Aidan Murgatroyd
Some applications still clearly seemed to have been written by LLMs, but whoever copied and pasted just removed the “banana.” These felt really obviously not done by humans. Usually, it was some combination of running too long, overly paraphrasing our mission statement, making random statements about the applicant’s experience, or using words that a human wouldn’t use, like saying “delve” a million times. It would just have a very unnatural storyline.
I feel for people applying to a lot of jobs, but we’re a small team.
When you’re about seven people and they’re going to be part of your core team and the essence of the startup, it’s really important for them to at least read through the mission statement and the technologies we’re using and know what they’re getting into. We can’t interview thousands of people; we’re not Facebook or Google. So the fact this person had possibly not even read the job description made us not really want to interview them.
Another interesting outcome from our prompt injection is that a lot of people who noticed it liked it, and that made them excited about the company. Some engineers thought it was a clever little nugget, mentioned it, and said it got them excited about joining Intrinsic.
Many startup founders will get a lot of spammy applications, and this is a funny way to sift through them. Maybe this can help some of them with their own flood of applications.