Beyond the Resume: How Employee Networks Drive More Hires with Mike Stafiej, ERIN

In a world increasingly dominated by AI-powered recruiting tools, the human touch of employee referrals might just be your organization's secret weapon. Mike Stafiej, CEO and founder of ERIN, joins Bill Banham on the HRchat Show to reveal how properly implemented employee referral programs drive five times more hires while cutting turnover in half.

"Employee referrals is not a new concept," Mike acknowledges, "but if you grab your average employee and say, 'Hey, do you know how much you can earn for referring to this job?' they're going to have no idea what you're talking about." This lack of transparency and cumbersome administrative processes have traditionally hampered what should be one of recruiting's most powerful channels. The ERIN platform tackles these challenges by automating everything from submission to payment, handling complex global policies across different countries, currencies, and business units.

Organizations using ERIN's approach see dramatic increases in referral participation, explains Mike, from initial adoption rates around 20% to as high as 80% over time. This means tapping into employees who were previously disengaged from talent acquisition efforts. Gamification plays a crucial role in this transformation, bringing "smaller, faster rewards earlier into the process" to counteract the typically lengthy referral timeline. Employees earn points for actions like sharing jobs on social media or logging into the app, creating immediate gratification rather than waiting months for a referral to complete the hiring process.

Perhaps most fascinating is Mike's perspective on how employee referrals will evolve alongside AI recruiting tools. As both employers and candidates increasingly leverage AI in the hiring process, we're moving "from a world where 60 applications per job is acceptable to one where you'll have 10,000 applications per hire." In this noise-filled environment, employee referrals maintain the critical human element at scale, providing pre-vetted candidates who already understand the company culture.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Empowering Employee Referrals
• 3:08 Aaron's Employee Referral Platform Explained
• 8:45 The Secret to 5x More Hires
• 14:00 Gamification: Instant Rewards Drive Participation
• 17:36 Handling Complex Diversity Incentives
• 21:51 AI vs. Human Touch in Recruitment

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit HRGazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannam, and in this episode we're going to consider the value of empowering employees to participate directly in recruiting and internal talent development. And joining me on the show this time is the fantastic, wonderful, superb mike staffie ceo over at erin, an employee referral and internal mobility platform that aims, or claims, to drive five times more hires from employee referrals and cuts turnover in half. As an entrepreneur, mike is focused on creating and innovating technology solutions that achieve operational efficiencies for businesses and have lasting impacts on people's lives. That's a pretty good mission. How are you doing, mike? Welcome to the show today I'm great.

Speaker 3: 1:14

That was a great intro too, so I was about I was getting ready to say who I am, what I do, but I think you nailed it uh, so I'm excited for that oh man, there goes my next question.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Then usually we start with who are you, what do you do? So let me change that up. Instead of that, mike, what gets you up in the morning? Tell us that.

Speaker 3: 1:32

My three children. I don't mean that as like I wake up for them. I mean it because they're jumping on me and bouncing on me. No, but I appreciate the intro. But, as you said, my name is Mike Staffy. I am the CEO and founder of Aaron. We're an employee referral platform and I know we have plenty of time here to dig into what that means, but at a high level. We're looking to automate everything from submission to payment and all the manual nuances in between. By doing that, we can create a much better experience on the front end for the employees that are using the platform.

Speaker 2: 2:05

Love it. Thank you very much, and before we go any further, can I just say I completely relate to you. So I was out last night watching the Europa League final. We're recording this episode in the middle of May. Well done, tottenham Hotspur. By the way. I got home and my 10 month daughter was in bed with my other half, which meant that I had to sleep on the couch, and this morning I was woken up by my four-year-old boy jumping on my chest. Dad, wake up, I'm hungry.

Speaker 2: 2:30

That's how it goes. Yeah, thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. Okay, so let's get into the meat of today's conversation. Aaron was recently named Talent Acquisition Category Winner in 2025 HR Tech Awards, so congratulations. Tell us more about why that particular award matters and what it says about Aaron.

Speaker 3: 3:08

Yeah, I'll tell you, we're not the first ones to tackle employee referrals. We're probably not the last, but it is a you know. Forgive the phrase, it's an unsexy piece of HR tech, right? So it's not AI, it's not this brand new concept, but it is a topic that I think is important. There's a ton of people that talk about the importance of referrals and how that fits strategically as part of their funnel and as part of their plan for talent acquisition. So I guess my point is it's often kind of like forgotten about until you really need to dig in deep on it. So getting an award, it starts bringing that in to the front lines of hey, we don't have to have ai at the end of our product name to get attention. So we're super thankful for that and we're hoping that it helps other people understand kind of the importance of how we can fit into their strategy for talent acquisition.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Well, that's quite a humble answer there. Well, very well done to you and your team. Aaron claims to drive five times more hires from referrals and cut turnover in half. These are bold statements. What's the secret sauce behind those results?

