On the Invest Like The Best podcast, Luca Ferrari shared a paradoxical figure that, in my view, perfectly describes the state of the Italian tech job market. In 2025, the CEO of Bending Spoons said, the company received around 800,000 applications. 250 got through.
A conversion rate of 0.03%.
Bending Spoons is the Italian company that owns Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, Meetup, Remini and StreamYard. Its best engineers earn over $250,000 a year. Revenue per employee reached $2.57 million in 2025. The company listed on the NYSE at a colossal valuation.
It is, to all intents and purposes, the most successful Italian tech company in recent history.
Ferrari’s explanation for that 1 in 3,200 is this: the education system does not produce enough candidates of the required calibre. The problem lies upstream. The schools are to blame.
I believe he is right.
But he is also wrong. And the balance between these two statements is precarious.
Let’s find out why.
What the data tells us
The figure of 800,000 applications tells us something, and nothing.
It is only natural that a company of Bending Spoons’ value makes noise, and attracts the right candidates as well as the wrong ones.
So when the ratio between applications and acceptances is 1 in 3,200, it means the signal the organisation sends to the market is broad enough to reach anyone, yet specific enough to select only a few (very few).
The 799,750 people who invested time, energy and expectations in a process that, for almost all of them, had only one possible outcome (rejection) are the cost of that gap.
Does the education system produce profiles that fall short of Bending Spoons’ expectations? Yes, without doubt. But the enormous, colossal gravitational pull with which Bending Spoons attracts applications is such that, even with a different school system, that ratio would hardly improve.
The distinction the CEO didn’t make
Bending Spoons has developed predictive models to assess CVs. It has built a seven-stage selection process with quantitative assessments, behavioural interviews and references. It has published detailed documents on its culture and on what it looks for. It has launched scholarships worth €50,000 a year for the brightest computer science students in Europe. It has funded events to identify the top 20 computer engineering students in Italy.
In other words: he knows the system is inadequate, and he is investing to create the talent he cannot find. That is the right response to the problem. Organisations that win the war for talent do not wait for the system to produce what they need. They build it themselves.
How can the hiring rate be improved?
The Italian education system is almost certainly adequate to Bending Spoons’ demand.
We are, after all, light years away from the approaches of countries such as the United States or China in technological terms. But the point here is a different one, since neither Luca Ferrari nor the CEO of any other Italian company will ever, on their own, change the way schooling is done in our country.
No, the real question is: if you are an organisation that wants the top 0.03% of available candidates, is the right strategy to build an employer brand that attracts enough volume for that 0.03% to emerge, accepting the cost of 799,750 rejected profiles, or to build an employer brand so precise and specific that the market self-selects before an application is even submitted?
Companies that have solved this problem have almost always chosen the second path. Not because the first doesn’t work: it does, and Bending Spoons proves it. But because the second is more sustainable, creates less friction for both sides, and builds a reputation over time that no longer depends on volume.
The system is broken, we know that.
Bending Spoons knows it too and is working to fix it with its own resources, which is the most mature response an organisation can give to a structural problem. But the second question (employer brand as a filter rather than an amplifier) remains open, and sooner or later it will have to be addressed.
New Connections (FAQ)
Aren’t 800,000 applications a positive signal for the Bending Spoons brand anyway?
For awareness, certainly. For the quality of the employer brand, it depends on the objective. If the objective is to be known as the best tech company to work for in Italy, 800,000 applications confirm it has been achieved. If the objective is to find the right candidates as efficiently as possible, 800,000 applications for 250 hires describe a process with a very high operating cost and an enormous amount of disappointed expectations in the market. The two objectives are not incompatible, but they require different metrics to be assessed.
Is Italy’s tech talent problem genuinely structural, or is it a convenient narrative for companies?
The data confirms that it is structural. The share of STEM graduates in Italy is among the lowest in Europe. The number of computer science and software engineering graduates relative to market demand is insufficient. Top-tier tech talent emigrates to markets that pay it better. All of this is real. What the “broken system” narrative risks doing is shifting all responsibility outwards, ignoring the part of the problem companies can control: how they build their pipeline, how they train the profiles they cannot find, how they retain those they manage to attract.
Can a mid-sized company apply the same logic as Bending Spoons and select to exceptionally high standards?
The logic works when the brand has enough pull to generate sufficient volume from which to extract the 0.03%. A less well-known company applying the same selection standards does not get 800,000 applications: it gets 300, of which 0.03% is a statistically empty number. The scalable version of this logic is to build the brand that attracts the right kind of candidate first, then raise the selection standards. In the reverse sequence, a high standard becomes a filter on a pool too small to work.