Open Interview Process

The following content provides both candidates and recruiters with valuable information.

Candidates:

• Our recruiters will provide you with preparation specific to the position you are interviewing for throughout the recruiting process. Gain a thorough understanding of the interview process at Cockroach Labs, along with visibility into real questions from our onsite interviews. 

• Throughout your time interviewing, we encourage you to share your thought process with your interviewers. Discussing why and how you developed a solution will put your creativity and approach to problem-solving on display!

We aim to have our interview process completed in a timely manner. At any point during the interview process, feel free to reach out to your recruiter for an update on how your application is progressing.

Once you pass the Recruiter Phone Screen, your recruiter will not share your resume and or their recruiter notes from your conversation with the hiring team. This is one of the ways that we focus on the skills candidates show during the exercises rather than their past experience.

1. Candidate application: Receive an automated message from the Applicant Tracking System (in this case, Greenhouse) to confirm receipt of your application. The note thanks you for submitting your information and contains a Cockroach Labs Company Guide that provides an inside look at our company culture.

2. Application review: Our recruiters will do the first round of evaluations and review application submissions. If more information is required, a recruiter will reach out to you directly. Candidates that are disqualified at this stage are notified by the recruiter.

3. Recruiter phone screen: If you qualify for the role, the recruiter sends an availability request for a 30-minute call to explore your background and experience. Depending on the outcome of the screening call, you could proceed to a take-home exercise and/or technical phone interview.

4. Initial phone interview: Typically, a 30 minute to 1-hour phone interview with a member of the team covers skills related to the specific role. For technical phone interviews, we use Google Hangouts and coderpad.io and cover coding and debugging, algorithms, and data structures.

Some interview processes may include a take-home exercise followed by an initial phone interview. The take-home exercise typically takes 1-2 hours.

5. Team interviews: The next step in the interview process are virtual team interviews, consisting of conversations with people that would be on your direct team and people on cross-functional teams, too. The recruiter will share an overview of the team members with whom you are meeting. The interview itself has 4-5 exercise based interviews, with a break in the middle, if desired.

6. Hiring Committee review: After the virtual team interviews are complete, feedback from the interview process is shared across the interview team. Hiring Committee members review the feedback and independently reach a decision of hire/no-hire based on the comprehensive feedback. At the Hiring Committee review meeting, the interview team reaches a consensus on whether to reject or proceed with reference calls.

7. Reference calls: Depending on the outcome of the Hiring Committee review, the recruiter will make, at a minimum, two reference calls. One of these reference calls should be an individual who has worked with you in a managerial capacity and the other should be with an individual who has worked directly with you and can speak to your past work.

8. Final review: After successful reference calls, the recruiter submits the candidate packet for final approval.

9. Offer Extended: The recruiter will reach out to you to schedule time to connect and extend the formal offer. Initially, this is done verbally but is always followed by the written offer as described in the section on preparing offers. The Hiring Manager and interview team will follow-up to answer any questions you might have, which will hopefully lead to your accepting the offer. While we would love to know whether or not you'd like to accept an offer from us in 3 days as well, we are happy to extend offer deadlines up to one month, so that you can make the best decision for you and your family.

10. Offer Accepted/Onboarding: If you accept our offer, the onboarding process begins.

11. Candidate survey: After completion of your offer, a link to an optional 2-minute candidate survey will be sent for you to complete. By filling this out you provide valuable feedback about our interview process and can help us improve.

For candidates - Applying to Cockroach Labs

The best way to apply for positions with Cockroach Labs is directly through our careers page, where we list all of our open roles. If there is not a role open that looks interesting to you, we encourage you to reach out to us directly at recruiting@cockroachlabs.com and check back with us in the future as we continue to grow.

To apply to Cockroach Labs:

1. Go to our careers page.

2. Check out our mission, core values, and benefits on your way to our list of open roles.

3. Click on the team you'd like to join, choose the job you'd like to do, and review the description of the role.

4. If the role sounds interesting to you, fill out the application form at the bottom of the page, then click the "Submit Application" button.

Challenging unconscious bias

In the effort of building a diverse workforce, at Cockroach Labs, we ask the question: "are we missing strong candidates because of preconceptions or unconscious biases of the interviewer?" To reduce our bias, we have committed to:

1. Exercise-based interviewing

2. Removing resumes

3. Expectations-based job descriptions

Our hypothesis is that a structured and fair process means better decisions. We understand that it is impossible to eliminate all biases, so we want to make sure that we are aware of them and challenge them in whatever ways we can.

The purpose of an interview is to obtain information about a candidate in order to predict future performance. To accomplish this, we rely on Exercise-based Interviewing. Exercise-based interviews can include case studies, group exercises involving role play or discussions, individual exercises, or presentations. They allow for our interviewers to witness the direct application of a candidate’s abilities to competencies required for the role. Rather than guess if a candidate can do the job-based on their answers to behavioral questions, we ask for candidates to show. During the interview, candidates are asked to complete exercises that are similar to the initiatives they would complete when actually working in the position on a day to day basis.

For engineering positions, we use coding and system design questions. For non-technical positions, we use job-based simulations in the form of case studies, individual exercises, and/or presentations.

We believe that setting you up for success does not end with the hiring process— our commitment to ensuring that you are well-prepared to join our team is the cornerstone of our onboarding program.