Bending Spoons cuts 800,000 applicants to 286 hires with tests that run up to six hours

The report leaves open when the list of principles reaches candidates. It says Bending Spoons sends the list to each prospective hire ^[2], not whether that happens before or after a person applies. If the list follows the application, it cannot have shaped the 800,000 ^[1].

The first screen offers one clue. Of the 800,000 applicants, 92.5% failed resume review, or 740,000 people ^[16]. Whatever the warning did to the pool, it did not keep out applications that fell at the first step.

Selection happens later. Entrepreneur calls the process 100 times more selective than the average Ivy League college ^[21]; the ratio underneath is one hire per roughly 2,800 applications ^[15]. Of the applicants invited to the online assessments, 5.5% advanced to interviews ^[17], and about 11.5 interviewees stood behind each hire if every hire came through that stage ^[18].

Nicolle Wasserman, the company's head of people operations, defends the tests on the grounds that they are hard to bluff ^[14]. "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 ^[11]. The scoring runs on Role Model, an in-house platform that pairs assessment scores with AI models trained on years of recruitment data, including how earlier hires performed ^[8]. "We've gotten more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success," Wasserman said ^[10].

Revenue per full-time employee rose about 2.3 times between 2023 and 2025 ^[20], and Wasserman credits the company's 600 employees for its success ^[14]. The company also spent $3 billion on acquisitions in 2025, Eventbrite among them ^[7]. A ratio of revenue to headcount moves with both, so in our view it is weak evidence about the quality of hires.

We think the figures support a narrower claim: Bending Spoons states its terms up front and then screens hard, and the screening produces the 286. Wasserman's own account of the draw is the work. "People want to work here because they know that they'll be taking on big challenges with talented colleagues every day," she said ^[12]. The terms candidates are warned about include accepting changes the company makes without consulting them, and the company says it will part ways with employees whose performance keeps falling short after feedback and support ^[13].