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Goldstein: —Tone: —
Jordan Zietz wants to be clear: He has never, and will never, force anyone to tattoo his startup’s logo on their body.
The 24-year-old briefly became the internet’s most hated person after LemonLime, his AI-for-small-business startup, hosted a party following Y Combinator's Startup School in late July. In a LinkedIn post, Zietz wrote that he brought an “actual tattoo artist” to the party, and “offered an instant interview to anyone who got a LemonLime tattoo.” Seven people, Zietz wrote, left with ink.
The backlash was quick. Zietz’s LinkedIn posts were flooded with angry comments calling him “disgusting” and “very unfair,” the perpetrator of a “textbook display of predatory corporate behavior, a gross abuse of power, and a profound violation of professional ethics.” A screenshot of his post went viral on X. One representative response read: “The job market cannot be this cooked that kids have to get permanent tattoos to get interviews.”
In an interview with WIRED on Tuesday, Zietz attempted to set the record straight.
He says that, despite what his original post suggested, no one permanently branded themselves with LemonLime’s corporate logo at the party. While there were pre-designed tattoos of lemons and limes, attendees could pick any design. (At least one said she got a personal tattoo; she added that she was “not seeking a job.”) According to Zietz, he told everyone at the party that getting a tattoo—citrus-themed or otherwise—was not a job requirement. In fact, he says, any attendee who wanted an interview got one.
“A decent amount of people who got tattoos never wanted to even take us up on any offer to chat” about a job, Zietz says. “They just wanted to get a tattoo for free.”
Three of LemonLime’s five employees received LemonLime-themed flash tattoos, including Zietz and his cofounder, Daniela Muñoz. So did at least one person who didn’t work for the startup, according to Zietz.
On Monday, Zietz got his second tattoo in less than month: the actual LemonLime logo, on his other shoulder. It is one of many. He got his first ever tattoo on a first date, and his thigh tattoos include a dinosaur doodle and text that says “This Is The Correct Knee,” with an X underneath.
“I would never ask anyone to do something I would not do myself,” Zietz says, while emphasizing, again, that he is the only person, to his knowledge, with the actual logo tattooed on his body. He plans to release a glossy video of himself getting the tattoo on social media.
Though Zietz insists the tattoos weren’t a prerequisite for employment at his startup, you’d be forgiven for assuming that was the case, and the language of his LinkedIn post certainly made people think it was. After reading various angry comments and posts, he says he understands why people were uncomfortable with the power dynamic.
Still, part of the reason Zietz hired the tattoo artist was to identify candidates who would be a good cultural fit for LemonLime. Zietz says his original post was “half-and-half” earnest, serving as something of a test for cultural alignment. He didn’t want people to feel obligated to get tattoos. But he did want people to see the tattoo station and think that what LemonLime was doing was “out there.” Then he wanted them to make a judgement call: Did they love it or did they hate it?
If party-goers were turned off by the tattoo station, they probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the startup, he reasons. Sure!
Zietz is trying to hire people who appreciate what he calls his “eccentric” approach to life. When he was a student at Stanford, Zietz was suspended from his role as the university’s mascot, the Tree, after unfurling a banner that said “Stanford Hates Fun” during a football game. Prior to LemonLime, Zietz cofounded a social-media platform called Confetti, and part of the hiring process, Zietz wrote last year on LinkedIn, involved an interview while sky diving.
“I get hundreds of applications for roles at LemonLime every single day, 80 to 90 percent of which are dead serious: Here's my resume, I am the most professional candidate you will ever meet,” Zietz says. “And I think that it’s very clear to me that this person should not be at LemonLime.”
“There is nothing about this team that is more important to me than the culture,” he says. “The most important thing for us has always been—and will always be—are you someone that we want to be around for 18 hours a day, seven days a week?”
“There is something to be said about the genuineness of that grindset,” he adds.
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Goldstein: —Tone: —
When Tim Millard received an email about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d speak to a human. When he was instead instructed to record himself answering a series of questions on camera, he felt a familiar pang of resignation—one that had followed him throughout the job hunt.
