Bending Spoons’ recruitment process has attracted 800,000 applications for just 286 jobs, as the Italian technology group warns prospective employees that they should expect demanding workloads, high expectations and “considerable” challenges.
The company, which owns Vimeo and AOL, sends candidates a list of its workplace principles before they apply. Those unwilling to commit fully to its approach do not get the job.
Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons buys underperforming apps, overhauls their technology with its own engineers and keeps the businesses. It has acquired more than 50 companies, with chief executive Luca Ferrari previously describing the group as “like private equity had a baby with Google”.
The scale of interest has made the company’s hiring process about 100 times more selective than the Ivy League, according to Bending Spoons. It employs around 600 people and ranked 69th in Fortune’s 2026 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Europe.
Of last year’s applicants, about 60,000 passed the initial CV screening. They were then given online tests intended to assess how quickly they could solve unfamiliar problems and learn new skills, with some tasks taking up to six hours and being monitored.
Nicolle Wasserman, Bending Spoons’ head of people operations, said practical tests were intended to reduce the influence of presentation skills and language fluency in the hiring process.
“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 said.
Roughly 3,300 candidates reached the interview stage. The final decision is made by a central talent team rather than an individual hiring manager, a system the company says is designed to limit personal bias.
Bending Spoons has built its own recruitment software, called Role Model, which uses test results and AI models trained on historical hiring data, including the subsequent performance of employees. The company says the system enables each member of its talent team to manage tens of thousands of applications a year.
Employees’ performance is monitored for up to two years and fed back into the selection models. Wasserman said the company had become “more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success”.
Strict expectations for Bending Spoons employees
The demands do not end when a candidate is hired. Bending Spoons says it may dismiss employees whose performance is considered “adequate” if stronger contributors are available, acknowledging that the practice is unusual.
The company does not offer performance bonuses, arguing that linking pay to targets can encourage short-term decisions without consistently improving results. Wasserman said bonuses could make relationships between colleagues “more transactional and less honest”.
Instead, Bending Spoons places greater emphasis on salaries, which are reviewed annually. Staff can also buy shares directly through their pay at a discounted price; 84% of eligible employees took up the option in 2025.
There are few formal distinctions between ranks. Junior and senior engineers are not separated by title internally, while managers are referred to simply as “leads”. In most cases, no more than three management layers sit between Ferrari and members of the core team.
Wasserman said employees could use whatever descriptions they wished on LinkedIn, “as long as it’s reasonable”. The company concluded that debating titles and the boundaries between levels had become “an enormous waste of time and energy”.
Bending Spoons’ principles also put responsibility for wellbeing largely on individuals. Staff disturbed by messages outside working hours are expected to switch off notifications, while those feeling drained are encouraged to alter their schedules or take time off under a flexible holiday policy that does not require approval.
“These things need to be addressed openly and in good faith so people can determine for themselves how aligned they are with the principles,” Wasserman said. “It really sucks for someone to go through a successful process, start working here, and swiftly realize they don’t see eye-to-eye on these topics.”
Despite the pressure, Wasserman said only 0.6% of the company’s core team resigned in 2025, with the rate lower so far this year. Overall staff turnover was 16.2%.
The company’s growth has also created opportunities for employees to move between businesses. A software engineer might spend a year rebuilding Evernote’s architecture, six months working on Vimeo subscriptions and then join a team developing payment technology used across the group, Wasserman said.
Most of Bending Spoons’ businesses and functions are led by people in their twenties or thirties, many with little or no previous 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 said.
The group’s revenues per full-time employee rose from 1.12 million US dollars in 2023 to 2.57 million dollars in 2025, according to its IPO filing.
Bending Spoons brought more than 500 employees from Italy to New York for its Nasdaq debut in July, when the flotation valued the company at 18.4 billion dollars and raised 1.68 billion dollars.
It has warned that preserving its culture may become more difficult as the organisation expands across a larger and more dispersed workforce. The company has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets, suggesting that its unusually selective hiring model will continue to face pressure as the group grows.
