This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Karine Mellata, cofounder of startup Intrinsic. It has been edited for length and clarity.
A couple of months ago, my cofounder Michael and I realized that while we were getting some very high-quality candidates, we were also receiving a lot of spammy applications.
We caught one application that started with “Banana” for a software engineering position. I don’t want to say it was the most effective mitigation ever, but it was funny to see one hit there.
The one free-response question in our job applications is, “In a few words, let us know why you’d love to work at Intrinsic.” A candidate’s answer honestly could just be one line; we’ve interviewed people who’ve only put one line. Some people will say they really like the tech stack or our mission, and to us that’s enough. You don’t need to write an essay. But automating it makes the application feel less thoughtful or legitimate.
We didn’t think we were going to catch anyone because it’s easy to add a line to your own prompt that says that if there’s any sort of prompt injection of words, then don’t comply.
Or, if people were doing the manual copying and pasting, I thought they were going to catch the banana and remove it, and I think most people actually did.
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.
