Here is an overview of how the hiring process works – There are five steps:
1) Submit a resume through the Airbnb job site
2) Complete the next level of questions through their interviewing partner, HireArt - It requires a webcam and microphone, and takes about 45 minutes. The sooner you do your HireArt interview the better, as they will be reviewing these on a rolling basis.
3) If they like what they see from your full application, they will invite you to one of their group Hiring Meetups in San Francisco
4) If you inspire them at the Meetup, they will schedule you for a follow up interview either over Skype or in person.
5) If you impress them through Step 4 then they will want to extend an offer to have you join the Airbnb.
The Meetup involved five parts:
1) First there were welcome and introductions. Each person said their name and talked a couple minutes about their most memorial Airbnb experience. People who had never used Airbnb spoke about other people they knew who had used the service. There were about 28 people at the Meet-up, including about 8 Airbnb employees. The Meet-up was held at the Ian Ross Gallery in SOMA district.
2) We then split up into three groups of about 6-8 people and did role-playing exercises. The employees gave you scenarios of real customer service phone calls. For example, someone calls Airbnb complaining that their Airbnb rental is infested with cockroaches and you’re supposed to respond to the caller. There is no right answer to the role-playing. You don’t have to quote Airbnb policy. They just want you to act the way a customer service representative should act: be confident, polite and understanding.
3) We then did a problem solving exercise. Each group was given a box of plastic toy parts for building models, sort of like Legos. Then, one-by-one, each member of your group had to walk into a backroom and memorize an abstract model made out of these toy parts. You have 30 seconds to memorize what the model looks like, and then you have about one minute to communicate what the model looks like to your group so that you’re group can try to replicate the model. You are not allowed to touch the model when you are describing it to your group. This exercise is used to see how you interact with your team and how well you communicate information. All the groups did pretty well in this exercise.
4) Employees talked more about the job and we had some Q&A time.
5) Then we had one-one interviews with employees. We were supposed to have two one-on-one interviews, but we only had time to do one one-on-one interview.
Everyone filled out an availability form for a Skype interview, which would be held the following week. However, only people who did well in the Meet-up were going to be contacted for Skype interviews.
