With data crunchers in such high demand, do they really need to enter a Facebook Kaggle competition to score a job interview with the social networking giant? Apparently, some may think not. In looking at the data from Facebook's recruiting competitions, it appears interest is waning as the company launches its third recruiting competition using the data scientist community site Kaggle. Here's the hard numbers on all three competitions:

Facebook may also be aware of the declining interest among data scientists and software developers. It's current competition spans roughly four months, whereas its previous two only lasted about a month each. While extending the competition for an additional three months won't likely affect its per day average for entries, it should bulk up the total number of potential job candidates to 1,568 at the competition's close, based on the 14-entries per day average. That would amount to more entries than the last Kaggle recruiting competition Facebook had. Facebook's current competition asks data scientists and other data crunchers, along with software developers, to "identify keywords and tags from millions of text questions." Contestants must use a large dataset from Stack Exchange websites and predict the tags using only the title and question text. And after all that work, Facebook will review only the code of the top participants to determine whether to bring folks in for a job interview. No guarantee of employment. Maybe data scientists have already run some numbers to predict what percentage of Facebook recruiting participants have scored an interview following the Kaggle competition and, more importantly, how many have led to jobs at Facebook.