AI Startup LemonLime Faces Backlash for Tattoo-for-Interview Hiring Stunt

Everyone knows that great gimmicks are the key to hiring top developers for your startup.

That’s why small AI startup LemonLime—which “optimizes your existing data to work with AI”—has so many of them. Want a job interview? Score a perfect 7/7 on the company’s own “Is it a Lemon or a Lime?” game. Or—hear me out—get something permanently tattooed on your flesh.

LemonLime has tried both tactics in the past few weeks. The tattoo stunt generated the most publicity, of course, much of it negative. According to a writeup in Inc., seven people took the deal and got tattooed with the LemonLime logo during a party.

Backlash was immediate, and CEO Jordan Zietz has now copped to “poor judgement,” saying he “messed up” and got a little “carried away.”

7 days a week

LemonLime is a small company with a grindset mentality. If you think you’re going to work there and, say, “have free weekends,” you are fooling yourself. The “entire team shows up to the office 7 days a week,” Zietz wrote in a LinkedIn post two weeks ago.

“Over a dozen applicants thus far have withdrawn after stating that they do not work past 5 pm or on weekends,” he added. “Lol.”

What you will be doing instead is pushing “critical product features to production while watching Pitch Perfect Sing-Along Edition at 1 a.m. on a Saturday.”

The company does not care about your grades; Zietz notes that his “freshman year GPA was a 2.3.” But LemonLime does require that you be a good hang. Zietz said that the company hires “people we want to be friends with,” since “changing the world is easier with friends. It should be fun.”

Zietz concluded his post by promising an “instant interview” to anyone who dropped their email address into the comments and who also scored perfectly on the lemon-or-lime game. (I tried it and scored 0/7, suggesting that I am completely unsuitable for shipping code at 1 am on a Saturday while watching Pitch Perfect Sing-Along Edition. This is true.)

Zietz soon moved on to tattoos. LemonLime hosted a San Francisco afterparty on July 25 following Y Combinator’s Startup School event. Named the “Calling All Crazy Builders Afterparty,” the event targeted the “most unhinged builders looking to change the world.”

At the party, Zietz brought in a tattoo artist and promised instant job interviews to anyone willing to get inked. The goal was to find “unhinged” people willing to take risks. Seven people got a tattoo of the LemonLime corporate logo. (Zietz says that the logo was not required; other people chose different images.)

The predictable social media explosion eventually reached traditional news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal. Zietz apologized for the tattoo stunt on July 30, writing:

We offered free tattoos and said we’d be happy to interview anyone who got one. What I thought would be a fun, memorable way to meet people was, in reality, reckless, and instead came across as tying a permanent tattoo to job opportunity, which showed poor judgement.

Even though participants chose their own tattoos and no one was asked to get our logo, I should have understood the pressure and power dynamic created by connecting tattoos to hiring.

Regardless of said intent, turning a celebration of personalized art into a company stunt was poorly exercised judgement.

He added that the company will “cover associated removal costs with anyone facing any delayed regret” about their tattoos—though that regret might be even stronger after Zietz said that “interviews were available to everyone regardless.”