The Biggest Challenge in SaaS

• The pandemic has had little impact on SaaS growth meaning companies are still hiring.

• Companies are reporting that finding the right people is the biggest challenge.

• Companies need to consider hiring for growth, culture and consider the length of their processes.

The Software as a service industry has grown 500% over the last 7 years, removing the need for hardware acquisition, provisioning, and maintenance, making the need for installing and running on individual applications obsolete. 

Companies are relying on SaaS technology more than ever to simplify and streamline processes. In fact, organisations with over 1000 employees are reported to use over 150 SaaS applications. 

The United States has dominated the Software as a Service or ‘SaaS’ industry for many years and is currently home to 8x more SaaS companies than any other country (Source). 

Despite the US being home to so many SaaS unicorns such as Adobe, Zoom and Salesforce, leaders in Europe, Israel and Africa are expected to carry much of the next generation of SaaS innovations. This means more investment in these regions. 

Oakstone’s partner and German-based, Celonis, managed to secure the largest private SaaS investment globally – $1 billion Series D and has claimed the award for the most valuable start-up in Germany and New York, having a valuation of $11 billion.

The pandemic may have bought an economic slowdown in many fields, but the SaaS industry was barely impacted by the uncertainty of 2020/1. The pandemic forced many businesses to become reliant on remote working and the SaaS industry had the solutions to adapt to the times.

The number of European SaaS unicorns has grown nearly 100% from 44 in 2020 to 81 in 2021 (source: Accel). EMEA SaaS companies are making history, however, they all face similar challenges.

Despite fast growth and promising funding opportunities, 21% of the European tech community thinks hiring talent is the greatest challenge in the next 12 months (source).

Why?

With so many successful companies in EMEA, the competition for great talent that can help organisations grow is limited. Fortunately, the new global approach SaaS companies are taking is helping them with this. 

In our opinion, there are 3 things businesses need to consider when it comes to building a best-in-class global team. 

1. Hiring for growth

   Someone who was a star employee when you were a 10-person company may not be the right person to lead a team of 50 or 150. Think ahead when hiring and hire people who can grow with you. 

2. Hiring for culture

   Company culture is perhaps one of the most important things about growing a business. Although companies are taking a more remote or hybrid approach to working models, it should not take your focus away from hiring for culture. The reputation of your company’s ability to attract great people can quickly diminish if you lose the focus of hiring for culture.

3. Hire quickly

   Oakstone Divisional Director Andy Strong explains, “In the race for top talent you have got to be fast, approach things in the right way, deliver an optimal candidate experience and partner with clients to speed up their hiring processes – or you will risk losing top talent.

   All the top candidates are getting approached three or four times a day by specialist SaaS recruiters and so the longer you spend on a hiring process, the more roles they are going to have presented to them, thus there is a greater opportunity of losing that candidate.

   If you do lose a candidate – a precious resource today – because your hiring process is not fit for purpose you could be waiting months to find another person as good or better. For every month there is an open vacancy it is costing the company tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros.”