Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Says He Spends Five Hours a Day on Recruiting for Top 200 Roles

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky spends about five hours a day recruiting and is involved in the hiring process for the top 200 people at the company. He makes the first and last call every day to the recruiting team. Chesky shared those details on Tuesday's episode of the "Invest Like the Best" podcast, which aired May 5, 2026.

Chesky said 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," he said. " The founder and CEO of Airbnb said he did not initially take hiring advice from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the early days of Airbnb after it had secured funding from Sequoia.

Altman had told Chesky that he would spend 50% of his time on hiring as a boss. Chesky called his failure to follow that counsel a "death blow" that he could have avoided. For years Chesky believed a strong recruiting machine would give him more time to manage and focus on good ideas.

His current theory is that more time spent on recruiting results in less time spent managing people. "If you hire the right people, they can manage themselves," he said. Chesky said people managers are on the path to becoming redundant in the age of AI.

He said founders should consider hiring a recruiter before an engineer as their company's first employee. Business Insider reported his remarks. Chesky said he uses referrals by asking the best people he knows who they know.

"I build these little mafias," he said. " He obsesses over recruiting and builds a pipeline of talent by constantly meeting new people. The trick is to focus on results over résumé, Chesky said.

It is 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. "The difference between the good companies and the great companies are the people, and I think AI kind of makes that clear now," he said. " Airbnb cut 25% of its workforce in 2020 amid the pandemic.

As of Wednesday, May 6, 2026, the company had about 240 open job listings on its site. Airbnb said in February 2025 that it planned to slightly increase its head count growth rate on the product side.