
How Airbnb Rewrote Its Recruiting Playbook - GCA10
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/05/06/airbnbs-5-star-recruiting-twist-the-competitive-power-of-nice/
======
dominotw
I had the most humiliating experience of my life interviewing with AirBnb
couple of years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104)

~~~
trimble-alum
1\. Don't pay for anything out-of-pocket for a fly-in interview without solid
assurances you won't be screwed (What assurances do I have your accounting
people won't give me the indefinite run-around?) or disbursement delays
forever (When can I count on being repaid?). Expense reimbursements normally
requires receipts, prior approval (specific person in HR or hiring mgr) and
talking to accounting to submit the right forms.

2\. Don't do a fly-in interview without the following minimums: a phone screen
with HR, hiring manager and a video call or two with someone on the team,
otherwise they don't have enough invested because they've not qualified you
enough to not waste your time and money.

Or: find another or start your own company where people's time and money are
not abused. (There's always some time / money invested on both sides of the
table, and it's mostly wasted... The wise move is to reduce it as much as
possible while still giving people enough of a chance.)

~~~
contingencies
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!

~~~
trimble-alum
Most interviewing are wasted time and money, on both sides of the table, that
is the presumption, it's a numbers game, also on both sides. It's when a
pattern of excess accumulates which builds resentment: candidates just gauging
their market worth OR employers being too picky about the wrong things OR not
following up to make things right.

How are accounting people supposed to know a reimbursement needs to happen if
former candidates and/or hiring managers do not let them know? They're not
mind readers. Hiring managers should be clear about whom pays for what and how
to recoup any out of pocket, or resentment will spread. Also, it does show
lack of professionalism on the company's part if they do indeed seem to screw
candidates, even if it were an actual innocent oversight. It would be
titanically stupid to habitually, intentionally cheat unselected candidates in
the modern world, for the ensuing exposure risks deterring good candidates at
least and risks lawsuits at work.

Furthermore, on the candidate side of the table, it signals wisdom on behalf
of a candidate if they socially-appropriately limit themselves to risks of
screwed. This is a hiring signal of value, whereas someone that hasn't a clue
is usually not respected as seriously. (To be fair, many of the best employees
in their fields can seem shy, humble and odd to most. This is why it's crucial
for astute interviewers to be non-threatening and mutually explore 1. how good
will this person be on our actual work and 2. will they not mess up the shop's
mojo... Hazing doesn't overcome current business problems, it guards
incumbents' sense of in-group entitlement)

PS: I've interviewed as an SRE manager at GOOG before and helped others with
their projects there, but I've decided to stay "executing" (bizword bingo)
independently on something else. The issue at GOOG is that their interviewing
process is somewhat more pragmatic than most but still doesn't go far enough
and is too ad-hoc/ineffective. Really though, I just don't respect their
products enough to commit the emotional energy into someone else's ship. The
advantage of small shops are like small towns: less chance of Tragedy of the
Commons because there is nowhere to hide. Unlike most small towns, everyone in
small shops must be able to pull their own weight.

------
mkarazin
A good recruiting experience in my opinion indicates a well run business at
many levels. It's a key differentiator, especially for lower level staff. Much
akin to how someone treats wait staff, how recruiters and employees treat
potential employees shows a lot about their character and organization. I'm
somewhat suprised the simple requirements AirBnB uses (such as providing
feedback promptly) are not more widespread.

~~~
MCRed
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:

=================

\- 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.

------
franklyjeremy
I remember applying to work AirBnB back in 2009 or 2010. I still recall today
the curt response sent back to be:

"We don't accept applicants without a college degree."

Needless to say, I'm sure the policy has been amended; we work in a very
different world now.

~~~
x0x0
airbnb: where it's cool to roll a front end engineer into my scheduled
interview for ML 24 minutes late without having read my fucking resume

~~~
dominotw
Same. None of my interviewers read my resume (or my github)and bemoaned the
fact that my degree was not from an IVY league university, right to my face.

~~~
NegativeK
That sounds like a raw, perfect insight into a company I wouldn't want to work
for.

~~~
exhilaration
Agreed, these comments are far better than the article.

------
msoad
I feel AirBnb paid for this article. It all feels like a big ad from AirBnb. I
also feel it's sponsored by YC by putting it in front page with 37 points in 9
hours (at the moment of writing this comment)

------
untilHellbanned
So they started giving a shit and treated people with respect. Puff piece.

------
crimsonalucard
Reading the article it seems like Airbnb took the strategy many companies
choose not to take. I call the strategy, "Don't be a dick."

~~~
dominotw
> Dont be a dick

Opposite of what I experienced.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104)

~~~
dilap
It sounds like they realized they had a problem and turned it around. (Or it's
just pure PR spin, and the problem remains. Any recent interview experiences?)

~~~
MCRed
IT's pure PR spin. Glassdoor reviews from the past couple of months, both
positive and negative indicate to me that the process is very broken and
disrespectful.

For instance, multiple people mentioned not being able to get the answer to
the problem coded and running with unit tests in 30 minutes.

IF you're testing programmers on the speed at which they code then you don't
know what you're doing.

The more productive programmers are slower out of the gate. (EG: think about
something for awhile then write it out and produce something that works better
and requires less debugging and bashing into shape over the next 2 weeks.)

Even if you disagree with this hypothesis, testing for speed is measuring just
one parameter. Apparently they only care if the program runs in the aloted
time, not the thought process the engineer goes thru in writing it.

~~~
collyw
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.

------
gourneau
Does anyone have a picture of the storyboard?

------
seabj0rn
They also take a very data driven approach to hiring by leveraging applicant
tracking systems like Greenhouse and testing platforms like HackerRank. This
helps to surface top candidates and keep the operation smooth and tight.

~~~
MCRed
This alone tells me that they don't know what they are doing.

I interviewed for a job using Hacker Rank about 6 months ago. They insisted
that I complete their problems. The problems were trivially easy (that's ok,
there was a time limit so you don't want to make things too confusing or
difficult) but I struggled and barely got it in on time due to how terrible
the HackerRank system worked. I ran into innumerable bugs, from not compiling
the code correctly (poor install of the language) to front and bugs that would
cause edits to be lost -- I eventually started coding in a text editor and
copy and pasting the results in to submit-- but that didn't work very well
either, possible because they have an anti-cheat system or something.

I literally spent 5 minutes writing a solution to one of the answers, 1 minute
running it locally (worked the first time) and then 20 minutes trying to get
Hacker Rank to accept it. Some of them it never accepted-- the code would be
there but I couldn't get the hacker rank system to run it to check its output.

Of course, the "scoring" on hacker rank is how fast you are and whether you
get the correct output-- and this company explicitly stated that they rank
people by score. This was the only "technical" part of the interview process.

Of course I told them about the issues I ran into but at some point that's
going to sound like complaining, right?

So, now, I take outsourcing technical interviews to hacker rank as a sign of
incompetence.

IF the hiring manager isn't technical enough to conduct a technical interview,
then your company is not competently managed. PERIOD.

And hacker rank was such a joke that it shows they didn't even try it
themselves.

~~~
riffraff
FWIW, I had to use hackerrank for an interview some time ago and it worked ok,
so I'd consider that possibly the specific platform you used (i.e. Go 1.x.y or
Ruby 2.x.y or whatever) might have been poorly tested.

But I wouldn't discount a company just for using that or anything like it, I
think there is a reasonable use case for tools like it, i.e. as a glorified
FizzBuzz to weed out obvious non-hires, which is what it felt like when I had
to use it.

