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?

Do you have them remove the brown M&M's too (ala Van Halen)? Seriously, this is jouvenile.

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.

@WesleyLong The brown M&Ms in Van Halen's rider served an important purpose: youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA

@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.

Just curious, what locale is this? Expecting a cover letter at all for a developer role sounds strange to me, especially for part time.

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.

Your stated goal is to filter out applicants. It worked 94%. That's pretty unbeatable, definitely keep doing that!

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...

This Little Trick Will Be very effective in avoiding any onboarding work ,)

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.

You can generally tell how a professional a company is by its recruitment process.

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?

What are you trying to achieve with that line?

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.

Welp...you got detail oriented developers alright. Just maybe not good developers.

How to get downvotes with one simple trick!