My name is Aika Zikibayeva and I am a Partner Marketing Manager at Cockroach Labs. I am part of the Product Marketing team, yet in my day-to-day responsibilities, I maintain a tight-knit collaboration with the Channels & Alliances team.

When you’re hiring for startups, each search for a new teammate can feel like a make-or-break moment for the company’s success. With such great stakes, it’s all the more important to make facts-based, data-driven hiring decisions when interviewing new people. That’s why we’re huge fans of hiring rubrics at Cockroach Labs. Not only do they get us closer to hiring the right person for open roles, they also ensure we have a hiring process that reduces bias. Of course, this is easier said than done. The challenges to developing rubrics mirror their benefits: they require consensus on what it takes to bolster your team’s skills, culture, and diversity.

The Roacher spotlight series is a celebration of our Roachers, their stories, and the wisdom they can impart to their peers. In this post, we highlight Raydijah Walters from our People team.

At Cockroach Labs, we value not only our company’s collective culture, but sharing a view into the culture driving teams across the company. In the Meet the Team series, you’ll meet wonderful Roachers who help Enable Every Developer to Build World-Changing Applications. This entry is part two in our feature of the East Sales team, where we sat down with Matt Vaughn, Brad Lewis, and Anthony DiMaggio. See part one to meet Vincent Giacomazza, VP of East Sales.

At Cockroach Labs, we value not only our company’s collective culture, but sharing a view into the culture driving teams across the company. In the Meet the Team series, you’ll meet wonderful Roachers who help Enable Every Developer to Build World-Changing Applications. This entry is part one in our feature of the East Sales team, where we sat down with Vincent Giacomazza, Vice President of Sales, East.

The Roacher spotlight series is a celebration of our Roachers, their stories, and the wisdom they can impart to their peers. In our inaugural post, we sat down with Jen Murphy to tell her Cockroach Labs story.

At Cockroach Labs, we’ve long worked at reducing bias for better, more inclusive recruiting outcomes. We do this by removing resumes throughout the hiring process so that interviewers can focus on you, the candidate— not your background. We also emphasize exercise-based interviews that give people the opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the job instead of recounting past experience. These practices are rooted in a basic, human principle for hiring: as a company looking for amazing talent, we want to eliminate hurdles that might keep you from showing us your strengths in an interview, not create them. Four years ago, we saw another opportunity to help people put their best foot forward: we decided to make our interview prep materials openly available.

Cockroach Labs was recently named on both Crain’s and Built in NYC’s “Best Places to Work” lists. In the published blurbs, they talk about the way our team treats employees: from the really important perks like great healthcare to the smaller ones like office snacks and Citibike memberships. I think what these lists are missing, however, is a greater sense of how Cockroach Labs views its relationship to the humans we interact with: our employees, our customers, and the world at large. One of the many ways this is manifested is in our company’s corporate giving initiatives. Here are some of the charitable giving practices we’ve instituted, and how they contribute to making Cockroach Labs a great place to work.

CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support) are groups intended to create an inclusive environment for Roachers from underrepresented backgrounds and help employees connect with their peers on a deeper level. Groups host events and develop programs to support and advocate for their members, both internally and externally. While these groups are company-sponsored, they are run by employees for employees.