How Airbnb Rewrote Its Recruiting Playbook
forbes.com
forbes.com
I have been looking for jobs recently, and while nowhere near as extreme a scenario as that case, a lot of companies expect me to speak with the HR person for 20 minutes on skype, followed by a timed online coding test, despite knowing nothing about the job. You can ask the HR person, but usually they know next to nothing.
Timed coding tests are stupid. That's not how I work on a day to day basis. "Weeks of coding can save hours of planning" is something I believe, and that planning is where my 12 years of experience in the industry makes a difference.
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.)
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!
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.
For example, why does Google sometimes take close to a year to make a decision on a candidate? Because they can afford to, with a pipeline of thousands of qualified candidates enough of whom will be OK playing along with Google's timeline in exchange for the significant CV boost, higher salary, prestige, experience, etc. The same applies to university applications - a lot of people will spend fortunes in time and money to try and get into Harvard, Stanford or MIT because the upside of having these schools on the CV is so high. Both prestigious jobs and universities (whether or not they should) do open doors, allow you to raise more funding and faster, to get higher positions all things being equal, to get your CV read in a pile of 200...
So it comes down to valuing each position's Net Present Value (NPV) and the probability of it being a success, and deciding whether this is the most attractive use of your time and money. Let's say AirBNB has an NPV of (an additional) $3 million over the next 10 years thanks to the network and career boost, and you have a 5% change of getting it, the value of taking the interview is still $150k. Assuming you weigh negatives 9x as high as positives (can't remember where I read about this cognitive bias), if the interview has a total cost (including opportunity cost) of under $16k it is worth doing. Of course, at 5% chance of success per position, it's probably worth applying to more than just AirBNB.
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.
"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.
edit: disclaimer: i work at airbnb
Opposite of what I experienced.
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.
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.
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.