Flip Phone Startup Made 900 Internship Applicants Write Cover Letters by Hand

Dumb.co, a startup selling $20 flip phones for people trying to spend less time online, received nearly 900 applications for four internship openings — and then required every candidate to hand-write a cover letter.

The company posted the roles — marketing, business and operations, customer success, and technology — on the Handshake job board. As applications rolled in, Dumb.co kept encountering AI-written cover letters that felt overly polished and devoid of personality, according to Business Insider.

The letters weren't "connecting with our mission and our greater goal," Marlee Pelton-Fuentes, customer success manager and head of Dumb.co's internship program, told Business Insider.

She raised the issue with Dumb.co CEO Danny Hogenkamp and the rest of the team. A few days after posting the roles, they changed the application process: candidates would now have to submit cover letters written by hand. The goal was to separate genuine applicants from a mass of generic, AI-generated submissions.

The move fit the company's product. Dumb.co sells flip phones aimed at users who want to unplug, and it wanted interns who shared that ethos.

Candidates complied — on paper

About 70% of applicants submitted photos of handwritten letters explaining their interest in "dumb living," why they wanted to join the startup, and whether they already used a dumb phone, according to Business Insider.

The old-school requirement went further than scanned images. Between 200 and 300 candidates mailed in physical applications, including handwritten letters, according to Afreka Ebanks, Dumb.co's director of brand and communications.

The company reviewed the submissions, interviewed about 60 applicants, and ultimately selected 10 interns.

One of them, Ian-Karlo Krockel, joined Dumb.co in July as a marketing intern. The recent Boston University graduate had no success landing internships until he came across the Dumb.co application. He hand-wrote a letter about owning multiple flip phones, then scanned and submitted it.

An arms race nobody is winning

The handwritten requirement reflects a broader breakdown in entry-level hiring. Job-seekers, exhausted by the pressure to submit enough applications to warrant consideration, use AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT to generate or polish cover letters and resumes. Recruiters, struggling to manage the resulting flood, increasingly turn to automated tools to sort through applications.

Both sides have adopted the same shortcut. Recruiters say AI can produce polished, job-specific letters in seconds, making it difficult to discern a candidate's actual qualifications. The traditional cover letter has lost much of its value as a result.

Judd Kessler, a professor of business economics and public policy at Wharton, told Business Insider that the current job market is "basically AI selecting AI to elevate to humans for review."

"Anything that can break that equilibrium, that can inject more of real people showing their real selves to actually help employers find the right fit" is worth it, Kessler said.

Dumb.co's experiment suggests one way to break it. A $20 flip phone company asked for pen and paper, and roughly seven in ten applicants complied — with hundreds more putting stamps on envelopes. For employers drowning in identical AI prose, the friction itself became the filter.