“I figured, I have to do this if I want to be considered for the job,” Millard tells WIRED. So, that evening, the Atlanta-based communications and marketing expert tidied his living room and set up his laptop. The email had left the timing for the interview open-ended, and he figured he might as well get it done as soon as possible. “What else was I going to do at 9:30 at night?”
The questions were pretty standard for the role. How would Millard pitch a story to the media? How would he cultivate relationships with local journalists? But the setup was bizarre. He sat in front of his laptop, watching as a question popped up on the screen. He had roughly half a minute to think about his response.
“Once the 30 seconds was up, ‘ding!’ Now you have two minutes to record your answer,” Millard said. “It felt so out of this world.”
Millard received an automated rejection email in March. But the experience unknowingly wedged him into a trend currently reshaping the modern job search. As automated video interviews and AI become a bigger part of the recruitment process, so do late-night interviews.
Arsham Ghahramani said that he noticed the late-night interview trend almost immediately after he cofounded and launched Ribbon, a company that makes voice-AI recruitment software. Twenty-four percent of Ribbon’s AI interviews take place between 10 pm and 2 am local time, according to data from the more than 500 companies that use the service. For his manufacturing clients, that figure jumps to 35 percent.
“This is a genuinely new option for people,” Ghahramani says. Many parents can’t sacrifice 30 minutes until the clock strikes 10 pm. Same for employees paid hourly, or those who are tied up working their current jobs on a noisy factory floor or kitchen. “Some people are very constrained in their options of when they can interview and how they can interview.”
Ribbon isn’t the only platform charting the rise in late-night interviews. Hiring platform Greenhouse says that roughly 15 to 20 percent of candidates interviewed by its voice agent now schedule an interview at night.
Ophir Samson, who became head of Greenhouse’s voice AI division when the company acquired his startup in May, tells WIRED that he doesn’t think artificial intelligence should replace human interviews. Which is good, because applicants are currently extremely skeptical of AI interviews.
While a Greenhouse survey in May found that nearly two-thirds of job applicants have been interviewed by an AI agent, up 13 points over six months, most people aren’t particularly excited about this development. Thirty-eight percent of American candidates told Greenhouse that they had withdrawn from a hiring process rather than be interviewed by an AI. Another 12 percent said they’d drop out if an AI interview was required.
One of the major stressors for applicants is the lack of transparency on how the footage will be used. Can AI reject them outright because they fail to say a certain buzzword?
While different employers and services vary, the typical AI or automated video interview is evaluated using a rubric that varies from job to job. A welder might be asked about certain technical skills or certifications in a Ribbon interview, Ghahramani says, while a sales role might include an “enthusiasm” score. AI analyzes footage of the interview to evaluate how well the candidate fits the rubric, and assigns them a score. The score is passed along to the recruiter, along with footage of the interview—though, realistically, many of the interviews go unwatched by humans.
Samson describes Greenhouse’s approach to the AI interview as a sort of résumé add-on, a tool that can identify high-scoring candidates who would have otherwise been lost in the deluge of applications. He doesn’t see the AI interview as a choice between human and robot, but a choice between being ghosted and improving the chance of actually speaking to a human interviewer in the next round.
“It’s a shitty time to be a candidate,” Samson says. “Your résumé goes into a black hole. You’re competing with thousands of candidates that are all using AI to write their résumés. So, good candidates can’t stand out.”
That assessment seems to be in line with Millard’s experience. A year after losing his job, he’s still searching. The process has been so emotionally devastating that it inspired Millard to write a one-man show, After Careful Consideration, which debuted at the Atlanta Fringe Festival in May.
When Millard signed on for his late-night interview in January, he wasn’t marveling at the convenience. He just wanted to get “this godawful thing done.”
“In today's job market,” Millard says, “it feels like if you are going to scream, you're going to scream into the void. And nobody is going to hear you.”
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