New employees, who were screened for empathy in job interviews, were welcomed “home” and told: “You belong here.”So in March, when the coronavirus hurtled in, the rupturing of the “Airfam” was painful. Airbnb, which had been on track to go public this year, suddenly faced an avalanche of travel cancellations. Weeks later, Mr. Chesky announced the layoffs and scaled back the company’s ambitions. “Everything that kind of could go wrong did go wrong,” he said in an interview. But more than a dozen current and former Airbnb employees, most of whom declined to be identified because they had signed nondisparagement agreements with the company, said in interviews that they had experienced a sudden disillusionment when the carefully crafted corporate idealism cracked.

Source: New York Times July 17, 2020 09:00 UTC