Custom resume from someone who wanted to work at Airbnb (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Custom resume from someone who wanted to work at Airbnb (2015)

nina4airbnb.com

155 pointstswicegood105 comments

1. This has been submitted before, 302 days ago in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nina4airbnb.com

2. This is actually a case study in how to market yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150714043548/http://media.wix....

3. From the case study:

These are the numbers:

• 445,000+ Visits to Nina4Airbnb

• Hundreds of thousands of Tweets and millions of impressions

• 30,000+ New visitors to my personal blog

• 14,000+ LinkedIn profile views

• 2,000+ Emails and messages of support from around the world

• Global media coverage

• An interview with Airbnb

• A pipeline of interviews with dozens of other high impact companies

4. This is her blog post about it: http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

5. Fireside chat: https://youtu.be/tcjaqeXjKuc?t=7m14s

The blog post is worth a read.

This part was especially interesting to me:

the person interviewing me was saying he couldn’t contextualize my experience because i “hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford”.

That's awful if true. Especially as a direct quote. So much for being inclusive.

SV is far from inclusive. Pedigree is every thing out here. Else, you're just in the 'minor' leagues trying to break in.

I have a great idea for a start up named "Burnr" to burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.

Must have 3 years experience as a molotov professional.

What in hell does that even MEAN? "contextualize an experience?"

Not sure, but I think it means they couldn't make an apples-to-apples comparison. To them, they wanted some Coca Cola and instead were presented with a pair of Air Jordans. Sure, they are nice shoes, but they wanted a Coke.

Actually, they got a Pepsi. Tastes the same, affects the body the same, the only thing different was the packaging. And to be honest, if they didn't hire her because of the interviewers bias then she may have dodged a bullet- that kind of thing really raises a red flag for what a companies culture really values. And now I'll be more wary if looking for a job at AirBnb

It means placing an experience in context, and being able to relate it to other contexts.

For example, if you know someone who works with PHP then contextualizing their experience could follow these steps: understand that PHP is a programming language, look at their code and see it is well architected, decide to hire them even despite inexperience in Ruby because they have the core skills.

Being unable to contextualize experience isn't the same as not having emotional empathy. It is being unable to have an actionable intellectual grasp of a topic.

True, that interviewer should either not be interviewing or perhaps not even be working in this industry then...

My best guess is the interviewer didn't know shit and could only use "facebook," "google," "stanford" as indicators that someone who did know shit considered the interviewee worthwhile.

probably. Most pre-interview programs are heavily biased for those keywords too. So, when her resume when viral, she got a interview through the front end PR campaign called "this resume went viral, do something about it". Then, the interview was exactly the same as the software screening, but with doublespeak.

Ah! Thanks I knew I had seen this tactic before, but I thought this is a new attempt.

Regardless it's still a well done effort.

The bigger story here is that given that she's clearly way above average at what she does - she couldn't find a job for a year and did this as a last resort - an act of desperation.

Which also did not work out - she ended up with Elance. If we measure success by job vs no job, then yes, otherwise... eh...

People 'say' they want creativity, passion, etc - but in reality, most people who work in successful companies didn't get there based on merit but largely, just dumb luck. If you know you're in a cushy spot, do you want to hire people who are way better than you?

Nope.

The job market is broken, and most people you know are the reason why. The people holding down the jobs are interested in keeping it that way - or else they'd get replaced.

Imagine a basketball player who could choose his/her own teammates and knew that if he/she gets kicked off the team, nobody will hire him/her ever again... They'd rather see the whole team destroyed, they'll get to collect cheques a while longer that way.

With regular jobs - this is much less obvious but truth of the matter is - there are too many young people hungry to replace the old, that the only way to prevent the whole system from beginning to collapse is to impose classicisms in subtle and not so much ways.

While what you say can often be true, it is a sign of weak leadership. Strong leaders promote the best people and thereby lift themselves and the whole team. Bad leaders see strong subordinates as threats to their power and suffocate the team. Not saying there aren’t a LOT of bad leaders out there, but what you describe isn’t a law everywhere.

The bigger point I think is your first sentence. She’s way above average and couldn’t get a job for a year. “Woe is us, the shortage of qualified candidates“. Like I was telling one friend who was complaining about not being able to find someone good, “The reality is you can’t find someone good at the price you want to pay.” There’s a shortage of talent that wants to live in a one bedroom apartment with their family for scraps of equity while the boss lives in a mansion and makes millions, that’s the real shortage in SV.

