When you’re a global leader in AI-assisted hiring, speed matters. Not just in matching candidates to jobs, but in making the engineering and financial decisions that keep your platform running efficiently.
For HireVue, fragmented infrastructure, manual processes, and sprawling spreadsheets turned cloud cost management into a time-consuming spelunking expedition. With multiple AWS accounts from acquisitions, different tagging standards, and little unified visibility, the mere effort of understanding spend was overwhelming and it often fell to only a handful of people in the company.
The biggest offender? A 25,000-row spreadsheet used for tax reporting that took days to reconcile and offered limited actionable insight.
The Challenge: Too Many Blind Spots, Too Little Time
HireVue’s platform powers over 70 million video interviews and 200 million chat-based candidate engagements worldwide. But behind the scenes, the company was wrestling with:
- Fragmented AWS accounts across acquisitions
- Manual, error-prone processes like tagging and spreadsheet reconciliation
- Limited visibility into costs for both legacy systems and new features
- Slow feedback loops taking as long as 30 days to match a release’s costs with its revenue impact
The result: engineering and finance teams were forced into reactive cost management, leaving optimization opportunities and competitive advantage on the table.
The Solution: CloudZero + AWS
HireVue’s CTO and VP of Cloud Engineering Sam Marks had worked with CloudZero before. When Marks compared options, CloudZero stood out for its ability to analyze 100% of cloud spend, provide real-time cost insights, and deliver them in a way that’s meaningful to engineering, finance, and product teams alike.
What stood out for Marks was that CloudZero assigned a dedicated FinOps Account Manager (FAM), a hands-on partner who brought deep AWS cost expertise and helped implement best practices, acting as an extension of HireVue’s engineering team.
“Having that partner that had that deep expertise in the space and was able to be a lot of my eyes, hands, and ears, as well as advocate for how to do things the right way. [That] really sped up the entire process and sped up the implementation,” Marks said.
Implementation itself was nearly instant:
“It’s one click to install the CloudFormation template. […] Within 15 minutes, I started seeing data trickling in.”
By running on AWS, leveraging services like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon S3, AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and AWS Cost Explorer, CloudZero ingested HireVue’s multi-account data, normalized it, and delivered actionable insights from day one.
From Raw Data To Real Decisions
With CloudZero, HireVue quickly consolidated cost data from all its AWS accounts into a single source of truth.
That giant 25,000-line spreadsheet? It’s now obsolete. What once took days of manual work for tax reporting and internal analysis could be completed in moments with accuracy and granularity that wasn’t possible before.
Feedback loops are tighter as well. Production teams can now see exactly what a new feature costs to run and compare that against its revenue on the first day rather than waiting a month.
“Being able to speed up the time to understand the value for our new propositions is huge.” Marks said.
“That helped us build the pricing model and service that to customers with a much faster feedback loop, and that is a market differentiator, absolutely.”
The strongest endorsement comes straight from Marks himself:
“My overall experience working with CloudZero has been phenomenal. I have become a happy user, and now, I absolutely put myself in the champion category. And anytime anyone asks me about cloud cost and cloud engineering, CloudZero is the first tool I reach for, not just because of the tool itself, but also because of the partnership that CloudZero brings to the table.”
Lessons for FinOps Leaders
HireVue’s journey highlights three key takeaways for organizations ready to get serious about cloud cost efficiency:
- Visibility is everything. Without a unified, granular view of spend, optimization opportunities go unnoticed.
- Partnership accelerates results. A dedicated FinOps expert can shorten time-to-value and instill best practices quickly.
- Speed wins. Faster feedback loops allow engineering and product teams to make better, data-driven decisions before costs spiral.
The takeaway is clear: if cloud cost chaos is holding back your business, you don’t have to live with it.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
