I applied through a referral about a month ago for a product design position and was for some reason put on the senior product designer tract. I thought that was a testament to my work and a vote of confidence! I had two 45 minute phone conversations with two separate people over the span of about 2 weeks. I was then asked to do a design exercise which took me about 15 hours to complete. A lot of time considering I still had a job at the time, but I was excited about the job prospect so I went with it. All feedback was positive and the phone conversations were interesting and went really well. I then was called and went into a 5 hour in-office interview about a week or so later and sat in a waiting room for 45 minutes while my time ticked away. The interview started about 30 minutes late because the meeting room scheduled for my portfolio presentation was double booked, meaning I was unable to properly present my work and had to crunch an hour long presentation that I was specifically requested to create for that interview into 30 minutes. That presentation took me probably 5 or 6 hours to pull together. Then no one could figure out how to hook my computer up to the presentation screen, so for the majority of what was left of my time, I tried to present from my laptop screen while my audience intermittently looked up at me while trying to figure out why Airplay wasn't working. They were encouraging but I felt like I still had a lot to say about my work and was nervous that the opportunity was botched, though they reassured me. I then had a handful of 30 minute culture interviews and a casual lunch where my work basically wasn't discussed at all, it was mostly touchy feely culture questions about my thoughts on life, process, Oprah, etc. Every interviewer except one said things like "wow that's a great answer" more than once, and some frankly spent a lot of time talking to me rather than listening. After almost 40 hours of time dumped into the process, a lot of stress and waiting (they were a day later than they said they would be with the response and I had to wait over the weekend) I wasn't offered a position because I didn't have enough experience for the role they were looking for and got the "maybe in 6 months to a year" brush off from them. All told it was a very time consuming and oddly personal experience that I feel like could have been avoided because they knew how many years of experience I had simply by looking at my resume. I'm also not sure why they suggested I apply for a senior position rather than just telling me there was nothing for me at that time. Advice for anyone applying: be skeptical of any positive feedback you receive from them. They "host" your interview and want you to feel welcome, but are very critical, and honestly not super respectful of your time. Also if you apply, be ready to dump basically a weeks worth of productivity into the process for potentially no gain.

After a long, needlessly drawn out interview process, I was essentially ghosted. I sent 2 polite follow ups over the course of 3 weeks. Each time the recruiter replied with a vague promise to follow up soon, but never did. My takeaway is that Airbnb does not respect the time and effort recruits put into their interview process.