I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2017
Interview
I applied for the role through internal referral, and heard back from the recruiter 2 days later for a follow up phone call. The conversation with the recruiter went well, and I really liked how clear the recruiter provided the team structure info without me even asking. This followed by the take home assignment, due to my own schedule problem, I did the take home 1.5 weeks later. One thing interesting happened was I could not find the role I applied for on Airbnb anymore before I did my take-home. I was not sure if that role was still open or something happened to it, but I decided not to ask but just to go through with the take-home step.
The take-home question is an interesting one to work on, but I don't know where the time estimated to complete the task came from, to me, 3-6 hours is an unrealistic timeline to solve such an open-ended question; especially when you are expected to put together a presentation or have a write up.
The timeline for getting feedback from take-home was also clearly communicated. So as expected, I got my result on the last day, though a bad news. And what's more is I actually got some concrete feedback when I asked the recruiter, which shows Airbnb's transparency, not like a lot of other big companies these days. I don't think the take-home reflects my real ability on the part they ding'd me for, but I understand their decision if there are other people who managed to do a better job than I am from all fronts within the 48-hour deadline.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
With recruiter it's mostly about my past experience and what kind of role I am looking for. The take home is to find insights through marketplace (host-guest) data in a specific city