I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
I worked with a recruiter that reached out to me via LinkedIn. Initially I wasn't looking to interview but after a few months the recruiter contacted me again and it was a better time then, so I gave it shot. The phone screens went really well and I thought the onsites went well too.
However, the experience left me quite confused. Two days after the interview, the recruiter sent me an email with false hopes. The email read along the lines of "Let's discuss the next steps", then when we talked on the phone I was told that although all the interviews went really well, one of them wasn't excellent, and therefore they are sad to deliver the bad news.
Honestly, I wasn't totally convinced that I wanted to work for Airbnb but I thought I'd give it a shot since the company talks so much about "compassion" and "belonging". l don't believe compassionate people use non-transparent language to communicate, and also I don't believe smart people value other people only on the basis of a single interview not being "excellent".
Phone screen 1:
HTML/CSS/JavaScript problem on CodePen
Phone screen 2:
JavaScript problem on CodePen
Onsite:
Three coding interviews, one lunch, two cross-functional, and one about your past experience working on a project.
I liked that I was able to write code in CodePen instead of a whiteboard or any other environments where you can't execute code at all. Additionally I enjoyed the cross functional parts because it allowed me to be more relaxed. I thought the Frontend focused questions were pragmatic and realistic for the most part. I have mixed feelings about the one general coding question - the interviewer of this question was constantly pulling me in different directions as if he/she was trying to confuse me on purpose.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I signed their NDA and can't disclose, but strong UI, JavaScript, and general programming experience is needed.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb
Interview
Online applications must be an automated process as I was rejected from my online application but a recruiter personally reached out to me weeks later.
I had a short call with the recruiter to review my experience and was set up for a technical screen for which I was told would cover frontend concepts and best practices. I was also sent prep materials emphasizing the same. However the actual technical screen was a data structure and algorithm/ leet code hard problem.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2022
Interview
Recruiting team seems very understaffed and overworked. When I was interviewing, it took them almost 2 weeks to get back to me after the technical screen, and virtual onsites. The recruiter also didn't seem to respect my time, often calling me without any warning with important info while I'm not available. They were also extremely unresponsive to my emails/messages. Airbnb was my first choice when I started interviewing, and it took such a long time that I found out about another compelling opportunity and took that instead.
That being said, the interviews themselves were average difficulty, the company outlook seems good, the engineers there seem great to work with.
I applied online. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in May 2019
Interview
Recruiter screen followed by a Tech phone screen.
I got a simple JS question dealing with hashmaps and arrays. I was able to code a perfectly working solution without any help. The interviewer kept making it tougher as I proceeded and I passed all the test cases. There was no back and forth and it was really smooth.
Still, I got a reject which was confusing!
I was reading through TeamBlind forum for Airbnb interviews and it has points on discrimination on ethnicity etc. It was a disheartening experience considering Airbnb was one of my favorite companies.
