In the heart of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of technological ambition and innovation, a young enterprise focused on building humanoid robots has achieved an almost mythical level of exclusivity in its hiring process—one that rivals, and arguably surpasses, even the most selective Ivy League universities. The startup, known as Figure AI, was founded in 2022 by entrepreneur Brett Adcock, who now serves as its chief executive officer. According to Adcock, the company has been inundated with an extraordinary number of applicants since its inception, an influx that vividly demonstrates both the allure of working in next-generation robotics and the desperation of today’s competitive job market.
Adcock recently shared striking statistics on the social platform X, revealing that over the past three years, Figure AI has received approximately 176,000 job applications. Out of this immense sea of résumés, merely around 425 individuals were ultimately chosen to join the company’s ranks. A simple calculation shows that this equates to a hiring rate of roughly 0.24 percent—an acceptance fraction lower than that of any top-tier academic institution. For contextual comparison, California Institute of Technology, renowned for its near-impossible admissions standards, posts an acceptance rate near 3 percent. Even spreading those 176,000 applications evenly across the three consecutive years since the company’s founding, which would yield close to 59,000 submissions annually, Figure AI’s selectiveness remains orders of magnitude more rigorous.
The founder’s surprising disclosure did not stop at the numbers. In his post, Adcock offered a candid and somewhat exasperated reflection on the realities of sifting through such a mountain of submissions. He noted that most applications were, in his words, mere “slop,” an informal remark that underscores his perception that a majority of candidates fail to meet even baseline standards for consideration. When pressed for comment, Adcock did not immediately respond, leaving observers to wonder how the overwhelming volume of résumés is managed internally or distributed across years.
Within the comment thread accompanying his post, Adcock further elaborated on the exhausting process of evaluation. He likened the act of reviewing applications to the monotonous effort of a “monkey” repeating the same task endlessly—an analogy that conveys both the tedium and futility of manual screening at this scale. Even with the aid of an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS—a specialized form of software designed to filter, categorize, and manage candidate data—the time required remains substantial. Adcock lamented that despite automation, each résumé still demands at least twenty seconds of interaction just to determine whether it has any value, a figure that becomes monumental when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of submissions.
The situation at Figure AI exemplifies a broader phenomenon currently reshaping the employment landscape. In today’s digital hiring environment, candidates rarely apply for a handful of roles; instead, many saturate the market with dozens or even hundreds of applications, creating an avalanche of digital paperwork for employers. As Business Insider’s chief correspondent Aki Ito has reported, the typical job opening today receives roughly 242 applications, based on data supplied by Greenhouse, a major platform that develops ATS software. Ito captured the growing sense of futility shared by many job seekers with a vivid metaphor, describing the experience of applying for work in 2025 as comparable to “hurling your résumé into a black hole.” For companies like Figure AI, this dynamic translates into an unsustainable administrative burden, compounded by the impossibility of granting each candidate meaningful consideration.
At the same time, Figure AI’s domain—robotics infused with artificial intelligence—represents one of the most dynamic and sought-after sectors in modern technology. The current “AI talent war” has driven salaries and incentive packages to unprecedented heights. Industry behemoths such as Meta and OpenAI have been offering seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure compensation packages to lure top researchers, engineers, and machine-learning scientists. Startups, including those aspiring to emulate Figure AI’s momentum, are competing fiercely as well, often countering massive corporate budgets with equity-based rewards, leadership opportunities, and the promise of creative freedom rarely found in large bureaucratic organizations.
Within this heated ecosystem, Figure AI has managed not only to stand out but to establish itself as a prominent player in humanoid robotics. Recently, the company completed an impressive Series C funding round that brought in over $1 billion in capital. This round attracted investments from high-profile backers such as Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, and the semiconductor titan Nvidia, leading to a company valuation approaching an extraordinary $39 billion. Such figures signal immense investor confidence in both the company’s technological vision and its potential to transform entire industries through advanced robotic systems.
Yet amid the soaring valuations and the escalating race to recruit the best minds, Figure AI faces a rather mundane but deeply consequential challenge: managing the relentless deluge of job applications. In a follow-up note on X, Adcock mused about the necessity of developing a more efficient model—possibly powered by AI itself—to handle candidate screening. “Need a model to do this for us better, maybe I’ll work on one,” he wrote, suggesting that the very technology the company specializes in could eventually streamline the human resource bottlenecks it currently endures.
Collectively, these revelations about Figure AI’s hiring difficulty epitomize a paradox of the modern tech world: while talent is more theoretically connectable than ever before, finding the right individuals remains extraordinarily difficult. The combination of overwhelming applicant volume, escalating expectations, and the scarcity of truly qualified professionals ensures that, for companies like Figure AI, exclusivity will continue to define success—not merely as a choice, but as a strategic necessity in the pursuit of technological excellence.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/figure-ai-robotics-startup-tech-job-market-competition-170k-resumes-2025-12
