Bending Spoons is not selling comfort.
The Italian tech conglomerate, which owns Vimeo and AOL, sends job candidates a warning up front: its workplace principles are 'controversial,' and the company expects 'considerable' challenges, workloads, and expectations. Those who do not fully commit do not get the job.
The numbers come first. Last year, Bending Spoons received 800,000 CVs and hired only 286 people, making its hiring process more selective than the Ivy League, according to the company profile. About 60,000 applicants passed the first CV screen and moved on to online tests. Roughly 3,300 reached interview stage.
Chief executive Luca Ferrari once described the company as 'like private equity had a baby with Google.' Since its founding in 2013, Bending Spoons has acquired more than 50 businesses. The company buys underperforming apps, rebuilds their technology with its own engineers, and keeps them.
The company says its recruiting software, called Role Model, uses test results and AI models trained on years of hiring data, including how past recruits performed on the job. It says this allows each talent team member to handle tens of thousands of applications a year. Final hiring decisions are made by a central talent team, not a hiring manager, which the company says limits personal bias.
Bending Spoons says it tracks each recruit's performance for up to two years and feeds that data back into its selection models. Nicolle Wasserman, head of people operations, says the company has become 'more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success.'
The company does not pay performance bonuses, even though such bonuses are common at other tech firms. It argues that pay tied to targets encourages short-term thinking without reliably improving results. Instead, Bending Spoons says it invests more heavily in salaries and reviews them annually. Employees can also buy stock through their salary at a discounted rate, and 84% of eligible staff did so in 2025.
The company keeps hierarchy thin. Internally, it makes no distinction between junior and senior engineers, and managers are called 'leads.' In most cases, there are no more than three layers of management between the chief executive and a member of the core team. Externally, employees can describe themselves however they like on LinkedIn 'as long as it's reasonable,' Wasserman says.
The company employed 600 people, and revenue per full-time employee rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, according to its IPO filing. The IPO valued Bending Spoons at $18.4 billion and raised $1.68 billion.
For free enterprise readers, the lesson is straightforward: talent still chases high standards when the incentives are clear. Perks are optional. Accountability is not. Bending Spoons is betting that fewer layers, less bureaucracy, and stronger selection can outproduce the corporate culture of soft targets and decorative titles.
That is not a political slogan. It is a management thesis with a paper trail, and 800,000 applicants just signed up to compete for it.
