Welcome to the Jungle helps businesses attract talent through employer branding, and a modern job platform with rich company profiles and curated career content. Their recruitment tools connect the right companies with the right candidates by highlighting what truly matters: the people behind it all.
Types of tools used
AI / Productivity, Collaboration, Data Analytics, UX Research & Testing, Project Management
Before Najar
70% of purchases made at list price
Manual contract tracking in spreadsheets
Approvals took 1–2 months, often unclear or stalled
Approvals ran through scattered Slack threads and email chains
Invoices hard to match to budget due to vendor aliases, costing Finance hours
300+ SaaS tools with limited oversight or strategy
After Najar
€406K saved over 2 years through expert negotiation
Automated renewal alerts and timeline views
Average request‑to‑approval is 5x faster with clear ownership
Clear, parallel workflows: Finance, Legal, and IT all see status in one place
IT buyer expertise clarifies vendor aliases, helping Finance align invoices to the right budgets faster
Strategic evaluations and guidance to avoid redundancy
A fast-growing team needed a Procurement process that could keep up
Before working with Najar, Welcome to the Jungle had a flexible but scattered approach to procurement. Department heads handled purchases independently, often with credit cards, and processes varied depending on urgency and the person in charge. It enabled speed but created issues with governance, visibility, and cost control. Additionally, there was no central RFP or negotiation framework.
“Well, it happened, unfortunately, we ended up paying list prices. It really depended on who was making the purchase. If the requester had experience in negotiation, they would handle it. But I’d say around 70% of the time, there was no negotiation at all.”
Large contracts reached the exec team, but smaller ones often bypassed review, leading to inconsistent supplier choices and missed benchmarking. Contracts were tracked in a tool, but it wasn’t fully set up to monitor renewals or ownership. As roles shifted, vendors sometimes contacted the wrong people, resulting in accidental renewals. Finance also struggled to match invoices to budgets. Vendors often billed under parent companies (like Salesforce for Slack), making it hard to allocate costs without IT’s help.
From security concerns to the challenge of cross-team alignment
The push to formalise Procurement came from security risks. As the Head of IT and Security put it:
“There was no gate. There was no approval that prevented very problematic software to be added and interconnected with the rest of our information system.”
IT took ownership and started from scratch, but aligning IT, Finance, and Legal took time, balancing compliance, budget control, and data protection. They tried building a Jira-based workflow. Great for ticketing, but not for Procurement: no conditional or parallel approvals, and approvers couldn’t tell if they had to act or were just consulted. Approvals slid into email and Slack, creating friction and endless chasing:
“I was basically tracking people and saying, ‘You need to look at this.’”
The manual oversight caused context switching and delays. Requests could take 1–2 months, with little visibility into blockers:
“There was no way for them [requesters] to know what was actually blocking their request.”
Lack of notifications and central tracking meant even simple asks could stall. Conditional rules added confusion e.g., did a three‑year commitment under €10,000 a year trigger review? Even a basic login could involve personal data and legal implications. Without a clear, easy process, people bypassed it. Approvals weren’t consistently enforced, and many purchases happened off‑system:
“It was much more distracting. It's context switching all the time... we were creating frustration with requesters, which meant they didn’t want to use the process. You wouldn't know if it was a legal issue or even if the legal team had seen the request.”
Step into the cockpit of financial excellence
Asking the right questions, getting the right deals
When budget topics emerged in late 2023, the IT and Finance teams agreed it was time to explore external support. After an RFP, they chose Najar for the cultural fit, focus on long‑term supplier relationships, and the ability to train managers on Procurement best practices. What stood out was the advisory mindset. Rather than just benchmarking, Najar challenged needs and right‑sized usage and licensing, for example, revisiting license mixes on a major productivity suite instead of rubber‑stamping the previous setup.
Najar paired sharp negotiations with tighter contract discipline:
- Automated renewal alerts surfaced key dates and prevented unintended renewals.
- Monthly strategy sessions created a cadence to review usage, pricing, and roadmap alignment ahead of renewals.
“Through the access to those skilled professionals, we grow, we get training. We understand things better on how Procurement should work, and how to get better deals on the market.
My favourite platform functionalities are the automated renewal alerts combined with the monthly strategy discussions. Being able to actually anticipate contract renewals with the timeline is definitely great, because it allows us to prioritise subjects in the right way. So that's absolutely perfect.”
Results: €406,000 saved over two years, including ~20% off a key CRM renewal, plus a mindset shift, with previously reluctant teams re‑engaging after seeing the value and speed.
Procurement that flows: clear roles, faster approvals, zero ambiguity
Najar co‑designed a tailored intake workflow with Welcome to the Jungle, adding parallel approvals, conditional logic, and clear role ownership across Legal, Finance, IT, and managers.
“From the intake experience, it really allowed us to streamline the process with clear responsibilities for each stakeholder involved. It also gave us the opportunity to reflect on our process and make it evolve.”
The work also sharpened internal structure: one legal step became two, privacy and commercial, since different stakeholders were involved. The graphical builder made the flow obvious, so requesters could see status and blockers instantly.
“I think my favorite feature is the graphical editor, being able to see your process and the branches is really satisfying.”
Impact: approvals shrank from 1–2 months to a few weeks, and adoption clicked, 20+ requests approved in just a few months, with teams proactively using the system.
Beyond savings, the real breakthrough is adoption. In a high autonomy culture, teams now choose Procurement because it’s clear, fast, and useful. Requests are visible end to end, ownership is obvious, and approvals move in weeks instead of months.
“That’s how you know the process works: when someone asks to go through it again because they saw the benefit. Everyone in the company wanted to go through the Procurement process because they identified that through Najar they were able to get savings, and through those savings, they would get budget room for something else.”
What made that shift possible is the combination of three levers working together across the intake‑to‑procure cycle:
- Intake: transparent, parallel approvals with clear accountability.
- Expert buyers: negotiation strategy, market benchmarks, hands‑on execution.
- Contract management: automated renewal alerts and monthly strategy check‑ins to stay ahead.
Together, they give Welcome to the Jungle full control and efficiency, from the first request to signature, and a process people actually want to use.
