Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to interview and reference check new hires

Brian’s first piece of advice comes from Steve Jobs:

“Start with the results and work backwards to the people. Most people start with resumes. They start with brands — ‘Oh, this person worked at Google.’ But you should actually ask yourself: What products do I admire? And then who built those products?”

With respect to actually interviewing them, Brian’s first tip is to ask follow-up questions:

“Ask them to explain how they did something, and then the key is to ask two follow-ups. You never want the first answer. You always want the third answer. And if people don’t know what they’re talking about, they struggle. They might be able to follow-up, but the second follow-up, they become absent of details.”

But more important than interviewing, Brian argues, is references:

“I prioritize references over interviewing, especially with executives who have more experience BSing you than you have experience detecting their BS.”

Brian recalls that Andreessen Horowitz would tell him to do 8 hours of reference checks per employee:

“[That’s] probably over the top, but you should probably spend as much time referencing as you do hiring.”

He also believes the CEO should interview and reference check new hires as long as possible. Brian interviewed the first 400 people at Airbnb, but he wishes he interviewed longer.

And with respect to tactics for reference checks, Brian offers the following advice:

“A lot of people are polite. They’re afraid of the feedback getting back. So the first thing to say when you start the call is that everything is off the record — and it should be off the record. It should never be attributed to them. The more it’s unattributed to them, the more honest they’re going to be.”

On this topic, Brian recommends avoiding disqualifying questions:

“A lot of people don’t want to say somebody sucks or is not good… Say, ‘Okay, separate from this topic, I just want to know who’s the best person you’ve ever worked with?’ Do they say the person’s name you just asked about? They usually tell the truth and if they don’t say that person’s name, they’re not the best, right?”

And then ask for specifics:

“They said they’re amazing — well why are they amazing? What would you point to? If they have no specifics, maybe they weren’t really good… Then ask questions like, ‘Okay, what do I need to watch out for if I were to hire them?’ or ‘What’s the one area of development you would give them?’ If you say that, they have to tell you something because they’ll feel like they’re not thoughtful enough…. And then you ask them at the end who else you should talk to: ‘Can you give me two more names?’ And then you use that to build a network.”

Brian believes recruiting should be more like building a talent network than a sales pipeline.

Full video: The Art of Hiring “Brian Chesky - Founder Mode & The Art of Hiring“ (Oct 2024)

More popular advice from Brian Chesky

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on designing an amazing user experience. “How do you make something for a million people? I don’t know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Don’t stop improving it until that person loves it, and you’re not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on.” (full article).

Brian Chesky on why Airbnb took months to hire their first employee. “I felt your first engineer was like bringing DNA into your company. If we were successful, there were going to be 1,000 people just like him or her in the company. And so it wasn’t a matter of getting somebody to build the next three features we needed to ship for our users. There was something much more long-term and much more enduring, which was, do I want to work with 100 or 1,000 more people like this?” (full article).

Brian Chesky explains how Airbnb solved the chicken-and-egg problem. “Marketplaces are incredibly defensible at scale, and maybe it’s because they’re incredibly hard to start. And the problem is simple - they call it the chicken and egg problem.” (full article).

p.s. If you missed it, a new essay was published in The Founders’ Tribune yesterday: 9 Lessons from Peter Thiel by Joe Lonsdale