A humanoid robotics startup in Silicon Valley appears to have an acceptance rate lower than any Ivy League university.<\/p>\n
Figure AI<\/a> has been flooded with r\u00e9sum\u00e9s since its founding in 2022, according to the startup’s founder and CEO, Brett Adcock.<\/p>\n “Just checked, 176,000 job applications at Figure the last 3 years,” he wrote in an X post on Saturday. “We’ve hired ~425 people.”<\/p>\n That amounts to a hiring rate of about .24% within the three years. Adcock wrote that most of the submissions were “slop.”<\/p>\n The spread of the 176,000 applications over the three years is unclear. Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Even if the number of applications were divided equally among the years Figure AI was operating \u2014 just under 59,000 applications a year \u2014 the acceptance rate would still be lower than that of the hardest university to get into. Caltech had the lowest acceptance rate of 3%, according to US News & World Report’s rankings list.<\/p>\n Adcock wrote in the comments of his X post that the review process has been a slog.<\/p>\n “We go through these one by one like a monkey \u2014 it’s incredibly time consuming,” he wrote.<\/p>\n According to the CEO, the “ATS” or applicant tracking system<\/a> \u2014 a software employers use to sift through r\u00e9sum\u00e9s \u2014 can’t save a lot of time if a company is being barraged with hundreds of thousands of applications.<\/p>\n “In the ATS it takes at least 20 seconds of button clicks per submission even if it’s garbage,” he wrote.<\/p>\n Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n A company like Figure AI sits right in the intersection of two trends within the job market.<\/p>\n Today’s job candidates aren’t applying to just a handful of roles. Business Insider’s chief correspondent Aki Ito reported that the average job opening saw 242 applications, citing data from Greenhouse, a leading ATS platform.<\/p>\n “Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 into a black hole,” Ito wrote.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Figure AI operates in one of the hottest spaces of the tech industry, that is, robotics and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Top tech firms like Meta and OpenAI are in the midst of an AI talent war<\/a>, offering up to seven- to nine-figure pay packages<\/a> just to poach superstar AI researchers.<\/p>\n