Engineer to recruiters: tell me how many National Merit scholars you can reach
MatthewChang · x · 2026-10-04
Responding to Guimarin's long-running argument on talent misallocation, engineer MatthewChang quips at recruiters: "If you call me offering candidates, tell me how many National Merit scholars you have immediate access to."
Guimarin's original post frames the core puzzle: 2,000 National Merit finalists per year out of roughly 2 million US high schoolers — the top 0.1% are already identified by a mostly fair standardized test — yet no one systematically follows up with that list. With LinkedIn and modern communications, he argues, finding these people should be trivial.
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