Getting Hired at This Company Is Harder Than Getting Into Harvard

Bending Spoons, the Italian tech startup, rejects 99.9% of its applicants. That makes it harder to get into than Harvard or NASA’s astronaut program, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company went public last week.

The Milan-based company specializes in acquiring and overhauling companies like AOL, Vimeo and Evernote that have dated software people continue to use. But its real talent is in vetting its employees through a rigorous screening process.

“A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin,” CEO Luca Ferrari told the Journal . “It’s basically completely useless.” 

Instead, candidates take reasoning and judgment tests before anyone interviews them, and a dedicated team of data scientists grades every answer against a hiring algorithm that tracks performance for years after the offer. Even politeness gets scored.

Ferrari co-founded the company in 2013 after his first startup failed and he liquidated it for $40,000. Asked if he’d pass his own hiring test today, he says probably not.

Bending Spoons, the Italian tech startup, rejects 99.9% of its applicants. That makes it harder to get into than Harvard or NASA’s astronaut program, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company went public last week.

The Milan-based company specializes in acquiring and overhauling companies like AOL, Vimeo and Evernote that have dated software people continue to use. But its real talent is in vetting its employees through a rigorous screening process.

“A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin,” CEO Luca Ferrari told the Journal . “It’s basically completely useless.” 

Instead, candidates take reasoning and judgment tests before anyone interviews them, and a dedicated team of data scientists grades every answer against a hiring algorithm that tracks performance for years after the offer. Even politeness gets scored.

Ferrari co-founded the company in 2013 after his first startup failed and he liquidated it for $40,000. Asked if he’d pass his own hiring test today, he says probably not.