I am looking for a developer. For that I posted an ad that looks like this:
We are searching for a BlahBlah developer part-time in-house. You will
be responsible for:
......
Flexible schedule.
Please put sunshine at the top of your cover
letter, otherwise you'll be rejected...
If you conclude that the "trick" doesn't work as you had hoped, why would you bother repeating it? Note: There is likely something other than your trick that is keeping you from attracting the right candidate.
So presumably you also looked at the 47 applicants who didn't put 'sunshine' at the top of the cover letter. Were any of them better than the ones who did?
This is something that would completely turn me off as a candidate. I think you should be willing to treat every application as a serious one. It's not my problem. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get you to look at my resume. It's your company, you have a need, and you are hiring. There's clearly a giant pool of candidates who could easily apply to other companies. And believe me, they did. Nothing makes your company special. Why should candidates put forth that extra effort?
How would you react if a great candidate buried a similar magic word in his resume and told you he was no longer interested because your reply didn't include it?
You may well have filtered out the good developers who read this "trick" and decided they wouldn't even bother applying to anyone employing this method.
@Blrfl - Yes. I personally know a promoter who fell victim to this. But this company isn't Van Halen. It smacks of arrogance and delusions of grandeur.
@only_pro - Yeah, I've seen this video before. He's leaving a lot out. Damages to the dressing room exceeded $10,000 in 1980's dollars. FWIW: He had the floor prepared for the stage. This video is pretty revisionist, actually. Of course, I worked with the promoters, and didn't work this tour (was before my time).
Whatever it was, I think we're in agreement that using something like this as a canary is a good idea in some circumstances, but that this isn't one of them.
If you want to check for whether they read the instructions fully, consider moving that into a different phase of the hiring process. For example, have a question in your coding challenge go through this really complicated algorithm as a red herring and at the end, say it only needs to output the word "sunshine".
i would not apply to your ad. Unless you send me an email writing "abracadabra". Otherwise, no deal. While I am joking, interviews are a 2 way street. Your strange request is a good pointer for me that job would not be a good fit for me. I think you have to distinguish if you want to hire people desperate for a job, or experienced and employed people.
It could honestly get interpreted as something expected not to be done, because a good developer does not give in to silly requests and is expected to push against unreasonable things. So it might have been a double edge sword. Also having this requirement, I personally would search for any editorial mistake such as space before a comma or other aesthetical flaws and happily not reply for expecting of others what you cannot deliver - major red flag. But that's me. Also asking for thoughts seems like off-topic - broad and opinion based. Yet, I replied in a comment, so...
Interesting to see all the offended reactions. To my mind, what you're doing is similar to a captcha-- you're verifying that there's a human at the other end who's paying attention, rather than a robot or someone blindly sending out resumes with a scatter gun. That seems pretty reasonable to me, at least in principle.
There is a simpler way to do this sort of thing. Don't bother with the "sunshine" request. When you get the 50 applications, just throw 47 of them in the trash before you open them. After all, you don't want to hire anyone who is unlucky, do you?
Story: I once applied somewhere that said to put "attention to details" on my cover letter. I added those words non-contiguously throughout the cover letter in bold. Something like: Roses are attention, violets are to, something else details. I never got a response. I am guessing they didn't see it, because they were'nt paying attention to the details.
Discussion on question by Konstantin …
Discussion on question by Konstantin …