As someone who has spent close to 5 years in the company, I have seen the history in Metricstream to an extent. Among many, one of the reasons we had layoffs in 2017 is our bloated staff structure especially in non billable teams. We had more than the required number of people in QC, HR, Finance etc especially in high cost destinations outside of India. There were many non-performing people in Sales, Marketing also. That brought the whole ship down. So, we had to resort to layoffs to bring things back on track.
I am worried we have a similar situation now especially among the onsite finance and accounting team. People who are under-qualified for the role are staying in the US only because they have been with us for a long time. Many of them are frogs in the well who have very limited knowledge of the outside world. Nobody will hire them. Hence they all the more cling to their current role. Lots of what they do can be easily done from India at 25% of the cost. They don’t even know how to conduct an interview properly. With total lack of knowledge of revenue recognition, they have conducted a hurried interview and hired a totally inexperienced person as Director of Revenue Accounting. Look at this person’s profile on LinkedIn and you will know that there is no basic evidence of prior US GAAP experience in product companies that have a meaningful amount of revenue. So this person is not able to offer practical guidance on software accounting, Saas, cloud etc and is learning everything on the job from the scratch at the expense of our company. I am sure a Director level resource would cost the company easily USD 180,000 per year.
With that kind of money you can hire people with good revenue accounting experience acquired over a period of 10 years and they will be able to design the company’s accounting policy. We are now trying to move into SaaS and not just stick to traditional software selling. Did anyone conduct a thorough technical interview and ask this person to give examples of how it was handled in previous jobs? Was any reference checks done about relevant experience on revenue accounting? How many listed companies with Software and SaaS background has this person either audited or worked for? The answer is None! Reading the US GAAP and offering bookish explanations is not what is expected at the Director level. That is what an entry level junior CPA would do. For the kind of money we are paying we could have hired a better hand with strong experience who would be able to play a leadership role. But the people who conduct interviews don’t know how to ask the right questions and do thorough technical assessment.
Many of the India based Chartered Accountants and CPAs are aspiring for a short term to medium term onsite opportunity. But that is denied citing cost issues. However, the same leadership does not find it expensive to hire a Director level resource with zero relevant experience. Based on our conversations and investigation we figured out that this person has not worked at all for nearly 12 years and you can quickly see through that there is no depth! You hire a Financial Analyst level resource at a senior level and pay a Director’s salary so that this person can hopefully one day play a Director level role. What a waste! Educational qualifications cannot compensate for lack of experience. Past experience in startups with either zero revenue or extremely low revenue does not count for our purposes. At startups many people are given a senior level title to just attract talent. A company of our size has to have some standards and do background checks.
We hear of the same problem in some of the Engineering teams recruitments also at times. But in Engg team by and large we have a strong recruitment process, When will the management start recognizing talent from within? When will they improve the interviewing process and not jump into hiring someone to just quickly fill the role? When will we learn to differentiate between glorified resumes/LinkedIn profile and genuine experience? Most importantly, once you know you have made a wrong hire and the Company is not getting any value from the person how will you rectify it quickly rather than continue to justify it. Onsite finance & accounting team as a whole needs overhaul. That would help us save cash and prevent a 2017 kind of layoff situation again.