800,000 Applicants, 286 Hires: Inside Bending Spoons' Hiring Funnel

Bending Spoons received 800,000 job applications last year and hired 286 people — a process Fortune reports is roughly 100 times more selective than the average Ivy League admissions.

The Milan-based tech company, which owns Vimeo and AOL, buys struggling apps and has its engineers rebuild the technology to make the products profitable. It holds the assets rather than flipping them. In 2025 alone, it spent $3 billion acquiring companies including Eventbrite. Since launching in 2013, Bending Spoons has bought more than 50 companies, among them the video editing app Splice and the data organization platform Airtable.

That's the business. The hiring machine behind it is the more unusual story.

What do applicants sign up for?

Candidates get a warning before anything else. Bending Spoons sends every prospective hire a list of its "controversial" workplace principles and tells them to expect "considerable" work challenges. Anyone not ready to commit doesn't get the position.

The published principles are blunt:

• Employees give each other honest feedback.
• They accept changes the company makes without consulting them.
• They must embrace restructurings even when those changes disrupt their own plans.
• Under a commitment to "uncompromising excellence," the company parts ways with employees whose performance keeps falling short after feedback and support.

Despite the warnings, the applications keep coming — 800,000 of them last year. The draw, according to Nicolle Wasserman, the company's head of people operations, is the work itself: rebuilding acquired products alongside strong colleagues. "People want to work here because they know that they'll be taking on big challenges with talented colleagues every day," Wasserman told Fortune.

The model shows up in the numbers. Revenue per full-time employee climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 — more than doubling in two years, on a headcount of 600.

How does the funnel actually work?

The process runs on practical testing, not conversation. Of the 800,000 applicants, about 60,000 survive the resume review. Those candidates then take online assessments measuring how they handle unfamiliar problems and pick up new skills — exercises that can run as long as six hours, some of them completed under supervision.

Wasserman argues interviews reward confident self-promoters and disadvantage shy candidates and non-native English speakers. Practical tests, she said, are harder to game.

"It's easy for a candidate to overstate their skills or accomplishments in an interview, but it's hard to misrepresent them in a practical test," Wasserman said.

Only about 3,300 candidates clear the practical round and advance to recruiter interviews.

Where does AI fit in?

Bending Spoons built its own recruiting platform, Role Model, to process the applications. The software combines assessment scores with AI models trained on years of recruitment data — including how previous hires actually performed after joining. Once someone is hired, the company tracks their performance for up to two years and feeds the results back into its selection models.

"We've gotten more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success," Wasserman said.

The takeaway in plain terms: a 600-person company spending billions on acquisitions has turned hiring itself into a data product — and it's still tightening the filter.