Wikipedia describes Airbnb as a company that operates an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging, including holiday cottages, apartments, homestays, hostel beds, or hotel rooms, to participate in or facilitate experiences related to tourism, such as walking tours and making reservations at restaurants.

In short, you can let complete strangers into your home and get money from it or be that stranger.

Is There a Way to Source a Candidate on Airbnb?

I shared in my book one easy string to target data on Airbnb. All users were under the /users folder, so the string was quite easy – simply focus on site:airbnb.com/users and add a few more keywords into the search string.

But some months after publication Airbnb moved the profiles to a new folder: /users/show/.

Every profile is under https://www.airbnb.com/users/show/00000000 with a unique number for every user.

And that’s not the only change Airbnb made. Airbnb also added <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”> to every profile page.

This noindex means that crawling robots from Google and other search engines can’t index these profiles. Because of that, the pages aren’t indexed by Google, and we can’t find them through Google.

There is still a way how to target profiles

There is still a way to target these profiles – at least some of them. Part of the description of the hosts is located on the room page, which means that you can target the profiles that have this profile information filled out, and they are on Google.

You will need to target site:airbnb.com/rooms/, and because you would like to target only pages that have some profile info, you will need to add “Joined in”.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in”

After that, you can add more keywords. But if you add, for example, “Designer,” you will get results with things like Designer furniture, so you need to be more specific when you are targeting the keywords.

The same is the case with locations. When you add London as a location, you will find all the pages with this keyword.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” London

One option to solve this is to use intitle: operator.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” intitle:London

Or you can expand the search and target the United Kingdom.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” intitle:”United Kingdom”

If you would like to target some job titles, you can add the job title into the string. For example, let’s say you need to see the profiles of accountants.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” intitle:”United Kingdom” “Accountant”

If you would like to find people who speak a specific language, you can also add “Languages:” into the string.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” “Accountant” “Languages:”

Do you know how many people on Airbnb know Hindi? 7300!

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” “Languages: * Hindi”

And 71,400 people understand French.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” “Languages: * Français”

You can combine these strings together, but if you use this string without intitle:, you will get all the profiles with the keyword London on their profile.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” intitle:”London “Accountant” “Languages:”

You can also target people who are Superhosts. “The Superhost program recognizes hosts who go above and beyond for every guest.”

And if you would like to find that person or rent a flat/room/house from Superhost users only, just use the string below.

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” intitle:”United Kingdom” “is a Superhost”

There are many ways to source candidates on Airbnb, and these strings are not the only way. Try to be creative and find your own ways!

Still Not Convinced that Airbnb Is a Source of Candidates?

That is all right. You can try being creative and create a similar string like this one:

site:airbnb.com/rooms/ “Joined in” (“Looking for a job” OR “looking for new opportunities” OR “Available for New Opportunities” OR “Open to new opportunities”)

How Do You Contact These People?

1)  You know the name and have a profile picture, so you should be able to find that person on LinkedIn and contacted them there.

2)  You can rent a flat and meet that person–plus you will see some new places!

3)  You can contact the person through the “Contact host” option on the page. But use this as a last resort. Try to find some other way to contact that person first.

Conclusion

I know that Airbnb is not an amazingly good source of candidates, but at least you have learned something new from this article.

You now know how to find a Superhost, and the next time you book a flat for your vacation, maybe you’ll choose the one that is owned by that accountant who is perfect for your new role. Because you never know.