To summarise your first paragraph #notallmanagers

Why do not all managers summarise his first paragraph?

It's how you define 'qualified'.

Here's from her blog:

"Professionals i admire were calling my work impressive, but the person interviewing me was saying he couldn’t contextualize my experience because i “hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford”."

Here's another:

"despite my 10 years of marketing and social media experience and despite the reach of my latest campaign, i was told i wouldn’t be that person."

This lady is clearly qualified. She's just not a good 'culture fit'.

I get that a fair bit myself - there's an apparent shortage of iOS developers and I happen to be one looking for work currently. Do you know how many companies explicitly say 'do you have a bachelor of computer science? no? ok bye'?

A lot! A college graduate being able to do iOS should be a 'wait, he/she must be good, that's unusual', instead it is straight to the garbage bin.

I could of course just start straight up lying on my resume and get better results but I just can't bring myself to do it.

Which means the hoardes of shameless liars who will say anything to get the job, get ahead. So it goes...

Is she qualified? Maybe.

My question is, what are the qualifications of the person that actually got the job?

I don't mean to nitpic but I tried to go read some of her blog [0] and it almost drove me crazy.... Someone buy her a Shift key! Lowercase "i"'s by themselves cause my skin to crawl as-is but she doesn't even start sentences with capitals.

[0] http://eatwritewalk.com/

This was explicitly from some doofus at Airbnb. One can at least hope that outside the Unicorn Ranch (and the FaceGoog) that people are more reasonable.

I constantly hear "We can't find any good techs". After interviews, I ask how it went, and I constantly hear "He was great, but he wanted too much money!"

So I whistle and get back to work. I've tried bringing it up before, but it just seems to fall on deaf ears.

Several of the companies I've worked at had this exact issue. So we'd hire a few people fresh out of college train to them to an acceptable standard, then watch them find another higher paying job. Leadership refused to pay good developers, their market worth. It might be important to note the CEO from the uk, where I hear developers are paid less than America.

> It might be important to note the CEO from the uk, where I hear developers are paid less than America.

I've heard that too, but I also hear they work less hours, have better vacation, and other benefits. You'll have to balance something out if you really want great employees.

Our CEO from the uk didn't bring any of those benefits over.

Regarding dumb luck, that's exactly how I got my first real job out of grad school. I had specialized in kind of a risky way. It would have made me less generally employable, but more desirable in the sector in which I wanted a job.

Looked like it wasn't going to pan out. I was totally unemployed in a bad market with skills not generally in demand. Student loans were looming and I was just about out of cash.

In a stroke of dumb luck, I went to the grocery to get a 6 pack of beer, a luxury at the time. On the way out, ran into my former boss from an internship who didn't even live in that area of town. She said they just got an opening and I would be perfect, as she knew my skillset.

Weeks later I started my career at my dream job.

This seems like an instance of Job's "A players hire A players, B players hire C players." [1] Results will vary by who is hiring.

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

> This seems like an instance of Job's "A players hire A players, B players hire C players."

Tangentially, I've always wondered, in that model, how B players ever get hired.

They hatch from the egg in the chicken or egg equation.

Dinosaurs.

Business always finds a way.

when B players found the company. For example software companies started by people who aren't excellent at writing software. And B hires C isn't even a bad outcome in that case, the founders may have other advantages and go on to be successful.

Interesting comment...

Given the limits imposed by Job's comment, which parameters the construct, it may be that the set of "B Players" are (failed) A players, who've involuntarily been forced a step down the ladder, or, alternatively, they are C players who've convinced some unspecified hiring intermediary that they're on the rise...

However one becomes a B player, by definition, one is constrained...one can only hire C players...dimming the prospects for success...so, for B, there appears to be little chance of ascending, or re-ascending, to A player status...

Whimsical, but fun to think about...

The right way to think about it is to realize that hiring is a very difficult business, and we all make mistakes. So it's not who they hire, but who they intend to hire. They still miss.

So A players end up hiring B players when they don't want to, and sometimes A players sneak through the B player's filter.

And this is why, when people that are apparently very good leave your company, you have to wonder if you have to much B team, and you are letting them run amok.

Tangentially, by dumb luck. Or they pretend to be C players and get paid as those.

Some times A players can fall to B or C due to life circumstance.

Sometimes whole teams are formed with B and C players because company cannot pay A wages/benefits, and it just stays in B or C arena.

I always strive to have people better than me on my team, and support them and keep them happy.

Jobs hired Sculley. What does that make Jobs?