Speaker 3: 4:22

Yep for sure. So it's important to know, kind of who our customer is right. So obviously that is a big claim and we make it proudly, but it's a claim that's mostly targeted for enterprise in some mediums, as businesses. Now, the reason I bring up that nuance is because when you're talking about what holds you back from being successful with employee referrals, that's what we're tackling is the complexity of organizations. So the larger you are, the more complicated you are. That's where we can provide value, and often it's a very segmented process.

Speaker 3: 4:58

If you're operating out of 85 different countries, it's speaking 13 different languages, paying 20 different currencies. That's a logistical problem. By bringing that all together and lowering the administrative overhead, we create an opportunity to now provide an end user experience that's much more transparent than anything they're used to, right? So we take all this complexity, we smooth it all out, we say it's okay, we got this, and then we can show the employee like hey, it's no longer just a, here's my buddy and move on, it's here's my buddy. I get to track them the whole way through the process. I get to then track the bonus through the process. I get to know when I get paid so I can buy that new Xbox, right. So it is a flywheel.

Speaker 3: 5:42

It's not just the upfront experience, it's not just the automation, it's one feeding the other and then creating bigger results. So what we often see is, when we roll out I just hugged a large customer yesterday they just broke 20% adoption about a couple months into their launch, which is great, which is great. And what happens is like that's your, that's your power users, right? Those are the people that are referring anyway. Once you start seeping into 30, 40, 50% user adoption, we have customers over 80%. That's when you're now tapping into people that were not participating in talent acquisition before. So when you have that level of employee adoption, things start happening.

Speaker 2: 6:21

More hires come from referrals and all the downstream effects start taking place how important is the hr department in making sure that those employee referrals happen, that employees feel incentivized to do so, they feel engaged, they believe in the company culture?

Speaker 3: 6:37

I'm guessing the hr department is pretty important yeah, it's honestly the the biggest things like transparency and communication. Right, this is something that business like referrals is not a new concept. They've been doing this for decades it's. But if you grab your average employee and you say, hey, do you know how much you can earn for referring to this job, they're gonna have no idea what you're talking about. So so part of what we you know, we partner with with hrta to those communications, the things that are annoying for them and are overhead, we can bring that into software and streamline it. So it is critical that they're active in it. But the things that were manual work before, now we can get to the employee directly and the time they save allows them to get more creative and more fun. That's the thing. Like sure, we're going to cut down 90 of your administration, but with your extra time now you can start doing fun things to promote the program on a wider scale so that you get more results in the end.

Speaker 4: 7:36

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Speaker 2: 8:45

Your platform features gamification to drive participation, so when folks aren't playing on their Xboxes, they're in your tool. How does gamification enhance employee engagement within the recruitment process? Can you maybe also share some stats around that?

Speaker 3: 9:02

Oh, 100%. See, 100% is a stat, so I already shared one. The gamification was a buzzword in the late teens for a lot of software products, right, when we talk about gamification for referrals, there's a lot of ways you can do it. But a way to kind of oversimplify it, more as a strategy rather than feature, is how can you bring smaller, faster rewards earlier into the process so that it keeps the employees excited, right? The problem with employee referral programs is that they're too far out. I refer you it's going to take weeks for you to get hired. Then I got to wait 90 days to get paid. Plus, I got to wait for the next payroll run, right? So I'm talking about half a year before I'm going to get any money out of it.

Speaker 3: 9:46

So gamification allows us to bring kind of more of that excitement upfront and more instant gratification. So things like earning points as you take steps throughout the process. It's, you know, every time I log into the mobile app or I share on social media, though that's activity that's rewarded through gamification immediately rather than 180 days later. So we have a lot of cool ways you can leverage that. With leaderboards, we have the ability to instantly let them cash out for a gift card if that's part of what you put in.

Speaker 3: 10:17

We have a lot of customers that don't do financial rewards for points, but they'll do giveaways and it gives them a marketing reason, right? So, hey, for every 100 points you earn every month, we're going to do a few giveaways for Amazon gift cards or time off or something like that, and then that gives them a reason to remarket back to the employees. Look at Bob he got an iPad Pro just by logging in every week, right? So when we can create that more upfront, instant gratification, that's when you get higher participation through gamification. That's the difference between it being a buzzword and actually being part of your strategy for adoption.

Speaker 2: 10:52

Okay, Bob, with all these cool technologies for logging in. Good work, Bob. Okay. So Aaron accommodates complex referral policies such as diversity incentives and multi-currency payouts. I've got a couple of questions for you around this. Firstly, what's the appetite for incentives around diverse hires in 2025? We've got a couple of questions for you around this. Firstly, what's the appetite for incentives around diverse hires in 2025? We've seen a lot of changes. We've seen the move away from the E in DEI. We've had more of a focus on stability. The term SHRM uses this a lot, so I'd love to hear your experiences around that. And also, how did you design erin to handle that level of flexibility and compliance?

