Terrible and unethical company - Anonymous employee HighRadius Employee Review

Very problematic company culture, if not outright toxic, in several aspects: 1. Product: - It’s true that their products would bring lots of value to the clients if they actually work. However, several products are not mature/stable enough and instead of focusing on fixing what’s broken, they keep building new broken stuff, which in turn keeps breaking the existing stuff. - There are unexplainable product bugs (Ex: hitting submit once doesn’t save changes - you have to do it twice, or saving from the front end will erase all existing settings so you have to go make changes from the backend). This makes implementation a literal nightmare and results in ACs having to rely on the Tech team for help troubleshooting which is extremely inefficient and in turn bogs down the Tech team’s bandwidth. 2. Training: - Training was extremely unorganized and inconsistent up until recently when they switched to department wide training which is another issue. Trainers, who were more experienced consultants (by that I mean they'd been there for barely a year, which is considered “experienced” in HRC world I guess?!), were notified of new people coming in literally a week before. That led to a scramble to align resources and set up required accesses for training, which always caused delays and frustrated both trainers and trainees. Furthermore, trainers were overburdened with training needs on top of existing project work, which resulted in big lulls in the day for trainees with no guidance and nothing to do while trainers were running around, pulling their hair out, and stressed. The self-guided training modules are full of outdated information, recordings after recordings of meetings which had tons of irrelevant information such that there was no way trainees could internalize the information without guidance, meaning they’re not actually self-guided training are they?? So they should stop calling it that! Furthermore, the cloud environment dedicated to training is soooo slow and no longer used in actual implementations. This means that trainers have to spend hours trying to troubleshoot issues unique to that environment which the trainees will never see again. Not only that, the trainees would learn how to do things differently from how most of the actual project implementations are done... Lastly, the training quality was entirely dependent on who the trainer was so if you're unlucky then most of the actual learning will be done on projects in much more high stress and high stake scenarios. - As far as resources on the job, there is a configuration guide portal now which is riddled with outdated documentation, links that don’t work anymore, and chaotic organization of information. Even after you find the documentation, most of them are so poorly written that you have to read a sentence 5 times before giving up because you still don't understand what it's saying. They also contain bad SQL syntaxes that will not work if you copy straight from the document, do not give good guidance on configuration or troubleshooting steps, and do not contain relevant product behaviors. All of those problems would be fine if there’s a POC to reach out to and ask questions but often times, the original owner of the feature already quit and even though there’s a form to submit questions, no matter how many follow-up emails you send or managers you CC in the email chain, your questions will still go unanswered until something blows up and the client escalates. 3. Processes: - Project timeline and execution: project execution playbooks are developed on the basis of unrealistic timelines and the assumption that there are no product issues, which is never the case. This consistently results in over-promising and under-delivering of projects - which surprise!! - most clients do not appreciate. Meanwhile, consultants work to death spinning their wheels trying to achieve the impossible, often on their first implementation with minimal guidance since there are not enough experienced consultants to lead every project. Even when the experienced consultant is staffed on the project, they are spread very thin or have to again work insane hours to please their managers and the client since their performance evaluation depends on it. As a result, the success of projects essentially falls on very new grads, consultants in their early twenties, and sometimes even low paid interns!! That does not reflect well on the organization's professionalism. Even when the project management team is more experienced and plans for cushion time, clients can ask upper management to step in and put pressure on the project team to bend space and time and shorten the timeline :). - Risk management: + Lots of instances where a product release breaks an important feature or fundamentally changes how a feature works without prior coordination with the consulting team or any client training, affecting live accounts and projects mid-flight. Imagine finding a bug in front of the client after having tested the feature hundreds of times :), good luck spinning that one in a positive light! Of course that always results in loss of client trust in the product and escalations. + Since the tech team is short on people, they also struggle with the amount of tickets that need to be resolved, leading to more delays. The entire tech team is based out of India with no support during half of North America's business hours so if you have an urgent ticket you need resolved in the afternoon US time, good luck with that! Even after the tech team picks up the ticket, lots of times they will assign it right back to you telling you to try something that won't work and by the time you reach out for help the next morning, they already logged off again. So plan to either wake up really early or stay up really late to catch them online and chat with them. So make some coffee and be prepared for daily mental breakdowns! :D + It's impossible to coordinate with the tech team and product team and plan ahead for high risk operations like a cutover since no one has the bandwidth to help unless there are issues and escalations. Even if you miraculously get the help, they can implement big product or process changes that don't even work on a whim and introduce risks to the operation without support when stuff inevitably breaks. + Not enough training for consultants on information security and cybersecurity, which is a lawsuit waiting to happen especially when dealing with financial information. - The process to transition a live project to support is poorly defined and since the support team is also short on people (recognize the pattern?), they will do anything to dodge it like a plague. 4. Workload: if you care about your work and your perceived performance, it's almost a requirement that you have no life outside of work since they only seem to reward people who do not push back and work insane hours (as early as 6:30am and as late as 3-4am), on weekends, and holidays. Comp time is on a case by case basis, at the manager's mercy, and honestly largely depends on the success of the project. So if you're dealt a bad project then you're pretty much out of luck. 5. Compensation: it's very clear that they do not value existing employees as they are given way below market value raises even as they work themselves to death for the company, and they will only counter when the employee brings up a competing offer. 6. Upper Management: - Constant changes from top down: 5 days RTO with 1hr/day mandatory training but making no effort to adjust existing project timelines, so if your life already sucks then that's too bad, welcome to hell! The training is not role specific and not well prepared. Trainers were approached the morning of training and asked to present that afternoon. India team members had to stay up until 2-3am their time to prepare for that day's training content. - Improper management of resources and recognition of efforts especially in the intern pool. Some interns have no work and some work to death only not to be converted to full time as their managers don't have visibility of them and don't bother to reach out to their project teams to get feedback. Interns had to advocate for themselves by reaching out to their previous project team members come evaluation time to make sure they put in a good word for them. - Some upper management team members are straight up incompetent or are so disconnected from the reality of the bad product and processes. - Questionable HR practices - sometimes they don't even follow their own guidelines until the employee calls them out on it. Not sure if this is due to pure incompetence or something worse.