Bending Spoons, the Italian technology conglomerate that owns Vimeo and AOL, hands every prospective hire a warning before they join: each candidate is sent a list of the company's self-described “controversial” workplace principles, which advises them to brace for “considerable” challenges, workloads, and expectations. Anyone not prepared to fully commit does not get the job.

Despite those terms, the company is regularly inundated with applications. Last year it received 800,000 CVs and hired just 286 people—an acceptance rate of roughly 0.04%—making its recruitment process 100-fold more selective than the Ivy League.

Chief executive Luca Ferrari once described Bending Spoons as “like private equity had a baby with Google.” The company buys underperforming apps, rebuilds their technology with its own engineers, and, unlike a typical buyout firm, keeps them. Since its founding in 2013, it has acquired more than 50 businesses—a portfolio that counts Evernote and Eventbrite alongside Vimeo and AOL.

“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.ending Spoons ranks No. 69 on the 2026 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For–Europe list.

A deliberately punishing hiring funnel

The recruitment process is intentionally selective. Roughly 60,000 applicants cleared an initial CV screen and advanced to online tests designed to measure how quickly candidates solve unfamiliar problems and learn new skills. The tasks can take up to six hours, and some are monitored.

Wasserman argues that traditional interviews tend to penalize candidates who are shy or not native English speakers, while rewarding 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 notes.

To manage the volume, the company built its own recruiting software, called Role Model. The system draws on candidates' test results and AI models trained on years of hiring data, including how past recruits went on to perform in the job. The company says this allows each member of its talent team to handle tens of thousands of applications a year.

About 3,300 candidates reached the interview stage, but final hiring decisions rest with a central talent team rather than individual hiring managers—a structure the company says limits personal bias. Each new recruit's performance is then 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 face continued scrutiny. Bending Spoons says it parts ways with employees performing only “adequately” if stronger contributors are available—something it acknowledges is uncommon.

No bonuses, fewer titles

Wasserman describes the company's employees, known internally as “Spooners,” as central to its success. The company employs 600 people, and 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 its IPO filing. Revenue per employee is a metric often used to compare efficiency across software companies.

Bending Spoons flew more than 500 employees from Italy to New York for its opening day on the Nasdaq in July, breaking the exchange's record attendance figures. The IPO valued the company at $18.4 billion and raised $1.68 billion—one of the largest listings by a European company this year. The listing also puts the model itself under a brighter light: figures like its acceptance rate, turnover, and revenue per employee are now public, letting outsiders track whether the approach performs as the company says it does.

Despite the revenue its employees generate, Bending Spoons does not pay performance bonuses, which are common at other tech companies. It argues that pay tied to targets encourages short-term thinking without reliably improving results, and Wasserman says it makes relationships between colleagues “more transactional and less honest.”

Instead, the company invests more heavily in salaries and reviews them annually. Employees can also purchase stock directly through their salary at a discounted rate, a perk Bending Spoons plans to continue offering now that it is listed. In 2025, 84% of eligible staff bought stock.

Hierarchy is kept to a minimum. Internally, the company makes no distinction between junior and senior engineers, and managers are known simply as “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 may 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 what separated one level from the next, and fielding requests for better titles, that it concluded the exercise was “an enormous waste of time and energy.”

The published principles are blunt about the demands of the job and place responsibility for well-being on the individual. An employee bothered by Slack messages at night, for example, is expected to turn off notifications rather than look to the company for a policy, while someone who feels drained should adjust their schedule or take time off under a flexible vacation policy that requires no approval. The approach “chimes with our culture of freedom and responsibility,” Wasserman says.

Publishing the principles allows candidates to judge whether they fit before committing to a demanding hiring process. “These things need to be addressed openly and in good faith so people can determine for themselves how aligned they are with the principles,” she says. “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.”

High risk, high reward

For all of Bending Spoons' demands, 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 is partly a function of the company's business model. Bending Spoons carried out headcount reductions at AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo following its acquisitions. Once those businesses have been restructured later this year, it expects only a few hundred of the 1,830 full-time staff to remain, its SEC filing states.

A leaner workforce brings some benefits, according to Wasserman, allowing staff to take on more responsibility and work more flexibly. “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,” she says.

Nearly all of the company's businesses and functions are led by people in their twenties or thirties, most of whom had little or no prior work experience. “It's not unusual for someone still in their twenties to be leading a business doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” Wasserman says.

The company acknowledges that its culture could be harder to sustain as it grows. In its filing, it warns that maintaining it may become more difficult across a larger, more dispersed organization with teams of different backgrounds and expectations. And with more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets identified, Bending Spoons is set to keep expanding. How the model holds up through that expansion will be documented in the public filings of a company that runs on measurement.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.