This is an excellent idea, though obviously needs some tweaks: Perhaps you get a refund if you get past some simple metric like being able to do a FizzBuzz test

This is an excellent idea, though obviously needs some tweaks: Perhaps you get a refund if you get past some simple metric like being able to do a FizzBuzz test? Or get partial money back for each step in the hiring process you get through (30% for FizzBuzz, 30% for phone screen, 40% for being good in person). Either way, if you're trying to reduce the number of spam applications, this is certainly a great way of doing it, and it's much much simpler than building a massive database.