America's most elite colleges receive thousands of applications each year from brilliant high-schoolers all over the world. They reject almost every single one of them.

And they're still not nearly as selective as a company that most people have never heard of.

It's a company that received 800,000 job applications last year -- and made 286 hires. The acceptance rate of top schools is around 4%. At Bending Spoons, it's below 0.04%.

But rejecting 99.9% of applications isn't even the wildest thing about the company's hiring process.

"If people looked under the hood at how we do this, they would think we're crazy," said CEO Luca Ferrari. "Hopefully in a good way."

Before we pop open that hood, there are a few things worth knowing about Bending Spoons.

It's an unusual business in every way, beginning with a name that was inspired by "The Matrix." It's a tech startup, but it's based thousands of miles from Silicon Valley -- in Milan, Italy. It was also founded in 2013 and operates more like a conglomerate from the mid-1900s.

Before it went public last week, Bending Spoons spent the past few years scooping up the old companies behind forgotten software that millions of people still use every day, like AOL, Evernote and Vimeo. It buys these companies to overhaul them and keep them, not flip them. Then it reinvests the profits and buys more companies.

But it's not just methodical about the companies it acquires. As it turns out, Bending Spoons is even more rigorous about the people it hires.

In recent years, the applications to work at this growing empire have shot up from 110,000 to 360,000 to 800,000. Last year, 60,000 made it past the initial round of screening and took a series of tests designed to measure their reasoning, judgment and speed of learning. That whittled the list down to the 3,300 candidates who were granted interviews.

"A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin," Ferrari said. "It's basically completely useless."

To make it useful, Bending Spoons made it more scientific. The questions are precisely worded. The answers are carefully graded against set parameters. Even the qualitative factors are quantified and fed to the hiring algorithms. By the time the scores are in, references are checked, decisions are reviewed and offers are extended, there is almost nobody left. Last year, 286 survived until the very end to call themselves Spooners.

It's a mind-bending number. The most cutthroat banks and consulting firms brag about hiring rates of 1%. Citadel and Citadel Securities took 0.36% of the quants who applied for internships this summer. NASA lets in 0.1% of those who want to be astronauts. But 0.04%? It means that getting a job at Bending Spoons is 100 times harder than getting into Harvard.

I know, I know, some of these comparisons are apples to oranges -- forks to spoons. But no matter how you slice the numbers, they add up to a company that has become obsessed with talent.

Bending Spoons is also a company that wasn't supposed to exist.

Back in 2010, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli and Luca Ferrari went on a backpacking trip as friends and returned as co-founders. But after a few years of working on their AI-based diary app, the product hadn't caught on and the startup was running out of money. They liquidated the company and used their last $40,000 to start another one.

Before they could move on, they made a point of studying what they'd gotten right and wrong. They came away with two ideas about success and failure that would become the foundation of their next company:

   1. Luck is essential when starting a business. 
 
   2. Luck becomes irrelevant when operating that business. 

To them, this meant that some good businesses had gotten lucky early but were now being run badly. And while their own startup had flopped, the entrepreneurs were more confident than ever in their operational skills.

"Too bad our skills were being wasted," they later wrote, "on products nobody wanted."

To remove luck from the equation, they set out to acquire products that had already proven people wanted them. These days, the companies in the Bending Spoons portfolio tend to be solid but unsexy businesses that haven't been appealing to exceptional talent in a generation. In other words, they're exactly the kind of places where a typical Spooner would never dream of working.

The company is run by executives in their 30s and early 40s. The employees are mostly in their 20s and 30s and have never worked anywhere else. Many are younger than the brands they take over.

"Being able to spot people who are unusually talented and motivated very early in their careers, then giving them unusually high levels of responsibility and coaching, has been an absolutely key advantage for us, " said Ferrari, who is 41.

It's a key part of the business model, too. When Bending Spoons buys a company, it begins each radical transformation by slashing most of the acquired employees -- and replacing them with the much leaner team of Spooners.

There are now about 700 people who made it through the notorious hiring process and now work in technical, product and growth roles across the organization. They move from one Bending Spoons acquisition to the next, making what Ferrari calls "very deep changes" -- rewriting the code, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning the user interface. And they are "held to particularly demanding performance standards," the company promises.

In fact, an entire team of Spooners does nothing but evaluate other Spooners and potential Spooners.

The talent squad's data scientists, software engineers and AI researchers have the final say on all hiring -- and firing. They are constantly tweaking interview questions, experimenting with slightly different test variations and searching for ways to improve models for predicting future performance. They also track post-hire performance and check it against their predictions after four months, eight months, one year and two years.

"All they do all day long," Ferrari said, "is look for signals."

One signal might not mean much. But hundreds of signals put together become predictive.

"I'll give you one that's modestly predictive," he told me. "We look at whether the candidate is polite."

Mi scusi?

He explained that most job candidates are perfectly respectful and punctual when they meet executives -- the people who control their fate. But if they're jerks to employees with less power, it's a decent signal of how they might treat their colleagues. And it goes right into the model.

As he closed the hood, there was one more thing I had to ask Ferrari.

As a co-founder, he never had to go through the Bending Spoons selection process. So would he have been part of the 0.04%?

"I cannot answer that question," he said. "I will say this: statistically speaking, it's unlikely."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 10, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.