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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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.

Sorry, it's just not that simple.

I see that you aren't finding this productive to continue. That's okay. Thanks for your responses anyway.

Answered up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10095199

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.

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.

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.

Look: this is easy.

We promise: your data is private. Nobody sees anything you do unless you want them to. It doesn't matter what employer incentives are; revealing a log of how you've engaged with this CTF would involve us breaking a promise to you.

Meanwhile: what we're doing as a business is opt-in. If you don't think we're trustworthy, there is absolutely no reason to work with us to help find jobs. Just goof around with the game and ignore the fact that we do other stuff. We are no company's job interview.

>>>Most of the best performers on this CTF aren't going to get placed by us.<<<

It's frustrating talking about this, because we've had our hands absolutely full just getting a CTF that's better than Microcorruption done. We haven't had a spare moment to think about how to make money from it.

Catch me sometime when I'm not debugging a weird interaction between my emulated SPI bus and my emulated UART. :)

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