Applied online with a resume. There was no recruiter call or email exchange, and got scheduled for a technical phone interview right away.
Technical phone interview:
- no video chat, just phone call with online coding tool
- no introductions in the beginning, straight to coding
- interviewer didn't ask about my experiences at all during the interview
- 45 minutes long, which is shorter than the 1 hour average time I usually have for phone interviews
- 2 part question. 1st part is find if string is a palindrome, 2nd part is to find all pairs of strings in a list than can form a palindrome (it's in Leetcode). I struggled to find the optimal solution for the 2nd part until the very end, which took up most of the interview.
- Did not get feedback for 3 days, and only emailed me back when I asked them. Generic HR message saying they've looked carefully at my experiences, interview performance, etc. But I don't think my experiences were looked at since it was never asked about it.
Overall it was a very impersonal experience. Airbnb definitely wanted to interview in a rushed way by not having the first HR introductory call, and making the interview time to only 45 minutes. I felt that the interviewer could've paced the interview better ether by giving hints earlier, or when I was struggling with the coding part, at least ask about my experiences to see if there was a fit in that regard (which I think there is after asking her what she was doing).