job postings and examine the market demand for the skills. 3. METHODOLOGY To better understand 1) the status quo of the recruitment market for blockchain-related jobs; 2) what qualifications and skills the jobs demand; and 3) how an employer values these qualifications and skills when recruiting blockchain talents, we follow a data-driven approach by combining descriptive statistics, topic modeling, and regression analysis based on the blockchain-related job postings from a nationwide Chinese recruitment website. Specifically, the objectives of our methodology are to 1) reveal the crucial facts and regularities based on descriptive analysis; 2) identify the skill sets demanded by blockchain-related jobs by applying a topic modeling algorithm, LDA; and 3) further analyze the relations between skill sets, qualifications, and salary through regression analysis. The methodological procedure consists of three steps, i.e., data collection, data preprocessing, and data analysis, the details of which are given as follows. 3.1. Data Collection We develop a job posting crawler to collect all job posting data from a nationwide Chinese recruitment website since February 2017. The website was launched in 2011 and had more than 59 million registered users as individual members, and served more than 620,000 firms as employer members by 2020. Before posting up its job postings on the website regularly, a firm needs to register as an employer user formally. The website will conduct a series of checks for the firm’s qualification, including its business license, official seal, email, and physical address, to ensure that the firm and the recruitment are authentic. The website also provides a structured template containing essential recruitment information such as job titles, job descriptions, job requirements, work locations, and salary ranges for employer users to facilitate their drafting of a job posting. Such measures make the job postings of the website a relatively reliable and complete data source of the recruitment information for blockchain talents. Among over 30 million job postings for the period from Februar...