Employee Ghosting: Another Case for Automating Payments Testing

Just as we get ready for the scariest time of the year here in the US, the Paragon team finds that we have already been ghosted. At least we think we have. I guess that is the whole point of ghosting, someone just disappears.

Being on the other end of my career from millennials and now post-millennials (how about “New Millennials”), I did not even know that this was a “thing” until a few weeks ago.

Having been through a number market consolidations over the past 50 years (including a few cycles where there were truly no jobs to be had), it seems completely foreign to me that you would take the time and effort required to win multiple job offers and then not have the courtesy to notify the companies that were not selected that you have chosen to work someplace else.

I think everyone understands that it is a seller’s market right now and competition for quality resources is quite fierce. But to accept an offer and then simply not show up for the first day of work does not make sense to me. And not responding to calls or emails? I just don't get it.

Yes, I come from a different generation, but I can’t help but think that ghosting qualifies as “burning a bridge,” something that I was taught never to do when it comes to your career.

What does this mean for us as an industry? 

As we have discussed before, the payments business is hot. Financial institutions, processors, gateways, fintech startups, e-tailers, retailers and technology providers all need resources that understand payments and can help their respective companies be competitive and successful in these dynamic times.

And, I do mean dynamic. There is more going on right now with retail payments than at any other time in the past 50 years. Which means that many (dare I say most) organizations have got a lot more going on than its current staff can handle.

Even if you may have been successful in getting some additional money in your 2019 budget to bring on some extra help, there may be no help available.

I know that some ATM deployers are thinking that they will go down to the wire on their Windows 10 migration projects and then bring in a bunch of extra resources to help with final testing and deployment. This model may have worked with the previous XP and Windows 7 migrations, but I am not so sure that things will play out the same way again next year.

Unless things change dramatically over the next few months, resources will be even harder to find next year than they are now.

As you are working through your budget planning process, it may be more appropriate to consider investing in technology solutions that will allow you to automate as much of your testing as possible. 

In most organizations, a significant amount of testing can be automated.  We regularly work with companies who are able to use automation to reduce their manual testing cycles from weeks and months to a few days.

The use of automation not only speeds up the testing process but also improves testing accuracy, reduces costs and frees up expensive (and increasingly precious) human capital to focus on higher value tasks, like figuring out how to beat the competition. 

And, as you automate more and more of your testing over time, the value of your investment in automation only increases.

Whether you are focused on testing network mandates, certification systems or ATM upgrades, Paragon has solutions to help you maximize your testing efficiency and minimize your dependence on manual processes.