Mike Stafiej is the CEO of employee referral platform ERIN. We sat down with him at SHRM 24 in Chicago.
AI Transcript
So tell the audience what his ERIN app.
Yeah, so ERIN is an employee referral platform. We help businesses engage employees to participate in recruitment, and what that means is we're taking the 40-year-old paper policy of refer somebody and we'll give you a thousand bucks. Automating all of that and then creating an experience around it so that the employees can constantly be involved and it kind of creates a flywheel of just a snowball effect. So typically we work with businesses of at least a thousand employees or more all the way up to a couple hundred thousand employees. What we're trying to do is get them from 10% hire from referrals to 30% hire from referrals. When we do that, there's three things that were really driving home. One is cost per hire, the second is time to fill, and then the third is retention and decreasing turnover.
Beyond using ERIN app, what are some of the things companies need to do for referrals to be successful at it? Yeah,
I mean, look, we we're tech that makes it easier to administrate, easier to engage with, but the reality is that most people struggle with just pure communication. I mean, grab any random employee, say, Hey, what is our referral bonus? They're not going to nip. So figuring out ways to make that communication happen better, and nobody wants another email saying there's another job open. So what we see effective is a lot of putting posters in break rooms, having a very easy place to go and learn about the policy, to participate dedicated URLs. Those are the things that matter because if people can't get in there and figure it out easily, they're never going to do anything. This is their side hustle. So they don't care about talent acquisition, but they do care about a thousand dollars. So that's the gap that people need to close. Tech just makes it a lot easier. Right.
Yeah, I remember I interviewed a guy, HR director, I remember years ago, and he had put around the office TVs with little commercials, almost playing about referrals. I thought that was a pretty cool idea, but communication is right. You have to really explain it to employees, make it easier for them to know how to do it
Mean. Yeah, you got, again, this is their side hustle within New York, so they have no idea what's going on. You need to market it constantly to them through parties, make it part of your initiative, make it part of the company wide announcements. Those are the things that close gap.
You guys have a new product this week, can tell us about it.
So today, hot off the press, I didn't even look at the press release yet, so I hope it's out there. Otherwise, we're ahead of ourselves, but this won't air in time. We'll be fine. So the new products recognition product, so we have employee referrals. We do have an internal mobility that people use, and then now we have a full recognition product that can actually be used standalone. The cool thing about that is it really buys into the message of the full life cycle of how employees participate in talent acquisition. It's refer your friends, bring 'em in. So new hires feed the machine, and then you have growing your career internally to help people develop and stay with the organization. And then recognition, which closes the gap on the other side, which is helping retain people so that they don't leave. And when that all happens together, it's a giant snowball effect. The more that people are recognized and enjoy being there, the more they're going to refer their friends. The more they refer to their friends, the more people come in that then enjoy being recognized and staying there. So we're really excited to have both sides of the problem, fix new hires and turning off the spigot to get a retention to the right place. So
What's your new recognition look like for the employee? You mean an actual use case? What
Happens? Yeah, so remember, they're already in our platform doing things. So they're in there looking at jobs. They can see how much you can earn. They can track their bonuses, fun stuff like that. The new product, it's a little bit more of a social aspect. They can engage with each other. So peer-to-peer reward system, think of it as like a wall, just any social media wall where you can see those interactions. You could insert GIF and stuff like that. It's fun as they do that. There's a point system behind it where they earn points by participating and then they can use those points to give those rewards to each other. And then some of the customers have the option to check out with digital gift cards. They could do a swag store, non-monetary rewards. Obviously we're heavy on bonuses. We have direct integrations with payroll, so if they want to create rewards and bonuses in the recognition side that do get paid out through payroll, we can do that super easy as well. So think of it as it's just a gamified, like, Hey, you're so close to earning that next reward. Can we get you in? It's a cool system.
