Bending Spoons Hired 286 of 800,000 Applicants in 2025

Bending Spoons received 800,000 job applications last year and hired 286 people, a selection rate roughly 100 times tougher than the Ivy League's. The Italian tech conglomerate, which owns Vimeo and AOL, is ranked No. 69 on Fortune's 2026 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Europe.

The company makes no effort to soften what candidates are signing up for. Every prospective hire receives a list of its "controversial" workplace principles, which advises them to prepare for "considerable" challenges, workloads, and expectations. Those who don't fully commit don't get the job.

Chief executive Luca Ferrari once described the company as "like private equity had a baby with Google." Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons buys underperforming apps, rebuilds their technology with its own engineers and, unlike a typical buyout firm, keeps them. It has acquired more than 50 businesses since its founding.

"People want to work here because they know that they'll be taking on big challenges with talented colleagues every day," says Nicolle Wasserman, head of people operations at the company.

How does the hiring funnel work?

The recruitment process is purposefully selective and leans on testing rather than conversation:

• About 60,000 applicants passed an initial CV screen.
• They moved on to online tests measuring how quickly candidates solve unfamiliar problems and learn new skills. The tasks can take up to six hours, and some are monitored.
• About 3,300 candidates reached interview stage.
• A central talent team, not a hiring manager, makes the final call, which the company says limits personal bias.

Wasserman argues traditional interviews penalize candidates who are shy or not native English speakers and reward those who oversell themselves. "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," she says.

To manage the volume, Bending Spoons built its own recruiting software, called Role Model. It draws on test results and AI models trained on years of hiring data, including how past recruits performed on the job. The company says the system lets each member of its talent team handle tens of thousands of applications a year. Each recruit's performance is tracked for up to two years and fed back into the selection models. "We've gotten more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success," Wasserman adds.

Even those who land a job remain at risk. Bending Spoons says it parts ways with employees performing "adequately" if stronger contributors are available, something it acknowledges is uncommon.

What do employees get instead of bonuses?

Revenue per full-time employee has more than doubled in two years, from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, according to the company's IPO filing. The company employs 600 people. Yet Bending Spoons does not pay performance bonuses, a standard perk at other tech firms.

It argues that pay tied to targets encourages short-term thinking without reliably improving results. Wasserman says bonuses make colleague relationships "more transactional and less honest." Instead, the company invests more heavily in salaries and reviews them annually.

Employees can purchase company stock directly through their salary at a discounted rate, a perk the company plans to keep now that it is listed. In 2025, 84% of eligible staff did so. The July Nasdaq IPO valued Bending Spoons at $18.4 billion and raised $1.68 billion, one of the largest by a European company this year. The company flew more than 500 employees from Italy to New York for opening day, breaking the exchange's attendance record.

Titles are equally absent. Internally, the company makes no distinction between junior and senior engineers, and managers are known simply as "leads." In most cases, no more than three layers of management sit between the CEO and a core team member. Externally, employees can describe themselves however they like on LinkedIn, "as long as it's reasonable," Wasserman says. She adds that the company spent so much time debating levels and fielding title requests that it concluded the exercise was "an enormous waste of time and energy."

The company's published principles put responsibility for wellbeing on the individual. An employee bothered by Slack messages at night is expected to turn off notifications rather than ask for a policy. Someone who feels drained should adjust their schedule or take time off under a flexible vacation policy that requires no approval. This "chimes with our culture of freedom and responsibility," Wasserman says.

Does the demanding culture drive people out?

Unwanted departures are low. Wasserman says 0.6% of the core team quit in 2025, and the rate so far this year has been even lower. Overall turnover was much higher, at 16.2%.

That gap reflects the business model. Bending Spoons cut headcount at AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo following those acquisitions. Once those businesses are restructured later this year, only a few hundred of the 1,830 full-time staff are expected to remain, according to its SEC filing.

A leaner workforce has benefits, Wasserman says: "A software engineer could spend a year rebuilding Evernote's architecture, then six months rethinking subscriptions on Vimeo, then join a platform team building the payments technology every one of our businesses runs on." Nearly all of the company's businesses and functions are led by people in their twenties or thirties, most with little or no prior work experience. "It's not unusual for someone still in their 20s to be leading a business doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue," Wasserman says.

The company itself flags the risk in its filing: maintaining this culture may become more difficult across a larger, more dispersed organization. With more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets identified, that test is coming fast.