The challenge
Veramatic already had an India team, but it came through a staffing agency and it was failing on two fronts. The talent was not strong enough to build the product at the stage it was in. And the agency billed the team as a single line item, so Veramatic could not see what it was paying for or where the money went.
The harder problem was the bar itself. Veramatic’s product exists to catch financial errors before they reach a dealership’s books, so a wrong number that slips through is the one failure it is sold to prevent. Screening for the engineers who clear that bar is not résumé work, which is exactly why the staffing agency kept sending people who looked right and were not.
What we did
We put the actual cost structure on the table first. Instead of one line item, we showed Veramatic what each seat cost, what our fee was, and where every dollar went. They could see the whole structure before they agreed to any of it.
We rebuilt the bar around a trait rather than a title. The thing that mattered was not raw problem-solving speed. It was the instinct to distrust your own output: to treat a number as wrong until it has been checked, to sit with an ambiguous input rather than guess past it, to be uncomfortable calling something done before verifying it. We defined that trait in concrete terms with Veramatic’s engineering leadership so we were all screening for the same thing.
We screened as if a wrong number was already sitting in a customer’s books. Because the cost of an error in this product is not a slow bug but a broken promise, we cared less about whether a candidate reached the answer and more about how they treated it once they had one: whether they went back and checked, whether they flagged their own uncertainty, whether they caught the mistake we left in front of them before we pointed at it. The people who did that are the team we placed. That is the bar the staffing agency could never hit, and it is the one the product actually runs on.
The result
Veramatic got an India team screened for the one thing its product cannot survive without, in place of a vendor arrangement that delivered neither the talent nor the transparency.
The product sells accuracy, and now the people building it are chosen for it. Veramatic can also see exactly what it pays for and whom. The corners the Chairman would not cut stayed uncut.
