Seven in ten Dumb.co intern applicants wrote their cover letters by hand

The board-deck version of this result is a retention rate. Dumb.co added a step that costs applicants real effort, and about 630 of its Handshake applicants cleared it ^[8]. On that reading, the company gave up roughly three in ten candidates ^[25] and got letters that sounded like people in return ^[11].

That version is incomplete because of timing. The handwriting rule went in a few days after the listings went live ^[3], so some of the nearly 900 applicants ^[4] applied before it existed. The company did not say how many. The three in ten without a handwritten upload are a mix of people who saw the rule and left and people who never saw it. On this evidence, nobody can say how far the friction shrank the pool. If the mailed applications Ebanks described ^[6] came on top of the Handshake count, as the company's wording suggests, staff had roughly 830 to 930 handwritten letters to read ^[9].

The benefit Dumb.co reports shows up in the reading. Marlee Pelton-Fuentes, who oversees the internship program, said the letters that came in first weren't "connecting with our mission and our greater goal" ^[2]. Afterward, "I was reading through more aligned applicants," she said ^[17]. She gave the prompts credit. They asked why applicants cared about "dumb living" and whether they owned a "dumb" phone ^[5], and she said they made the letters read like personal reflections ^[11]. A handwritten letter proves a person held the pen, though not who drafted the words. By Pelton-Fuentes's account, the prompts produced at least part of the improvement ^[11].

Both sides paid for it. Ian-Karlo Krockel, hired as a marketing intern in July ^[19], said his letter took about an hour to write and scan ^[14]. Pelton-Fuentes said reading hundreds of handwritten letters took longer than skimming typed submissions ^[16]. Hiring teams took up AI screening precisely to get through applications faster ^[22]. "It's basically AI selecting AI to elevate to humans for review," said Judd Kessler, a professor of business economics and public policy at Wharton ^[12]. "Anything that can break that equilibrium, that can inject more of real people showing their real selves to actually help employers find the right fit" is worth trying, he said ^[13].

I think the result travels less well than the retention figure suggests. An employer with no stake in being offline would be asking for an hour of handwriting that has nothing to do with the job, and I'd expect that to select for spare time as much as for fit. At Dumb.co the friction matched the product. The company sells modified flip phones ^[1], and a week before applying, Krockel had told friends on Instagram that he was switching to one ^[18].

This quarter's decision is whether to add the step. Next quarter, the bill arrives as reviewer hours. Dumb.co ran six interviews per hire ^[10] after reviewing each letter individually, and Pelton-Fuentes said she remembered what every interviewee had written ^[21]. Krockel said Hogenkamp, the chief executive, held his letter and referred to it in his second-round interview ^[20].