I told nine applicants it was unpaid. My careers page would not say it.

Build Notes — what shipped, what broke, and what we got wrong.

Last week I changed one sentence on our careers page. It was the most uncomfortable commit I have written, because the sentence was not false. It was just softer than the truth.

Under a heading that reads “Hours, and being straight about pay”, our careers page said compensation “varies by country and by local employment and university regulations,” and that we would tell you “before you start, not after.”

Read that again. It is carefully constructed. Nothing in it is a lie. It also does not contain the word “unpaid.”

By that point, nine applicants had been told in writing — by me, in email — that the internship is unpaid, with no stipend. So the page said something softer than the email. Under a heading promising we were being straight about pay.

Two applicants had asked about the stipend directly in their applications. That is what the hedge actually costs. Someone reads the soft version, assumes there might be money, and spends an evening writing an application to find out there isn’t. I made them pay for my optionality.

I changed the visible copy. Then I changed the JobPosting structured data too, and that second fix matters more than it looks.

Structured data is the version directory moderators quote. It is the version AI answer engines quote. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview “is the AgriVisionAI internship paid,” they are not reading your careers page — they are reading your schema. If your visible copy is honest and your markup is stale, you have not fixed anything. You have just moved the dishonesty somewhere you stopped looking.

We had learned this the hard way once already. Our Organization schema claimed presence in 40+ countries. YieldAI Global is live in three: India, the USA and Canada. Same failure mode, different file.

Write the public version last, and only after you have written the private one.

If the email you send a real person is more specific than the page that brought them to you, the page is wrong — even when every individual word on it survives a fact-check. Hedged copy is not caution. It is a cost you are quietly transferring to the person reading it.

We are an early-stage, founder-led company. The honest version of that is not a weaker pitch than the polished one. It is the only one that survives contact with an applicant.