Getting a job at Bending Spoons may now be statistically harder than becoming a NASA astronaut. The Milan-based technology company received approximately 800,000 applications in 2025 but hired only 286 people, producing an acceptance rate of roughly 0.04%.
That figure is striking even by the standards of elite universities and highly competitive government programs. Harvard admits around 4% of applicants in a typical cycle, while NASA has selected roughly 0.1% of candidates during some recent astronaut recruitment rounds. The comparisons are not exact because the institutions assess very different skills, but they illustrate how unusually narrow the entry gate at Bending Spoons has become.
The hiring numbers were disclosed in the company’s registration documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and examined in a recent Wall Street Journal report. They show a company using an enormous applicant pool to build a relatively compact workforce around a strategy of buying established digital products and restructuring them for higher growth and profitability.
Bending Spoons has accumulated a portfolio that includes AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Komoot, WeTransfer, Meetup, Eventbrite and other recognizable internet businesses. Its model is not built around creating every product internally. Instead, the company acquires services that already have substantial user bases, integrates operations, centralizes technology and marketing functions, and frequently makes significant changes to staffing and product strategy.
The company became publicly traded on Nasdaq in July 2026 under the ticker BSP. Its shares jumped sharply during their first session, giving Bending Spoons a market value of more than $20 billion and increasing scrutiny of the operating system behind its acquisition-led expansion.
A Funnel That Rejects Almost Everyone
The recruitment funnel begins with scale. Of the roughly 800,000 people who applied in 2025, about 60,000 advanced through the first screening stage and completed a series of assessments covering logical reasoning, decision-making and learning speed.
Only around 3,300 candidates were invited to interview. From that group, Bending Spoons hired 286 people, meaning that fewer than one applicant in every 2,700 ultimately joined the company.
The process had already been highly selective before applications reached their latest level. According to the company’s SEC registration filing, Bending Spoons received approximately 110,000 applications in 2023 and hired about 100 people, an acceptance rate near 0.09%. Applications rose to roughly 360,000 in 2024, when 152 people were hired and the rate fell to about 0.04%.
The 2025 total more than doubled the previous year’s application volume, yet the company continued to hire only a few hundred people. That suggests Bending Spoons is not using the applicant surge primarily to expand headcount rapidly. It is using scale to increase selectivity and preserve what management describes as exceptionally high talent density.
Processing 800,000 applications also creates a major operational challenge. Averaged across a full year, the company received more than 2,190 applications a day. Over an eight-hour working day, that would equal approximately 274 applications an hour, or more than four every minute.
No conventional recruiting team could manually review that volume with equal depth. Bending Spoons has not publicly disclosed every tool used in its screening stack, but its filings describe a standardized and experiment-based approach that relies on structured assessments and predictive methods. Automation is therefore likely to play an important role in sorting applications, administering tests and identifying candidates for closer human review.
That does not necessarily mean an artificial intelligence system independently decides who gets hired. Automated filtering can rank candidates or measure assessment results, while final decisions remain with recruiters and interviewers. The distinction matters because heavy dependence on algorithms can create risks involving bias, false negatives and overconfidence in measurable traits.
Bending Spoons says it attempts to reduce those risks by treating recruitment as an evolving system rather than a fixed checklist. The company tracks how employees perform after joining and examines outcomes across different periods, using the results to refine which signals are most predictive of long-term success.
This feedback loop resembles the way a technology company might improve a product through controlled experiments. A selection method that appears effective at the interview stage is not considered proven until the company can compare it with actual workplace performance, retention and progression.
Why Bending Spoons Treats Talent Like an Investment Portfolio
Hiring and dismissal decisions are centralized within a dedicated talent organization rather than being fully delegated to individual department managers. Bending Spoons argues that a centralized team can evaluate candidates more consistently, compare talent needs across the whole company and take a longer-term view than a manager trying to fill an immediate vacancy.
The approach fits the company’s broader business philosophy. Bending Spoons buys products with recognizable brands and existing customers, then attempts to improve them through shared technology, data analysis, monetization expertise and disciplined cost management. A small group of highly productive employees can be especially valuable in that model because the same internal capabilities can be applied across multiple acquired businesses.
The company’s emphasis on cultural alignment is equally strong. Its filings indicate that when recruiters believe a candidate may not fit the organization, they may provide enough information about the work environment to encourage the person to withdraw voluntarily. In practice, that means the recruitment process is designed not only to identify ability but also to test whether candidates are comfortable with the company’s intensity, expectations and centralized way of operating.
That philosophy can produce benefits. A rigorous and consistent process may lower the cost of poor hiring decisions, improve cooperation among teams and allow the company to entrust substantial responsibility to relatively young employees. Bending Spoons has also received workplace awards in Italy and Europe, suggesting that at least part of its workforce responds positively to the culture.
However, extreme selectivity is not automatically proof of superior hiring. A low acceptance rate can be created by a strong employer brand, global online applications and low-friction application forms as much as by uniquely difficult standards. It can also encourage candidates to treat admission itself as a status symbol, reinforcing demand without necessarily revealing how every employee experiences the workplace.
The comparison with NASA should also be interpreted carefully. Astronaut candidates generally face strict requirements involving education, professional experience, medical fitness and operational readiness before entering a multistage selection process. Bending Spoons recruits for many different business and technical roles, so the applicant pools are not directly comparable.
Still, the 0.04% rate remains remarkable. It demonstrates how digital recruiting has allowed a European technology company to source talent at a global scale and apply a highly standardized process to an applicant pool larger than the population of many cities.
The system also raises a broader question for employers as AI screening becomes more common: how much should companies trust models to identify potential? Structured testing can make decisions more consistent, but qualities such as creativity, judgment, resilience and leadership are difficult to compress into a score. The more selective a process becomes, the greater the cost of mistakenly rejecting candidates who might have performed well.
For Bending Spoons, the strategy appears closely tied to its financial model. The company is betting that a concentrated workforce, supported by data and automation, can operate a growing collection of global products more efficiently than the organizations that previously owned them.
Its 800,000 applications provide an enormous pool from which to make that bet. The more important test will come after recruitment: whether the 286 people selected can deliver the performance needed to justify one of the most demanding hiring filters in modern business.
