Getting into an Ivy League school might be tough, but getting an internship at Gecko Robotics is a lot harder. 

A Pittsburgh-based company with a workforce of 300, the organization uses robots and sensors to assess the health of critical infrastructure. It received more than 40,000 applications for 32 internship roles in 2024. That’s a hire rate of 0.08%, or one person for every 1,254 applicants. By comparison, Harvard’s acceptance rate for the class of 2026 was 3.19%, and Goldman Sachs’s internship hiring rate was 0.9% last year, Business Insider reports.

Cofounder and CEO Jake Loosararian attributes the internship’s competitiveness to the opportunity for hands-on experience. “It’s not for everyone, but what we offer is a dose of reality around how the real world works,” he tells Fortune. “People aren’t stuck sitting behind their desks, so as a young kid you get to go out and get your boots dirty.”

The company says a human is involved in sorting through all 40,000 applications, and each one is read by hiring staff. They pay extra attention to candidate responses to open-ended questions about their interest in working for Gecko. Loosararian says hiring managers are on the lookout for some core qualities: being excited to work in person and “get their boots dirty,” and then also whether they’re passionate about the kind of work the company does.

Loosararian also prefers candidates who fall outside of traditional norms, and those who have “experience going through hard things.” He says he frequently asks questions during interviews about the most difficult career experiences applicants have faced, a product they created, or plan they implemented, and how it turned out. He doesn’t care if the project was a success in the end, and instead looks for the candidate to show accountability for their actions and the ability to learn from previous mistakes.

“Obviously I want people who are competent but also those who are able to take really high ownership of what they’re trying to accomplish,” says Loosararian. “Building robots isn’t perfect, especially when you’re not building them for a lab, so I want people who are comfortable with being uncomfortable because that’s how innovation happens.”

He’s also very open to candidates using whatever technology they want to help with the application process. For people applying to engineering internships, he insists they use AI agents during coding tests to better mimic work realities. 

As for educational backgrounds, Loosararian says he doesn’t really care if the applicant has a degree, but he does want to know the thought process behind choosing to get one or not.

“We have a lot of employees that don’t have college degrees who are geniuses in their fields,” he says. “I care about the decision you made, to either go to college or not go to college and why. That’s what I test for.”

Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com

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Watercooler

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