Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says he spends three hours a day on recruitment—and if his hiring managers don’t like his input, he tells them to leave

Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky doesn't think hiring is just HR's job. Despite being very busy running the $98 billion rental company and managing over 8,200 employees, he sets hours aside daily to recruiting. And if his managers don't want him that involved in their hiring decisions, his advice is blunt: leave.

"I probably spend three hours a day recruiting," Chesky recently told Time . It sounds like a lot of time for a handful of top hires. But that's because he no longer just approves Airbnb's executive roles. Now, he wants to be involved with who his executives hire, too.

"I treat myself as the co-hiring manager for all my directs directs," he explained, while adding that it's not because his senior leadership team aren't effective at hiring and need micromanaging.

In fact, he used to leave hiring decisions entirely up to those below him—until it dawned on him that every one of those hires could one day be sitting in his own leadership team's seats.

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

And if Chesky's reports don't like him meddling in their hiring decisions? "If that creates tension, then I'm going to tell them leave the company," he 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."

Chesky admits he stole the hiring idea from OpenAI boss Sam Altman

Chesky wasn't always this hands-on. In fact, he said that hiring barely registered as a priority for him until OpenAI's co-founder and CEO Sam Altman changed his mind.

"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."

"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," he added.

Chesky and Altman's friendship goes back nearly two decades, to 2006, when Altman mentored Chesky through startup accelerator Y Combinator. The relationship has stayed close ever since. Altman has previously said he leaned heavily on Chesky after ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, and again during his brief ousting from OpenAI in 2023.

And while Chesky said he's not sure on whether Altman's hiring philosophy has changed since OpenAI has grown from a scrappy startup to a $852 billion tech giant with over 4,500 employer, it's reshaped how he runs Airbnb.