Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky doesn’t think hiring is just HR’s job. Despite being very busy running the $98 billion rental company and managing over 8,200 employees, he sets hours aside daily to recruiting. And if his managers don’t want him that involved in their hiring decisions, his advice is blunt: leave.
“I probably spend three hours a day recruiting,” Chesky recently told Time. It sounds like a lot of time for a handful of top hires. But that’s because he no longer just approves Airbnb’s executive roles. Now, he wants to be involved with who his executives hire, too.
“I treat myself as the co-hiring manager for all my directs directs,” he explained, while adding that it’s not because his senior leadership team aren’t effective at hiring and need micromanaging.
In fact, he used to leave hiring decisions entirely up to those below him—until it dawned on him that every one of those hires could one day be sitting in his own leadership team’s seats.
“We both have to agree to the person because when my exec retires, naturally they’ll be looking at their person under them as their successor,” he added. “If it’s their person, not your person, they may not be philosophically aligned with me.”
And if Chesky’s reports don’t like him meddling in their hiring decisions? “If that creates tension, then I’m going to tell them leave the company,” he said. “If somebody needs ‘authority’ to operate in a huge amount of space separate from me, then I tell them this is not the right company for you.”
Chesky admits he stole the hiring idea from OpenAI boss Sam Altman
Chesky wasn’t always this hands-on. In fact, he said that hiring barely registered as a priority for him until OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO Sam Altman changed his mind.
“He said hiring should be 50% of your job,” Chesky recalled. “During the pre-launch of ChatGPT, he told me that’s what he did.”
“It never was 50 of my job. It wasn’t even 10% of my job, and so I never really spent enough time hiring, and I never really made it a high enough priority,” he added.
Chesky and Altman’s friendship goes back nearly two decades, to 2006, when Altman mentored Chesky through startup accelerator Y Combinator. The relationship has stayed close ever since. Altman has previously said he leaned heavily on Chesky after ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, and again during his brief ousting from OpenAI in 2023.
And while Chesky said he’s not sure on whether Altman’s hiring philosophy has changed since OpenAI has grown from a scrappy startup to a $852 billion tech giant with over 4,500 employer, it’s reshaped how he runs Airbnb.
“I think I learned the hard way that I didn’t spend enough time on hiring, and so I now think it’s the number one priority inside the company for me,” he said.
“The basic philosophy is we’re not trying to hire for the company of today; we’re trying to hire for the company of tomorrow,” Chesky added. “We want you to come here to build the company of tomorrow… Somebody has to be there to sell the dream of who we’re going to be tomorrow, and I think that person’s the founder.”
Chesky isn’t the only CEO rewriting the rules on hiring: Apple’s Steve Jobs had a ‘beer test’ and Bolt CEO fired HR
Chesky’s hands-on approach is unusual given Airbnb’s size, but he’s certainly not alone; and at such senior levels, some executives have even developed tests to weed out the best of the best.
Twilio’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler told Fortune that he interviews candidates for 45 minutes over dinner and if they say “I” too much or don’t ask any questions, that’s a red flag. Bupa’s $25 billion CEO, meanwhile, thinks one-hour interviews are a waste of time—he puts candidates through six hours of tests instead, and watches to see if they order wine at lunch.
Netskope’s $5 billion CEO Sanjay Beri has admitted he secretly calls references candidates never listed to get an honest take on a potential new hire’s personality—and he’ll even ask coworkers they clashed with what they really think of the candidate.
The late Steve Jobs famously used a “beer test” to judge candidates at Apple. One CEO has even given candidates live feedback mid-interview, specifically to see whether they freeze up or get offended. Meanwhile, an IBM exec has taken to asking every candidate a very timely make-or-break question: do you think we’re in an AI bubble?
And then there’s Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, who took things even further than Chesky. Rather than getting more involved in hiring, he simply cut the entire HR department. He told Fortune that the department meant to help with staffing was actually just creating more red tape and “problems that didn’t exist… Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
