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.
3
No offer
Positive experience
Easy interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2017
Interview
Recruiter contacted me. They asked if I wanted to go for traditional engineer role or frontend engineer role. I chose frontend. They scheduled the interview at my earliest convenience.
First phone screen was in codepen and was to use any framework I wanted (jquery was loaded by default but I went with react) to implement a very basic frontend component. The task itself is easy but they were looking for how you might make it reusable and it was not conversational or collaborative. You can ask questions but you have to accomplish the task as fast as possible.
Moved to a second phone screen which was on coderpad which was to implement a model that passed some tests. This was conversational and they even said I could google things. The task is easy enough and does not require google. You should know all your basics of javascript and should be able to implement every new feature without hesitation.
If I could do it over, I would work faster, as the requirements of the second interview were iterative and it was unclear how much they expected you to accomplish within the time frame. The interviews both went well so hard to say what rubric they docked me on. Got the rejection email two days later with no feedback on why.
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.