Airbnb's Chesky Spends Three Hours a Day on Hiring

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says he devotes three hours a day to recruiting—and he has a blunt message for any executive who objects to his involvement in their hiring decisions: find another employer.

"I probably spend three hours a day recruiting," Chesky told Time. That commitment covers far more than approving Airbnb's executive roles. Chesky now positions himself as a co-decision-maker on everyone his direct reports bring in.

"I treat myself as the co-hiring manager for all my directs' directs," he explained. He insisted this is not micromanagement. His senior leaders hire effectively. The issue, as he sees it, is succession.

"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 said. "If it's their person, not your person, they may not be philosophically aligned with me."

And if his executives bristle at the arrangement? "If that creates tension, then I'm going to tell them leave the company," Chesky 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."

The idea came from Sam Altman

Chesky was not always this hands-on. He credits OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman with changing his approach.

"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."

The admission is striking. "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," Chesky said.

The two CEOs have known each other since 2006, when Altman mentored Chesky through startup accelerator Y Combinator. The relationship has stayed close. Altman has said he leaned on Chesky after ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, and again during his brief ousting from OpenAI in 2023.

Chesky is unsure whether Altman still applies the same philosophy now that OpenAI has grown into an $852 billion company with more than 4,500 employees. But the lesson has stuck at Airbnb, where Chesky oversees 8,200 people at a company valued at $98 billion.

"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.

His framing is forward-looking. "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 said. "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."

Other CEOs are rewriting hiring rules too

Chesky's level of involvement is unusual at Airbnb's scale, but senior executives across industries have built their own screening methods.

Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler told Fortune he interviews candidates for 45 minutes over dinner and watches for red flags: candidates who say "I" too much or ask no questions. Bupa's CEO, who runs the $25 billion company, considers one-hour interviews a waste of time. He puts candidates through six hours of tests and watches whether they order wine at lunch.

Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri, who leads the $5 billion company, has admitted he secretly calls references candidates never listed, asking coworkers they clashed with what they really think of the candidate.

The late Steve Jobs famously used a "beer test" at Apple to judge candidates. Another CEO gives candidates live feedback mid-interview to see whether they freeze up or get offended. An IBM executive asks every candidate a make-or-break question: do you think we're in an AI bubble?

Then there is Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, who went further than Chesky. Rather than getting more involved in hiring, he cut the entire HR department. He told Fortune the department was creating red tape and "problems that didn't exist… Those problems disappeared when I let them go."

For a company of Airbnb's size, the bet is that founder-led recruiting at three hours a day builds the leadership bench of tomorrow—whether or not every executive enjoys the oversight.