This Company Wants to Give You $1,000, But There's A Small Catch

So you want $1,000 cash with no strings attached? Alright then. Head on over to Rap Genius and apply for a job and if you’re brought in for an interview, pass the technical interview, and are extended a job offer, you will also receive $1,000 no strings attached (regardless of whether you take the job or not). The award is being called the “Rap Genius Genius Grant” in case you were wondering.

Now, according to a post on Rap Genius, they only want to work with brilliant people and seem to take great pride in just how difficult their technical exam is to do well on. In the post, they write, “It’s impossible to get through the Rap Genius technical interview without being brilliant.” Okay then. I guess you can’t fault a company for wanting to work with only the best.

Clearly this is a great way to generate press for the growing company that has come quite a long way and also recently raised $15 million from well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. But on the other hand, could it cause some commotion in the hiring of software developers/engineers? I personally don’t think so. It’s not like they’re giving away some crazy amount (like $5,000, $10,000, or more). The $1,000 award, to me, seems like more of a way to get the press to bite and do some free advertising for them (and it’s working, I’m writing about it) to get on the radar of more brilliant developers.

Besides the industry is already full of perks and good pay, it’s not like the extra $1,000 is going to mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, they’re currently looking for people to fill the following positions:

Experienced full-stack Rails engineers
Front-end developers with an eye for design
iOS devs to build our iPhone app from the ground up

So what do you think? Are you going to apply and give it a shot?