How Airbnb Rewrote Its Recruiting Playbook

Personally, reading this article, I doubt even AirBnB does a good job. Lets check it out.... I haven't interviewed with them but I can go thru my normal job hunt process.

This may sound harsh but I consider applying for a job to be a serious process. I know companies seem to take candidates for granted a lot, and there's a lot of emphasis on weeding out bad hires.... but how many people think about the fact that you're going into a situation where they ask you questions, don't give you much time to learn about them, and then expect you to be there for 3 or more years?

I care about my life and I don't want to waste 3 or more years in a bad situation, because it does lasting damage to your resume. So, you have to be very perceptive, and look closely at the information you do get. Based on this experiment (what I will write up below) I would never even apply to AirBnB because the indications are they are not a good place to work.

You're right that good recruiting is a competitive advantage, but it seems like AirBnB doesn't have it. And I'd guess it's because the corporate culture is too arrogant... anywhere here's my notes upon evaluating AirBnB as a place to apply:

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- First off, their jobs page is full of HR BS, it's not genuine at all, it comes off as completely fake. By genuine, I mean relatable to a potential employee. And by fake I mean written by an HR person in vague generalities that don't really mean anything. This is a strong indicator that the culture may really suck hard. Example, BS like this: "Everyone is creative. Think scary big. Volunteer for impossible situations. Get shit done." Volunteer for impossible situations? So, you want me to set myself up for failure? Cause I'm a ninja, right? Words do have meanings.

- No remote engineering positions. Most of their jobs are in the bay area. Two strikes indicating a lack of care for their employees. Working in the bay area is about %250 as expensive as living elsewhere (I did a comparison to Austin and when cost of living (which is high in Austin) and additional taxes in california are added, then I would have needed a %150 pay raise to have the same take home pay-- and the salaries being offered in california are not that high.) Your 500th engineer does not need to be in california.

- Their job listing page for a job highly relevant to me-- pretty good. The listing is very polished but more genuine than the jobs page. No "ninja" but they do fall into "We want someone who is great at X but also not-X and this other unrelated not-X as well." For values of X and not-X that are kinda mutually exclusive (yes, you could be a designer who codes but you're going to be more one or the other not really both, and certainly not all three. Pick one.) They bragged about doing something where they literally did a half assed job. EG: "We've done X a lot, in fact we've done it Y times!" Where Y is half of what it should be for a proper professional solution.

- Benefits: What's a "employee travel coupon" They should explain it. Also, if you're going to make me drag my butt into your office every day, at least give me a standing desk, preferably motor operated. At home I can just work out whenever I want.

-- Looks like an open office plan. When you're at that level of operations you should give engineers the option of a 1 or 2 person office, and make it clear on your recruiting site. If you don't offer this, you don't know what you're doing.

I haven't interviewed with them, so here's my review of recent (Eg this year) reviews on Glassdoor:

-- Bad technical interview, using a clearly inappropriate technical question (Eg: let's entertain ourselves by watching the candidate squirm, and get an ego boost as well for knowing the answer.)

-- Yeah, this one I'll just quote: "This was one bad experience. I have interviewed at many places- big and small companies and experience at AirBnb is easily the worst. I applied online and HR called to schedule a phone interview. We went back and forth and they could not interview on the dates I had provided. I was going to be in SF for something else the next week and they suggested that I come onsite directly for onsite interviews as the phone interview dates were not working out. So I extended my stay (my own expenses as I am not a local candidate) and got ready for onsite interviews. When I went there, and asked for the agenda - the HR tells me - that its going to be just 1 interview - similar to a phone interview except that its going to be in person. I was shocked. I showed them the email where they confirmed me for onsite and they simply stated it was a communication mishap. This costed me heavily in terms of time and money. The HR seemed very careless and inefficient.

As for the interview, the interviewer asked me a Dynamic Programming question (hard one) and said - he didn't care how I implemented it but just wanted a working code in 30 mins. I tried and was very close to the solution. I had a minor bug in the base case of my recursion. The interviewer just stood up at the 30 min mark and left abruptly. I came out and quickly tried the solution in my laptop. I was able to complete it and get it working in another 5 mins. But from the looks of it, there is no credit for implementation idea, thought process or any such thing.

Overall, very negative experience."

Sounds very much like the experience from several years ago posted elsewhere in this thread.

BTW, if you're just looking for working code and you're not caring about the candidates thought process, you fail, and you should be fired from interviewing on the spot. Multiple of the reviews mentioned this, so clearly this is a pattern which makes me think it's a policy! That's kinda astounding!

Yeah, it just continues from there, bad experience after bad experience:

"Recruiters at Airbnb are the most unprofessional bunch of people. They don't reply to emails for weeks and don't attend you during onsite. In my onsite, one interviewer didn't come to interview room on time, the other was busy doing her work after giving me a question. I have interviewed at big/small all kind of companies, have offers from them but this was the worst experience so far. All my respect for the company gone down in drain. They publicize their "core values" so much, one of which is "Be a host." They were the worst host an interview candidate can get."

More than enough negative reviews and more importantly indications of bad arbitrary interview process in the positive reviews as well to tell me to stay away.

What he's describing there isn't a recruiting problem. It's a douchebag culture problem. I doubt you can fix that just by redoing the recruitment process.

It's like you're saying "it's your fault, here's what you should have done". Someone came up with a good term for this sort of HN answer the other day, "hindsight snark" or similar. In fact, any way you look at it a company with decent cash and an ounce of self respect should not be out there screwing industry peers over for time and chump change when it wants to expand.

Disclaimer: I've had similar experiences with Google... outright missing interviews, saying one thing and doing another, failing to communicate entirely. Most of my own career has been at smaller companies or starting them myself. That's my resolution... just avoid big companies!

Completely agree. Yet, the number of companies using hacker rank and other timed tests is going up! I honestly prefer a whiteboard interview, where I can actually explain my thought process with the interviewer. Its far better than bash out the first solution that comes into my head, as I don't have time to think it through properly.

That's the point in which I walk out. So disrespectful and shortsighted.