At Cozero, we’re all about transparency—whether it's in our products, our processes, or how we engage with potential team members. One of the ways we showcase this, is through our interviewing guide.

After applying to Cozero and passing the initial filter, you get an interviewing guide to give you an idea of what we’re about and what you can expect from our interview process. We heard from candidates that they appreciate the one-stop-shop landing page, upfront information about our process, and …our radical transparency. 🤔

After publishing the guide for the first time, we iterated on it a bit in the usual async manner. Ping-ponging on the Notion page, sometimes about ensuring the information we present reflects reality and doesn’t paint an overly rosy picture. In the shuffle, we completely forgot that any comments we add will also be visible to the candidates who open it. And so, all of our candidates could read an exchange between our CTO and one of the tech leads about the importance of emojis in appealing to GenZ developers. 😅

To our surprise, we heard from the candidates that they loved the (unintentional) transparency. The candidates mentioned that it’s fun to get an insight into the day-to-day discussions we lead, the tone we use, and discussing challenging topics like aligning our listing to our core values in the open.

For us, this signaled that candidates value authenticity above polish and strive to stay authentic throughout the process. When we forget to get back to a candidate, we don’t pretend that the long void in communication was somehow a part of the plan but start with an apology. And when our interviewers misunderstand our tech challenge, we laugh at ourselves instead of trying to keep a serious face.

By not hiding and embracing our imperfections, we can better show the candidate our internal culture. Given the size of our organization, our carbon accounting product is quite complex, so we need to embrace the fact that misunderstandings are inevitable and go the extra mile to maintain our blame-free culture.

Pobody’s nerfect. 🙃

So, whether you're applying to Cozero or just curious about our approach, know that what you see is what you get. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. What do you think—do you value transparency as much as we do? Let us know in the comments!

Jan K. - Tech Lead