This. Can people please stop quoting Jobs? He was a massive narcissist who propped himself up on other people's work.

This bullshit about A players was just his way of forcing everyone that worked for him to fear not delivering on his absurd expectations lest they become a "B" player.

>most people who work in successful companies didn't get there based on merit but largely, just dumb luck

Do you have evidence for this, or are you just speculating? My experience (based on my employment history and the employment history of those close to me) is that ability to get hired correlates very closely with merit (including technical skill, amicability, etc.)

Do you have any evidence, or you're just speculating on your own experience? Most people would, of course, never admit they got hired based on luck instead of merit.

My point is clearly that neither I nor the person I responded to have presented hard evidence re. ability to get jobs versus merit.

However, I'm more inclined to believe the entailments of my own experience than the informal inferences of some stranger. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

I might argue that I even have "data" in the form of a reasonably large group of professional acquaintances. "Luck" is nothing but statistical noise, and a large number of people and a large number of job applications helps damp down the noise. There is a very obvious trend in the form of more meritorious people performing better when applying for jobs.

This made the circles ~a year ago when it was published, unfortunately didn't work out at AirBNB for Nina.

"Now, three months later, Mufleh tells Business Insider that Airbnb decided she wasn't the right candidate for the marketing role she had been considered for." (1)

But it's been succesful enough as a marketing piece to get her interviewed far-and-wide and - like a good marketer - she wrote a white paper to double down on the success.(2)

(1) http://www.businessinsider.com/the-resume-that-got-nina-mufl...

(2) http://www.nina4airbnb.com/#!whitepaper/c1e1m

Holy shit, putting on my protective suit before all the "DONT BREAK MY BROWSER'S BACK BUTTON" comments come pouring in :).

Actually, I don't think it would break browser interaction, but yeah, I think she should consider re-creating the page as text rather than screenshots of text. First of all, much easier to edit (and style) when it's just text. Second, makes it much easier for the employer to Cmd-F search for keywords.

My other recommendation would be to have a prominent resumé link, and have it point to a standard PDF. Though maybe a linkedin link is good enough? I know Airbnb is probably more tech-forward than most employers, but there are still some HR shops that print out candidates' resumes to read by paper..and if your web-ready resumé does _not_ print out well...you may be at a disadvantage.

While this may not be the most technically well-executed page...have to give credit to the applicant for even trying to do something different, even if she's not a web developer. I've often introduced web dev to newbies by just pointing out that when they really need to get something online for the whole world to see...an image works just as well in a jiffy. The Web isn't just about HTML, but about having that URL that anyone in the entire world can freely and relatively instantaneously access. It's something we take for granted as web developers but it's a very different paradigm for those who are not webdevs.

Until I read this comment, I didn't realize those were all images instead of text.

O_o

I have a habit of compulsively selecting text on webpages for no real reason. So I quickly realize when pages like this one aren't actually using text, and then I find it so distracting that I can't actually pay attention to anything and just give up.

I thought I was the only one...

Nope. It's a thing, for some reason. I've got it as well. There's even an xkcd[0].

0 - https://xkcd.com/1271/

I have the same habit but it was the retina screen that tipped me off. All the images are slightly blurry on a high-DPI display and I immediately notice because I've been spoiled by super sharp fonts and crisp images.

Weird I have the same habit however what clued me in was the images too forever to load and they were pixelated before they were fully loaded.

I do this too, and images of text are bad, but much worse are the places that open up popups when you click on text.

I noticed immediately because it looks terrible on a high-resolution display.

Not to mention, all of the images take a hell of a lot longer time to load than text plus a font. I had a 16 second load time, granted my connection isn't the best. But she's not applying for a web designer/software position, so I guess we shouldn't be too hard on the site...

Exactly - she's not being judged on her CSS skills, so why does it matter. She did something that is the top of HN right now. Seems like whatever she did (however bad) accomplished what she wanted, to get noticed.

Speaking as someone who works in a Middle Eastern country, most of these countries would totally lose their minds if AirBnB made serious penetration into the Middle East. They absolutely do not want/tolerate these types of services (Uber also comes to mind).

How come these services are unwanted/not tolerated? This sounds interesting.

Totally fascinating! Why on earth would anyone care what someone else does with their home/car?

I care what my closest neighbors do with their apartment as I share a floor, ceiling, and common spaces with them. If I owned a car, I might care what neighbors on my street do as it could reduce availability of on-street parking (there's little off-street parking here).

