Application
We were hiring eight interns and didn't want to do it off CVs, so we asked three questions with no right answers instead:
Q1 - What's your favorite color?
A decoy. Trivial enough that people answered it themselves instead of reaching for an AI, and obvious when they didn't. That one question alone dropped AI-generated answers by ~80%.
Q2 - Explain it to someone blind since birth.
This tested imagination and depth. Anyone can name a color, but turning something purely visual into a feeling someone could understand without ever having seen it is a different skill. We wanted to see who could make the invisible feel real.
Q3 - When there's no more bad work, does good work even mean anything?
No right answer existed, which was the point. There was nothing to look up and nothing to optimise for. We wanted to see who could sit with a question that doesn't resolve and still say something honest.
PKR 80,000 a month, for work that actually ships, no GPA required. About 2,268 people applied in two weeks.
Results
We were left with a fairly interesting spreadsheet. Here's the pile by the numbers:
Total Applications
2,268
The full talent pool that came through the funnel.
Applicants by Gender
Male vs Female · share of the applicant pool
Male leads 53% to 47% — a fairly balanced applicant pool.
Applicants by University
Top 12 universities shown, the rest grouped as “Other / not specified”
Self-reported university from the application form. FAST, IBA and IoBM alone account for ~55% of all applicants.
Applicants by Field of Study
Degree field as stated on the CV · share of all 2,268 applicants
Computer Science / IT is the single largest field at ~31%, followed by Business and Accounting & Finance. A further 759 applicants (33%) didn’t state a field and are excluded from the bars above.
Applicants by Favorite Color
Self-reported favorite color · top 9 shown, the rest grouped as “Others” · 2,268 applicants
Black (23%) and Blue (16%) are the clear favorites, well ahead of every other color.
The Chosen Ones
The 8 hired interns, and the colors they live by
2,268 applications, ~80 interviews, 8 hires. The questions did the filtering. After that we picked on one thing: who'd be the most fun to work with. That was the whole KPI. These are the most fun people we could find.
Final 8
Meet the eight. They made the video above, and they make the work now.
Kamil Raza works across code, product, and problem-solving at AlphaVenture. He writes when something's worth explaining.
Connect on LinkedIn
