By Lee Flanagan
“If people looked under the hood at how we do this, they would think we’re crazy,” Luca Ferrari, CEO of Bending Spoons, told the Wall Street Journal. “Hopefully in a good way.” He was talking about how his $21 billion company, owner of Eventbrite, Vimeo and AOL, hired just 286 people out of 800,000 applications last year. Fortune calculated that as an acceptance rate of 0.04%, 100 times more selective than the Ivy League colleges that typically admit around 4% of applicants. That comparison has done exactly what it was built to do: travel. It has not told you anything about whether Bending Spoons hires well. Those are different questions, and the coverage keeps answering the wrong one.
What 286 Hires Out of 800,000 Applications Actually Measures
A 0.04% acceptance rate is not a badge of selectivity. It measures funnel size against funnel efficiency. By that measure, we would call this an inefficient top-of-funnel process, not a selective one. Fortune notes that 60,000 candidates made it through the first round alone, all of whom sat through reasoning, judgement and learning-speed tests before an interview stage where less than 9% of interviewees received an offer. Applications doubled year over year, and so did the number of people hired. Our read is that this is a company processing a growing volume of applicants through expensive assessment stages before the real filtering happens. Screening 800,000 people to make 286 hires is a cost and capacity problem for a talent function to solve, not a strategy for other TA leaders to admire. Treating the ratio itself as the achievement gets the arrow backwards.
The Line Ferrari Buried Under His Own Headline
Here is the sentence in the Fortune piece that actually deserves a talent leader’s attention, and it is not the acceptance rate. “A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin,” Ferrari told the WSJ. “It’s basically completely useless.” That is the CEO of one of the most selective hiring processes telling you the interview alone tells him almost nothing. Read against the rest of his process, that line is not a throwaway. We read it as the reason Bending Spoons layers reasoning and judgement testing, algorithmic scoring against defined quantitative and qualitative characteristics, and reference verification on top of the interview rather than relying on it. We think that admission is the real story here, the opposite of what a 0.04% headline implies. Ferrari is not saying his funnel proves rigor. He is saying the interview by itself cannot be trusted, and that is why he built scaffolding around it.
Why the Ivy League Comparison Is a Trick
Fortune is not alone in reaching for this framing. Match Group’s revived Tindership internship drew more than 30,000 applicants for 27 spots after CEO Spencer Rascoff posted it on LinkedIn, an acceptance rate under 0.09% that Fortune calls more selective than any Ivy League college. Goldman Sachs accepted less than 1% of applicants to its summer internship program for the third year running, yet still hired 2,500 interns across more than 500 universities. Gecko Robotics took under 0.08% of 40,000 applicants for 32 internship roles in 2024. Each of these numbers reflects applicant volume against a fixed set of openings, not evidence of hiring quality. A tight labor market and a viral LinkedIn post produce a low acceptance rate whether or not the underlying assessment is any good. TA leaders who quote these figures as aspirational benchmarks are borrowing a media hook, not a hiring-quality standard.
The Part of Bending Spoons’ Process Worth Studying
What we see across TA teams is a persistent instinct to chase the selectivity ratio because it is the number that gets attention, while the structural work that actually predicts quality of hire, the reasoning and judgement testing, staged interviews, scoring against defined criteria, and reference checks before an offer, sits underneath the headline and gets skipped over. That structure, not the 0.04%, is the transferable part of Bending Spoons’ model. A ratio built purely from application volume is easy for any company to replicate by accident, simply by going viral for the wrong reasons. Ferrari built his layered process because he does not trust the coin toss, and that distrust is the operating principle worth taking from this story.
The Question That Matters More Than the Rejection Rate
If your own team ever points to a shrinking acceptance rate as proof the hiring bar is rising, ask the harder question first: what changed in how you evaluate candidates, not just how many you turned away. A funnel can narrow for reasons that have nothing to do with rigor: rising applicant volume, a viral post, an uncertain job market pushing more people toward fewer openings. Fortune’s own reporting on falling job openings and slowing entry-level hiring at Meta, Microsoft and Google confirms that volume is climbing for reasons unrelated to any single company’s process. Selectivity theatre is easy to produce and easy to celebrate. Interview structure that survives scrutiny is neither. We would rather see a talent leader defend the evidence behind one offer than the ratio behind ten thousand rejections.
Original reporting: Fortune.
Frequently asked questions
Does Bending Spoons’ 0.04% acceptance rate prove its hiring process is rigorous?
No. The acceptance rate reported by Fortune measures how few applicants were hired against total applications, which reflects application volume and screening capacity, not the quality or predictive accuracy of the evaluation itself.
What did Bending Spoons’ CEO actually say about job interviews?
Luca Ferrari told the Wall Street Journal, as reported by Fortune, “A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin. It’s basically completely useless.” That is why the company layers reasoning tests, algorithmic scoring and reference checks around the interview stage.
Should other companies benchmark their hiring against Ivy League acceptance rates, as Fortune did with Bending Spoons and Match Group?
We do not think so. Those comparisons reflect applicant volume against a fixed number of openings and say nothing about whether the selection method identifies the right hires.
What part of Bending Spoons’ process is actually worth other TA teams studying?
The rejection rate itself is not worth studying. What matters is the layered structure behind it, reasoning and judgement testing, staged interviews scored against defined criteria, and reference verification before an offer, because that is what stops the final decision resting on a single unstructured conversation.
Does this lesson apply to smaller teams that will never see 800,000 applications?
Yes. The scale is specific to Bending Spoons, but the underlying point, that a low acceptance rate is not evidence of a good process and that interview structure is what predicts quality of hire, applies regardless of applicant volume.