How Hired Saved $1.7M with Strategic SaaS Management

How did Hired uncover 300 apps instead of 100, automate offboarding, and save $1.7 million? Discover how a three-phase rollout, clear guardrails, and smart automations delivered control, visibility, and savings. See the exact steps to eliminate duplicate apps, streamline renewals with timely alerts, and secure data across a growing, distributed team.

In this video, Hired’s Director of IT Operations, Michelle Chan, shares the roadmap behind their SaaS turnaround. Follow the journey from a four-vendor proof of concept to a Torii-led implementation that uncovered 3x more apps than expected, centralized contracts, added 30, 60, and 90-day renewal alerts, automated real-time offboarding, and optimized licenses for lasting savings. Discover practical tactics to track usage, reclaim and reassign seats, align with finance, and build clean audit trails, a must-watch for teams battling shadow IT, surprise renewals, and rising SaaS spend.

This article was originally a video (YouTube link here). Below is the full transcript:

Welcome to today’s Deciphering the SaaS Landscape webinar: How Hired found savings and control through strategic SaaS management. In this webinar, we will explore how Hired successfully managed their SaaS landscape and achieved savings and control through strategic SaaS management. Please submit questions through the Q&A section, and we will address them at the end. I would like to introduce our speaker, Hired’s director of IT operations, Michelle Chan.

Thank you for the introduction. I am excited to share Hired’s SaaS management journey and our continued partnership with Torii. For those unfamiliar with Hired, we are a hiring marketplace and assessments platform that combines real-time data, a proprietary AI algorithm, and high-touch customer service to give employers and candidates the most transparent and efficient path to hire. Check us out at hired.com.

Today we will cover the modern SaaS landscape, Hired’s approach to SaaS management, our search for a SaaS management platform, our implementation phases and goals, our results, and top takeaways. We will save time for Q&A at the end.

SaaS applications have been growing in number, with no signs of slowing down. Ads on social media and email encourage people to sign up and try products, and depending on your security policies, that can be a challenge to keep up with, especially with distributed teams. Shadow IT creates blind spots.

Those blind spots prevent an accurate count of applications, usage, renewals, and total spend, especially when subscriptions are paid with personal credit cards. They also create security concerns about the data you are sharing and how it is stored, and they complicate offboarding and verification that accounts have been fully removed from all in-use applications.

To identify our path, we started at the beginning. Many organizations have outdated or incomplete data in spreadsheets, which makes accurate budget forecasting difficult. There are too many manual tasks, such as manually looking up application access per individual, tracking down contracts, and ongoing spreadsheet upkeep.

With that in mind, we wanted to prevent excess spending, identify duplicate applications, check spend from sanctioned applications, analyze license utilization so we could adjust allocations, and eliminate surprise renewals.

Vettery acquired Hired in 2020, and our employee count grew by 35 percent, which expanded our tech stack. We needed to decipher contracts and applications, consolidate, and effectively manage all our SaaS tools, which is where Torii came in.

Before we began our platform search, we defined what we needed from a SaaS management platform. Essential requirements included accurate data on what applications were being used, and clear license allocation and utilization. We needed centralized contract management, automations to provide data insights so we could right-size contracts, and workflows and automations that were easy to build and customize. With many competing priorities, we needed quick wins and a solution that was agile enough to grow with us and scale.

We conducted proof-of-concept trials with four prominent SaaS management platforms. Among our stakeholders, Torii met our needs and proved scalable.

We broke our implementation into three phases. Phase one was to understand our environment and create an action plan, aiming for initial quick wins. When we first connected Torii, we discovered about 300 applications, rather than the 100 we anticipated. With that data, we defined what constituted a business application versus a personal one, identified users and owners, measured utilization, and calculated expenditures per app. We also reduced risk through automated offboarding for former employees.

Phase two was control and scale. To prevent future excess spending, we observed utilization to understand where we could downgrade, reclaim, and reharvest licenses. We eliminated redundant apps and prevented surprise renewals. For contracts, we set up notifications at 30, 60, and 90 days, which align with our approval workflows.

Phase three was mature practices and ongoing improvements. We centralized contract management, customized automation workflows, and established procedures aligned with our IT policies regarding unsanctioned app usage, while continuing to look for more cost-saving opportunities.

After one year, we eliminated duplicate applications and right-sized our contracts based on licensing, which led to savings of $1.7 million to date. Offboarding is completely automated and triggered in real time, eliminating offboarding-related risk. We eliminated surprise contract renewals with advanced notifications, and contract and license data are up to date and easy to find within the platform.

What we appreciate about Torii is more IT control and less burden on personnel. We gained full visibility and insights into usage, which led to better data-driven decisions, and we benefited from built-in audit trails for SOC and internal audits. Workflows include detailed logs, which are handy for audits. We achieved significant cost savings and a modern, consolidated tech stack.

Top takeaways for success: be proactive, and define exactly what you need from a SaaS management platform. Invest time in understanding your chosen solution. Create a plan that delivers quick wins and ongoing advantages. Select a vendor who will partner with you in your SaaS evolution and grow with your needs.

On stakeholder alignment: you always want buy-in from stakeholders. At Hired, we had a mutual goal with our finance department to identify SaaS spend, license allocations, and contract management. Once IT understood Torii’s capabilities, we had a tailored demo that explored Torii’s financial system integrations and expense matching, and we reviewed how contract management and roles were handled within the platform. Torii was the clear standout for us.

Regarding the vendor evaluation phase: the length of a proof of concept depends on the vendor. Some can be completed in a few days to a week, and vendors often allow more time for a thorough review. The most important aspect is to find a vendor that will partner with you. If you ask for more time, many vendors will provide it. Investing in a solution is a big decision, and you want to ensure the solution satisfies your needs before committing resources.

On harmonizing processes after the Vettery acquisition: we were already searching for solutions to better manage SaaS, and an internal company audit accelerated our efforts. After Vettery acquired Hired, we quickly analyzed vendors to identify overlaps, consolidate, and develop a migration strategy, knowing that ongoing management would be essential.

On the most difficult aspect of moving to SaaS management: before SaaS, companies had on-site infrastructure that allowed in-house monitoring. Transitioning to cloud services and platform-as-a-service offered flexibility, but it also produced a landscape of many different applications that can be difficult to inventory. A SaaS management platform helps you understand that landscape and manage costs and contracts more efficiently.

On research and best practices before selecting an SMP: at a previous company, we used a competitor that was very finance-driven and required many manual processes. For our search, we wanted automatic data ingestion, not constant manual imports. Best practices come back to defining your path and requirements, ensuring the solution meets the needs of multiple stakeholders, and securing buy-in so you can evolve and tailor the solution over time.

Thank you for joining us today. If we did not get to your question, we will follow up after the webinar. Thank you.