Let's talk numbers a bit. When it comes to payouts for employees, what are the highs and lows within your customer base?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, so look, healthcare's on fire in a lot of ways. We see nurse physicians paying up to $10,000. We see cyber security with secret clearance positions paying $20,000 sometimes. But these are very specific hires, so imagine the recruiter fee to go find that person. On average, we see about a thousand to 1500. It's gone up and down a little bit over the years, and we do average 'em out, but it's pretty consistent. People bought 'em out of at 500 at the lowest, a thousand's, very common, and then up to 5,000 on more specialized roles. So just within, we're talking about healthcare, think of it as anybody, you'll give it a thousand dollars for any hire nurses, we're going to give you $5,000. Doctors would give you $10,000. So yeah, about that thousand to $1,500 range.
What's the overall average for the industry as far as just percentage of employee referrals? There are hires in the market.
Yeah, I mean, if you're over 10,000 employees, I could almost guarantee that you're at eight to 12% hires from referrals today. Some people are worse, some people are better. Really, obviously it depends on the situation. It depends on who you're hiring, how you're hiring them. Obviously you're going to have communication hurdles for manufacturing because the employees are not on, computers, are not engaging with tech versus something like an office job. But yeah, it's eight to 12%. And then from there, what we want to get you is to 30, 35%. And we've done it.
Clients in that range down
Times. Yeah, that's the magic, right? We just, we're two years in with a customer and they're kind of like our poster child just because just lined up so perfectly. We have people that have done better than them, but they started at 3% higher from referrals, 3%. They brought in a full-time person to manage it. They got them to 9%. So they tripled that. That's pretty good plateau From there, they bring in ERIN , they're now at 35% hires from referrals to 75% engagement of their workforce,
Which is pretty, that's pretty impressive. Definitely. What's your favorite feature of the product?
I've had people laugh at me when I tell them we do employee referrals. They're like, what? It's like a Google form. The nuances behind it are often lost on the surface. And what I mean by that is automating every single part of the written policy could be very hard. And I'm talking things like, did they work here before? Well, if they worked here 12 months ago, it's okay, I'll pay you a bonus. But if they worked here nine months ago, we're not going to pay you a bonus. Or maybe a hiring manager is eligible for referral bonuses unless they're referring to a job that they're the hiring manager of. So there's a lot of weird rules you have to pull together to truly automate this. We're doing this with organizations that are over a hundred thousand people. So you're getting literally tens of thousands of bonuses paid every year.
Everything has to be perfect. So we've done this all along, but what we've now done is brought that into the UI to give our customers control on it, meaning they can go in there and they can basically see every rule we've ever written, and then there's dropdowns so they can build their own, and it allows them to now think like, oh shit, we didn't even know we needed that. Right? So now they can do some pretty cool stuff, and that's all in the ui and they have full control on it. So it's, well, not a very sexy feature on the surface. It's super powerful.
Is AI going to play a part in this at all?
Yeah. Yeah. I had a guy yell at me earlier for seeing AI
For all. It seems like a pretty simple use case for a software. Does it need ai?
Well, no, that's a good point. What it needs is, is a way for employees to find what they're looking for faster. So you have to remove all friction in the process. So what we are launching this summer AI slash machine learning, but mixed in with natural language processing. So if I'm a security guard, I should be able to say, Hey, I want to security guard job that's within 20 miles of a major city that pays 20 bucks an hour, and then find the job. So that's where you can leverage things like natural language processing to turn it in from something that a human would say into a result, and then matching based on data in that job and for that person as well. So that's where we're leveraging it, and it's exciting. I mean, think about, again, large organizations. Your average person's not used to looking for work, a job within the organization. They don't want to deal with a dozen dropdowns and how to specify something and get to get somewhere. They just want to see what they want and then show them a result. That's what we're releasing.
Good stuff, Mike. Tell the audience where to go to learn more.
Aaron app.com. E-R-I-N-A-P p.com and find us on LinkedIn.
Awesome. Thanks.
Cool, man. Nice. Appreciate it, man. That's a wrap.