[kasey_junk]

Remember their incentives. They want you to perform well (or more precisely they want performing well in their game to correlate with you being a good employee).

It is not in their best interests to count against you, quite the contrary they want to sell you to their clients.

[pekk]

What is a better way to sell a candidate to clients than to say she is in the top 1%? They have every reason to count out as many people out as possible. Nobody looking at this kind of service wants to hire candidates who are not the best.

[kasey_junk]

Because the population of devs who don't play at all is gigantic. So they can make the argument that "this person played and got through 65% which has x correlation with being a good employee" and that still puts that person in the elite status.

Just knowing what stockfighter is puts them into some extremely small percentage of devs, which in the current market is a drop in the bucket for demand.

[tptacek]

That's not how our business model works. We're not going to make extra money based on where people rank.

[pekk]

I understand that, but if you want to sell any kind of screen you have to represent that the screen discriminates "better" candidates from "worse" ones. The people who are willing to pay for this screening want the top 1% or 10% or whatever (even if the way it goes down is that they request data dumps and then make up the scoring function themselves). That is how the whole industry works, it's not your fault and you almost certainly can't do anything about it.

Edit: even if you present yourself as a recruiter, it doesn't make any real difference. The value you are adding and charging for is that you are handling part of the recruitment process so that your clients don't have to. Nobody wants a recruiter who doesn't hand them the best candidates.

[tptacek]

We're not selling a screen. We're not a job interview. We're just smarter recruiters.

[pekk]

Pardon me. You're selling recruitment services, which happen to involve preliminary screening through Stockfighter. I am venturing the very risky speculation that these recruitment services would have no value to your clients if they were not somehow selective. If all you want is to sift through a million resumes, that has been cheaply available for years.

[tptacek]

Sorry, it's just not that simple.

[nialo]

I think the key point is that they don't want the top 10% or 1% or .1%, they want as many people as possible above some particular skill level. The client is just as happy if that happens to be 50% of players or whatever.

They don't want "the best" candidates, they just want competent ones.

[tptacek]

Yes, that's closer to the idea.

In particular: clients cannot pay us for a list of people who have exceeded some threshold in SF.

[pekk]

Clients would be irrational to pay for a recruiting service which removed 0 bits of uncertainty as to the quality of presented candidates (by the client's definition of quality). It's safe to generalize that recruiting services which survive reduce uncertainty or at least give a strong impression that they do, i.e., they discriminate among candidates in some way (I don't mean discrimination in the legal or pejorative sense).

This isn't an accusation of wrongdoing, just a simple observation about reality. The incentive for a recruiter using a game like this really isn't for every candidate (err, I mean, player) to be seen as equally recommendable. Even if you were so suicidally idealistic that you saw it that way, clients wouldn't. But you aren't stupid, you know that.

quote66555 is right to think that there is an incentive for extensively recorded details to be used as a signal of his individual "quality" as a candidate. And if he is not in the top n% (where n < 100) then at best he will not be recommended. So it is possible that his little delays or minor fuckups will count against him, assuming he cares about being recommended. It's a reasonable thing for him to think. He isn't scare-mongering.