Bending Spoons Rejects 99.9% of Applicants Through Brutal AI Screening

The Milan-based firm, which acquires and restructures struggling apps like Vimeo and AOL, maintains a growth model centered on radical internal efficiency. Since 2013, Bending Spoons has purchased over 50 companies, including Eventbrite and Splice. This aggressive acquisition strategy is backed by a workforce that generated $2.57 million in revenue per employee in 2025, more than double the figure from two years prior.

Prospective hires receive a blunt warning about the company’s "controversial" culture before applying. Candidates are expected to accept constant restructuring and rapid feedback cycles. Nicolle Wasserman, the company’s head of people operations, argues that traditional interviews often favor polished self-promoters over actual talent. By utilizing its in-house platform, Role Model, the company combines AI analysis with practical, multi-hour tests to measure problem-solving skills, filtering the 800,000-person applicant pool down to roughly 3,300 interviewees. Once onboarded, new hires continue to be tracked for two years, feeding data back into the AI to further refine the recruitment process.