This Company Received 800,000 Job Applications for 286 Roles

This tech company makes getting into the Ivy League look easy. 

Bending Spoons, a tech company that owns Vimeo and AOL, boasts a hiring process that is 100 times more selective than the average Ivy League college. According to a recent Fortune report, the company received 800,000 job applications last year but only hired 286 candidates.

Bending Spoons buys struggling apps. Its engineers then overhaul the technology with the goal of making the apps profitable. The company holds onto the apps rather than selling them. 

In 2025, Bending Spoons spent $3 billion acquiring companies like Eventbrite. It has acquired more than 50 companies since launching in 2013, including video editing app Splice and data organization platform Airtable.

Candidates get an upfront warning about the demanding work culture. Bending Spoons sends each prospective hire a list of its “controversial” workplace principles and instructs the candidate to be ready for “considerable” work challenges. If the applicant isn’t ready to commit, they don’t get the position. 

Workplace principles

The company’s published principles spell out what that means. Employees give each other honest feedback and accept that they might be impacted by changes the company makes without consulting them. They have to embrace restructurings even when those changes disrupt their own plans. 

Additionally, under its commitment to “uncompromising excellence,” the company says it will part ways with employees whose performance continues to fall short after feedback and support.

For employees, the appeal of Bending Spoons is the chance to tackle that rebuilding work alongside talented peers, according to Nicolle Wasserman, the company’s head of people operations. “People want to work here because they know that they’ll be taking on big challenges with talented colleagues every day,” she said in an interview with Fortune. 

Wasserman credits Bending Spoons’ success to its 600 employees. Revenue per full-time employee climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 — more than doubling in two years. 

Inside the recruitment process

Bending Spoons hires job candidates who excel in a series of hurdles designed to test potential. About 60,000 of the 800,000-person applicant pool make it past the resume review. The company invites them to complete online assessments showing how well they tackle unfamiliar problems and pick up new skills. 

The exercises can take as long as six hours, with some completed under supervision. 

Wasserman pointed out that interviews can favor confident self-promoters while putting shy candidates and non-native English speakers at a disadvantage. She said practical tests are harder to bluff. 

“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. 

Bending Spoons developed an in-house recruiting platform, Role Model, to go through the applications. The software combines assessment scores with AI models trained on years of recruitment data. It includes how previous hires performed after joining. 

Only about 3,300 candidates make it past the practical test round and advance to interviews with recruiters. 

After someone joins, Bending Spoons tracks their performance for up to two years and uses the results to refine its selection models.

“We’ve gotten more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success,” Wasserman said. 

This tech company makes getting into the Ivy League look easy. 

Bending Spoons, a tech company that owns Vimeo and AOL, boasts a hiring process that is 100 times more selective than the average Ivy League college. According to a recent Fortune report, the company received 800,000 job applications last year but only hired 286 candidates.

Bending Spoons buys struggling apps. Its engineers then overhaul the technology with the goal of making the apps profitable. The company holds onto the apps rather than selling them.