A 0.04% Acceptance Rate Isn’t a Hiring Strategy, It’s Theatre

Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari told the Wall Street Journal that if people looked under the hood at how his company hires, they would think the company is crazy. Here is what I think: when your rejection rate makes headlines, you have not built proof your hiring works, you have built what we would call a selection spectacle: a process that measures endurance, not job performance.

Inside Bending Spoons’ 0.04% Acceptance Rate

The $21 billion company, which owns digital businesses including Eventbrite, Vimeo, and AOL, hired 286 people from 800,000 applications last year, according to Fortune. That is a 0.04% acceptance rate, 100 times more selective than Ivy League colleges, which typically accept around 4%. The mid-sized Milan-based tech business has fewer than 1,000 employees on payroll but received an applicant pool larger than the populations of Seattle, Boston and Las Vegas. That is a brand and market story, not a hiring story. The hiring story would be whether the 286 people the company selected are measurably better at their jobs than the people it passed over.

The company’s process moves 60,000 candidates past the first screening round, then puts them through tests analyzing reasoning, judgement and learning speed. This is followed by interviews, then hiring algorithms run an analysis on how candidates scored against both quantitative and qualitative characteristics. References are verified. Less than 9% of those who reach the interview stage receive an offer. Ferrari told the WSJ that a run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin, and “basically completely useless.” Yet the company still conducts interviews after algorithmic screening. The question the process description does not answer is whether Bending Spoons’ interviews differ meaningfully from the run-of-the-mill kind Ferrari dismisses, or whether the company is stacking steps to create the appearance of rigour rather than predictive gain.

Selectivity Isn’t the Same as Validity

Selectivity and validity are not the same thing. You can reject 99.96% of applicants and still be wrong about who will succeed. The Fortune article presents the extreme selectivity prominently in its headline and framing, but nowhere does it offer performance data on the 286 hires. Do they outperform peers hired through faster, less exhaustive methods? Do they stay longer? Produce better work? We do not know, because the story Bending Spoons is telling is about the process, not the outcome. That is the tell. When your rejection rate becomes the story, you have lost the plot.

The Process Maximalism Trap

In our work with hiring teams, we see this pattern often enough to name it: process maximalism. Companies layer on steps, reasoning that more filters must yield better hires. From a selection design perspective, a funnel that passes 7.5% of applicants in the first round, then eliminates most of them in later stages, inverts the usual efficiency model. Well-designed early screening should eliminate the majority of poor fits before you invest in multi-stage assessments, interviews and reference checks. If your funnel is shaped like an inverted pyramid, with the widest part in the middle, your process is not rigorous. It is inefficient.

It’s Not Just Bending Spoons: A Market-Wide Rejection Race

Bending Spoons is not alone. A chill has come over the U.S. hiring market. Last year, job openings fell to 6.54 million, the lowest since September 2020. In June this year, employers added just 57,000 jobs, less than half the month before. Entry-level roles have particularly felt the sting. Meta, Microsoft and Google have all slowed hiring of entry-level roles. When Match Group revived a shuttered “Tindership” program this year, CEO Spencer Rascoff posted the opportunity on his LinkedIn and social media accounts. More than 30,000 candidates applied for 27 spots, less than 0.09% accepted. Goldman Sachs accepted less than 1% of applicants to its summer internship program this year, hiring 2,500 interns across more than 500 universities. It is the third year in a row Goldman Sachs has hired less than 1 in 100 candidates for the program. Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based robotics business, received more than 40,000 applications for 32 internship roles in 2024, an acceptance rate below 0.08%.

The pattern is clear: when hiring slows and junior roles shrink, application volumes explode, and companies respond by tightening the funnel. But tighter is not smarter. A 0.04% acceptance rate tells you the market is flooded and your brand is strong. It does not tell you whether the 286 people you hired are the right 286.

Can You Defend Your Process? What to Measure Instead

The real question for talent acquisition leaders is this: can you defend your process? Not in a press release, but in an audit. Can you show that each stage improves prediction? That your algorithmic scoring of qualitative traits correlates with on-the-job performance? That your rejection decisions are consistent and fair? When you reject 799,714 people, you are making 799,714 decisions. If your process cannot produce evidence those decisions were valid and consistent, you are exposed. Not just to inefficiency, but to the risk of challenge. Extreme selectivity creates extreme scrutiny. Stop measuring your hiring by how many people you reject. Measure it by whether the people you hire perform, stay and grow. If you cannot connect your process to those outcomes with data, you are not doing rigorous hiring. You are doing expensive hiring. And in a market where 800,000 people are willing to apply, the difference matters.

Original reporting: Fortune.