Key Takeaways

  • Bending Spoons centralizes hiring under dedicated talent evaluators instead of letting department heads choose their own team members.
  • The company tracks over 100 behavioral and cognitive signals per candidate, including how an applicant treats support staff during the process.
  • Experience in digital tech decays quickly, often bringing bad corporate habits, low standards, and internal politics into high-output environments.
  • Tying compensation or promotions directly to narrow, rigid performance targets creates perverse incentives that hurt company performance.

The Trap of Stale Experience

Most tech companies hunt for senior resumes. They want the executive who ran an engineering team at a public company or the marketer who managed a massive budget five years ago. Luca Ferrari took the opposite approach at Bending Spoons. When evaluating performance across teams running products like Evernote, the highest output did not come from industry veterans.

“The range of productivity at least in our field in digital technology is massive,” Ferrari explains. “So the value of having on board that sort of individual is gigantic, and also that person who was performing at the peak in that group was actually one of the least experienced people.”

In fast-moving software categories, technical playbooks expire every few years. While soft skills and emotional maturity carry forward, technical and managerial habits often degrade into liability. “Whatever people learned back then, yes, some of it will port,” Ferrari notes. “I'm sure you are more mature emotionally, you know how to work with others and whatnot, but a lot of that experience basically you can throw it away.”

Instead of screening for years on a resume, Bending Spoons looks for high raw cognitive ability and drive. The company treats early talent selection as a quantitative discipline rather than an interview gut check. “We've really built a science out of studying people's track records, including academic records and personal projects and similar things, whereby in some application we identify over 100 different signals and through those we predict their long-term potential.”

Why Team Managers Should Never Hire

The standard corporate playbook lets engineering and marketing managers build their own squads. Ferrari calls this a structural mistake because department leaders operate under the wrong incentives.

“Hiring managers, meaning that person who runs the team, have almost all the wrong incentives in hiring,” Ferrari says. When a team leader falls behind on a deadline, they feel acute pain today. That pain creates an urge to hire warm bodies who can do basic tasks immediately, even if those hires lower the talent density over the next three years. A dedicated talent team, insulated from day-to-day project emergencies, protects the long-term hiring standard.

This philosophy extends to how Bending Spoons evaluates performance after candidates join. Most organizations set rigid quarterly targets and tie bonuses directly to hitting them. Ferrari avoids this practice entirely.

“We find that setting highly specific concrete objectives to which career progression or pay are tied almost invariably leads to bad outcomes or inferior outcomes,” Ferrari explains. When pay depends on fixed metrics, employees optimize for easily gameable targets instead of solving hard, ambiguous company problems. By decoupling compensation from narrow scorecards and letting dedicated talent specialists control hiring, Bending Spoons keeps standards high across lean teams.

What to Do With This

Take hiring authority away from your team leads on their next open role. Design an objective assessment battery that scores raw problem-solving speed and work samples rather than years of experience, and assign one neutral operator outside the team to hold veto power over every hiring decision.