But I think the main point was not about the citizenry but the governments in the Middle East. The governments there would care for the same reasons governments in other countries do, companies like Airbnb and Uber are violating and/or inciting violation of zoning laws, regulations, avoiding relevant taxes & fees, etc. Relative to countries like the U.S. they might "lose their shit" because it's more novel to have such disruption. Such outfits might also not fit well with their forms of corruption, reducing bribe opportunities (e.g. why pay a bribe to get a zoning change for a hotel when you can just call the rooms "apartments" and list them on Airbnb?).

Oh you!

This is awesome and a great way to get hired. Finding a company(or several) you really want to work at and targeting them specifically with a tailor made strategy is probably better than a shotgun approach.

Best of luck to Nina.

I work at mega corp. Finding a small company is key. A hiring manager here wouldn't even be able to submit this to HR. Maybe her resume which would go into a giant stack, as if submitted online to be reviewed by committee.

FWIW, she did this in April and talks about it as her most successful campaign yet. I don't think she got a job at Airbnb, but she did get an interview.

Unfortunately, the kinds of talent she showcases on her website is the kind of talent "RESERVED" for higher ups. I see "too much ambition" there and HR may not exactly be willing to approve of her.

(Such is the impression I have received from working in big corporate like places.)

Too much ambition is bad?

Can be, if it seems likely that the ambition would cause them to leave the company, especially if within a year or 2 of hiring. There are a lot of costs to hiring someone (both money-wise and in opportunity cost) and if they seem likely to leave in less than 2 years than the company could end up net-negative for hiring them.

In corporate environments, there is too much management bureaucracy. A person with lots of ambition entering a weak or insignificant subsection of the company can quickly feel out of place.

However, when you have the veterans who have already done something great, an ambitious person may seem like a rare opportunity to do something big again.

In the words of Ip Man, it is difficult for a student to find a great teacher. It is more difficult for a teacher to find a great student.

It can be.

Too much ambition can lead to losing sight of practicality, burn out, high stress, anxiety, depression, high turnover, as well as losing site of the bigger picture.

Your higher-ups must be more talented than most.

I thought this too. But I am in the middle of my job search (applied for several on the ASK HN thread) and the calls I have received back are for jobs I did not write a cover letter or at most a paragraph that I sent with my resume.

The two companies where I spent almost a week each writing a cover letter and editing it until I thought it was perfect, have not even bothered to send me a "not interested." Obviously anecdotal, but not sure if I will continue to put in that effort as it does not seem to make a difference for me.

I'm in the midst of the same process and have observed exactly the same.

Well now I have to eat some crow. I ended up hearing back from one of these companies a couple days after my original comment. It was very positive, too! Hang in there, my friend, need lots of patience for this.

I've had the same experience. Written ~10 unique cover letters (for positions I really wanted), done a couple 'practice problems' but the only positive responses have been from 4 sentence long emails I sent out to people who posted on Ask HN.

It looks like this from earlier in 2015 and there's a follow up post on her blog[1]. Ultimately she didn't get a job at AirBNB but seems like she did end up landing a job elsewhere as a result.

[1] http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

am I the only one fascinated by the use of images instead of text on the site?

looks like was built on wix.

Perhaps to avoid search engine indexing?

I'm fascinated too, but not every text is an image. Certain ones (scroll to learn more, the navbar buttons, etc.) are pure text.

Inconsistency is my trigger! :P

If she doesn't have CSS chops, then it makes a lot of sense. Much easier to build the components in photoshop or whatever and just get them stitched together. It doesn't look like she's interested in any sort of development role, so it's not a skill I would expect her to have.

i like it better than people who come to interviews without even creating a _free_ account with the company they want a job with.

When you're unemployed, it's not like you should have anything better to do than mess around with the product you want to support.

In fairness, some people are just more interested in the technical side of things than the product side.

I love this and I'm still surprised AirBnb didn't take a chance on Nina, though she seems quite happy in her current job. I'm still not sure why AirBnb largely ignores the Middle East, especially considering the popularity of couchsurfing in the region. I watched AirBnb explode in popularity in Istanbul, where I lived 2009-2012, and saw many services like Pillow-style concierges spring up there well before we heard of them in the States. As Nina points out, Muslim hospitality is a natural cultural fit with the type of exchange that is core to the AirBnb experience.

>I love this and I'm still surprised AirBnb didn't take a chance on Nina

She gives a possible reason in her blog:

    the person interviewing me was saying he couldn’t contextualize my experience because i “hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford”

Also, the all lower-case thing in her blog seems a bit overly pretentious. I know she use normal capitalisation in her "resume", but it's still a bit odd that someone who wants a marketing job is writing in that way.

