Bending Spoons Hired 286 People From 800,000 Applicants as Revenue per Employee More Than Doubled

Bending Spoons’ hiring figures point to a business built around a small workforce and a demanding acquisition playbook. The company received 800,000 job applications last year and hired 286 people, while revenue per full-time employee more than doubled from 2023 to 2025. Those figures suggest a company trying to expand its business without adding staff at the same pace, though they don’t, by themselves, show how much of the change came from acquisitions or changes to existing operations.

The gap between applications and hires is striking. It signals that Bending Spoons can draw a large candidate pool, but also that most applicants won’t get close to an offer. For the company, the numbers support a hiring model built around screening for a narrow set of capabilities. For candidates, they describe a process that demands a substantial investment of time before the result is known.

An acquisition strategy built on rebuilding

The tech company owns Vimeo and AOL and buys struggling apps, then works to rebuild their technology and profitability. It typically keeps the businesses after acquiring them, making the work less about a quick resale and more about improving operations over time. Since its launch in 2013, Bending Spoons has bought more than 50 companies, including video editing app Splice and data organization platform Airtable. In 2025, it spent $3 billion on acquisitions, including Eventbrite.

That approach places pressure on execution after a deal closes. Buying a business can add products, users, and new operating responsibilities, but the purchase itself doesn’t establish that the company can improve performance. The work of integrating technology and rebuilding profitability is where the strategy has to prove its value. With a small workforce, hiring becomes part of that operating model: the company needs people it believes can handle demanding work across a growing portfolio.

A demanding workplace, stated upfront

Bending Spoons tells applicants that its work can bring “considerable” challenges and shares a list of workplace principles it describes as “controversial.” The expectations include direct feedback, adapting to changes made without employee consultation, and accepting restructurings that can disrupt personal plans. Stating those conditions early may help candidates judge whether the environment suits them, while also making clear that the company expects employees to absorb a high degree of change.

The company also says it will part ways with employees whose performance remains below expectations after feedback and support. That standard sits alongside its stated commitment to “uncompromising excellence.” The combination suggests a workplace where performance is treated as an ongoing requirement, not just a hurdle to clear during hiring. It may appeal to people who want clear standards and difficult assignments; it may be a poor fit for people who value predictable roles and a slower pace of change.

For some candidates, the attraction is the chance to take on difficult rebuilding work with experienced colleagues. Nicolle Wasserman, Bending Spoons’ head of people operations, told Fortune that employees are drawn to “big challenges with talented colleagues every day.” She credits the company’s 600 employees with helping drive its results. That account gives the company’s own explanation for why applicants might accept demanding conditions: the work itself and the people around them. It’s a persuasive pitch, but it describes the opportunity from management’s point of view.

Revenue per full-time employee rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. This is more significant than it looks as a measure of how much revenue the company generates for each employee, but it isn’t a direct measure of employee productivity or operating profit. The ratio can change as a company acquires businesses, adjusts its workforce, or changes how it runs existing operations. Without a breakdown of those effects, the increase shows a shift in revenue relative to headcount, not what caused it.

Assessments narrow the applicant pool

The selection process starts with a steep cut: about 60,000 of the 800,000 applicants pass résumé review. Those candidates take online assessments that test how they handle unfamiliar problems and learn new skills. Some exercises can last up to six hours, and some are supervised. The process is designed to test performance directly, but the time commitment is substantial, especially for applicants who may be balancing the process with work or other responsibilities.

Wasserman argues that practical exercises give candidates a more direct way to demonstrate ability than interviews, where confident self-presentation can shape impressions and shy candidates or non-native English speakers may face a disadvantage. “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. That logic has intuitive appeal: a task can show how someone approaches a problem rather than how well they describe their past work. Still, an assessment captures performance under particular conditions, and it can’t answer every question about how a person will work with colleagues or respond to changing priorities.

Bending Spoons built an internal recruiting platform, Role Model, to process applications. It combines assessment results with AI models trained on historical recruiting information, including how earlier hires performed after joining. About 3,300 candidates clear the practical test stage and reach recruiter interviews. The platform gives the company a way to compare a large number of applicants against its own past hiring experience, though its usefulness depends on what that history captures and how well it applies to future roles.

The company then tracks new employees’ performance for as long as two years and uses those results to refine its selection models. Wasserman said Bending Spoons has become more selective and better at identifying predictors of success. That feedback loop may help the company adjust its process as it learns which candidates perform well after joining. And yet. A model trained on prior outcomes can only reflect the information available in those outcomes; the figures provided don’t show how the company measures performance or how it checks that its selection criteria remain useful as the business changes.

What the numbers leave unresolved

The figures capture both the appeal and the cost of this approach: a large pool of applicants, a small number of hires, and an unusually intensive evaluation process. They also show how recruiting and acquisitions connect. If you’re working in this space, the relevant question isn’t simply how many people a company hires, but whether that workforce can support the work required across the businesses it buys.

For Bending Spoons, continued acquisitions will test whether its hiring system can find people suited to a business that keeps changing shape. The company’s revenue per employee has risen, but the figures don’t separate the effects of acquisitions from operational improvements, and the hiring totals don’t establish how well new employees perform across different roles. What’s clear is that the company has built a process meant to be selective and demanding. Whether that process can keep matching people to the work as the portfolio grows remains the open question.