Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky regrets not obsessing over hiring sooner

• Brian Chesky said he personally gets involved in hiring at the top levels of Airbnb.
• The CEO said not prioritizing hiring earlier was a "death blow" that he could've avoided.
• Chesky's approach focuses on results over résumés, emphasizing talent referrals and connections.

If you're applying to work at Airbnb, the CEO may be reviewing your application.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Tuesday's episode of the "Invest Like the Best" podcast that a chief executive's No. 1 job is hiring.

"A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executives, and their executive team hires their team," Chesky said. "I think that is fatal."

He said he spends about five hours a day recruiting and is involved in the hiring process for the top 200 people in the company.

"The first and last call I make every day is the recruiting team," Chesky said.

Chesky said his "very radical" approach stems from a conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who once told Chesky that he would spend 50% of his time on hiring as a boss, during the early days of Airbnb after it had secured funding from VC firm Sequoia. Chesky said he didn't initially take that time, and it was a "death blow."

He said he spent years believing that a strong recruiting machine would give him more time to manage and focus on good ideas. His current theory, however, is that more time spent on recruiting results in less time spent managing people.

If you hire the right people, he said, they can manage themselves. "People managers," as he called them during the interview, are on the path to becoming redundant in the age of AI. Chesky said founders should consider hiring a recruiter before an engineer as their company's first employee.

Chesky also serves as a hiring manager, constantly meeting new people and building a pipeline of talent to recruit. He said he uses referrals by asking the best people he knows who they know, like building a mafia.

"I basically build these little mafias," Chesky said. "Every company's got like a little mafia of talent."

The trick is to focus on results over résumé, Chesky said. For example, it's more efficient to find out who worked on an ad you like than to scout someone who worked at a company known for its marketing.

Airbnb hasn't been immune to layoffs in the past. In 2020, it cut thousands of workers, equaling 25% of its workforce, amid the pandemic.

However, it looks like Chesky has been busy growing Airbnb. As of Wednesday, the company had about 240 open job listings on its site. It said in February 2025 that it planned to slightly increase its head count growth rate on the product side, though the company hasn't given a more recent hiring update on earnings calls.

"The difference between the good companies and the great companies are the people, and I think AI kind of makes that clear now," Chesky said. "I obsess over recruiting."