Airbnb has a history of enthusiastic individuals creating microsite "resumes":

  * 2011:
    https://kathleenkowal.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/custom-airbnb-resume/
    Kathleen went very physical, but it wasn't a good fit for Airbnb in 2011

  * 2012:
    http://www.ericlovesairbnb.com/
    Eric more or less pioneered the "microsite" approach [at Airbnb, at least] and is still there today

  * 2013:
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2600264
    Loren was not extended an offer, and has unfortunately taken down his "resume" site

  * 2014:
    http://www.katielovesairbnb.com/
    Katie was successful and is working on killer stuff at Airbnb these days

I'm sure there are more examples, but I thought it would be interesting to contextualize. Some of these folks got jobs there.

As for the "hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford" from the recruiter ... well, sometimes startups become BigCos and idiots are tasked with interview duties.

It's strange she emphasizes "Bedouin Hospitality" because bedouins[1] comprise a really small percentage of the natives/citizens of the U.A.E., Qatar, Bahrain, etc.

Bedouins are a seminomadic group of people sort of like the gypsies of Europe. Most of the citizens of Arab countries are not bedouins. They're permanently settled in one location/area, and they do not identify as bedouin.

This cultural gaffe indicates that she should have done more research before making such a prominent statement. "Arab hospitality" or "Middle eastern hospitality" would have been more appropriate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedouin

Perhaps, but that Bedouin hospitality is part of the self-identity of most Arab groups, I believe. (source, was married to a Palestinian from Kuwait for several years and was exposed to a variety of Arab cultures in U.S.)

I was half expecting some Aleksey Vayner bit of hilarity but there's actual skill on display here.

Off topic, but I feel terrible every time I see him referenced given his very tragic suicide as a result of the endless humiliation he suffered from his one youthful indiscretion.

I think this worked out for Loren back in the day, right?

http://thewc.co/misc/loren-wants-to-work-for-airbnb/

Yeahhhh... No it didn't. I was very surprised to learn he didn't land a job after he got an interview from Airbnb. I mean, seriously Loren showed some pretty good skill with that site.

Here's the way I think about this: imagine you did this for a woman you want to date. How would she react? My guess, the same psychology applies

I do believe that ATL (Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport) is the busiest airport in the world, and has been so for quite some time. Dubai, indeed, is not.

Just changed it up: http://www.ibtimes.com/chicago-ohare-knocks-atlanta-title-bu...

Looks like it depends on how you count. Atlanta moves the most people, Chicago moves the most planes, Dubai move the most people between countries. Dubai is also #3 for the most people regardless of origin and destination which makes me think they'll remain tops for moving people internationally; all the other top airports would have a much larger proportion of domestic passengers (unless flights between Hong Kong and the rest of China don't count as domestic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_...

desperate times call for desperate measures

Desperate times if you're bad at what you do.

This should have "(2015)" in the title.

Yup. Added.

Does it bother anyone else that the colored boxes on the campaign results page seem to have random widths?

That combined with the text-as-images make the whole experience rather disconcerting. I understand she's not a designer, but as a marketer her presentation needs to be polished. As it is, the visual mistakes undermine the content.

It definitely checks the "passion to work here" checkbox.

I wouldn't hire a designer who's application does not degrade gracefully - had to allow JS just to see her resume.

Good thing she's not a designer then

She's designing social media strategies. Do they have to degrade gracefully, too?

Social media strategies are pretty degraded to begin with...

Ah although it's typical for designers to do this sort of thing, marketers also do it.

She's a marketer. This is the equivalent of nice PDF, which is the output of most marketing departments to their higher ups.

Agreed. I viewed the source of the page and immediately saw one of my pet peeves--a blank document body that is dynamically replaced via script.

As I typically browse unfamiliar sites with scripts disabled, loading a blank page is instant failure for the site.

You build a barebones static page first, and then you add bells and whistles.

But then, after enabling script, what do I see? Images filled with mostly text. Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgh... I bet they weren't even crushed.

Luckily for her, no business in its right mind would ask someone like me to evaluate any new marketing hires. Engineer-types and marketer-types in the same company are like mortal enemies, forced by circumstance to work together toward a common goal.

she also worked for queen rania the wife of a tyrant

i have very little sympathy for her

we should take this more seriously, dont help tyrants ... or their wives

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