Speaker 3: 11:31

yeah, both great questions, the um. So I'll tell you that when we launched 2019, like the biggest pushback on investing employee referrals is that it does not create a diverse organization. Um, and which is it's when you think about, is a big statement assuming that your employees only know people that look and act like them and, at the same time, already assuming you don't have a diverse organization, and then that's just going to snowball that. So when we built that feature years ago now at least five years ago now the goal was to kind of break down some of that stereotype, and not only that. So it was basically kind of a countermeasure to like a reason not to invest in referrals, which is always silly. But the thing, the problem with diversity programs is that their marketing tools they're not something that your employees actually participate in. What I mean by that is you can say all you want that you believe in strong diversity, but how do you actually execute on that in a company level? So by adding that feature, we were able to get the employees actually participating in the company, kind of putting their money where their mouth is, which is, hey, if you refer, somebody will pay you, and if they qualify as one of these targeted hires. We're going to pay you more because that's important to our business and we're going to pay you more because that's important to our business and we're going to invest into that.

Speaker 3: 12:51

So it was a really cool feature when we launched it, the way it works. We don't make any determination on what qualifies or what doesn't, so it's more of a kick right. We call it diversity bonus as a marketing play, but it's basically hey. If there's a box checked on this candidate's application, for whatever reason, we can include a bigger bonus. So it's super flexible. You can apply it to basically any scenario where you'd want to incentivize employees to bring in certain talent, this could be hey. If they have top secret clearance, you know we can give them a kicker. If we had a lot of some customers, especially overseas, where their sales teams were male dominated, and if it was a female on the sales team and sales rule, they got the kicker. So things like that veterans right. So obviously diversity includes a lot of groups, but it doesn't necessarily. It could be anybody with certain skills that are just more targeted higher.

Speaker 3: 13:51

To answer your question, the appetite is down. It is not a topic that comes up nearly as much as it did back in the day for us, but the feature is still there. It can be leveraged for any organization that uses our product. The other part of your question is actually the the more complicated answer and our secret sauce, right, which is how do we handle such complexity?

Speaker 3: 14:13

We have one customer, we have several customers, but one in particular that I'm thinking of, that has, I think, 4 000 bonus combinations, right, 80 some countries they're. They have four business units and then they have seven tiers of jobs, job levels, with a kicker. If you have top secret clearance or secret clearance, right, two different kickers, right. So it becomes exponentially complicated because you have a different policy for every country. You have a different policy for every business unit in every country. You have a different policy for every job tier for every business unit in every country, right? And then you have a more complicated one when you add in secret clearances, right. So it just becomes a multiplication issue, right?

Speaker 3: 14:55

So the way we built our product back in the day, we just used heavy customization, heavy, heavy coding that does not scale, it makes it impossible to maintain, it makes it impossible to audit.

Speaker 3: 15:06

So we built out the product to have like a policy builder that can be extremely complex, and we pair that with a feature called groups that allow us to control the experience based on the group that the employee belongs into. I know that all sounds pretty boring, so I'm going to give you a simple example to tie that up. If I'm in the US and I'm looking at a job, it's going to say, hey, mike, you can earn $1,000 for this job. If you're in the UK, it's going to say, hey, bill, you can earn 1,200 pounds for this job. So it actually not only does it manage what policy you belong to, but it actually changes the experience in real time, so that the employees participating will only ever see how much they can earn in their native currency, not just some number that exists across the platform. So by localizing that experience, we can definitely tap into those different countries and get higher participation and ensure that payroll pays the right people, the right amount and the right currency.

Speaker 2: 16:07

You do a very good job at explaining this stuff. I was reading your bio ahead of this, uh, ahead of this interview. You come from a biz dev and sales background, um, and when you say things like you know we we needed, we needed to add this feature to prove out the business case, um, it's, it's very straightforward, you explain it very well, so I kudos to you, sir.

Speaker 3: 16:29

I was in there before as a person.

Speaker 2: 16:32

So my next question. I'm reading it again now. It's a bit lame, but given your very high standard of being able to produce good answers, it might become quite interesting as an answer. The question is how do you see the role of employee referrals evolving over the next few years, especially in the age of AI and skills-based hiring? So could have done better with that question, but I suspect the answer is going to be quite interesting. Give it a go.

Speaker 3: 16:57

I hope you find it interesting. So I 100% believe that there will be a huge swing to AI for talent acquisition teams. We're seeing it happen already. So that's not even an interesting statement by me. However, I also believe this can be an overinvestment in AI, meaning that people are gonna go a little too hard into it and then have to pull back a little bit and say, eh, maybe we put a little bit too much faith in the robots, let's get a few more humans involved, because what AI is really good at doing is repetitive tasks, and screening resumes is a perfect example of a repetitive task. Now that's and you can remove the bias from it. You can. It can work nonstop, right. So, like AI is a is not good for recruiters. You know. Period, right. That said, removing humans from the process 100% is also not good for companies.

Speaker 3: 17:52

So my more recent hot take is that, as we do this heavy investment into AI and potentially overinvestment into AI employee referrals is a great way to keep humans involved in the process and make it much more efficient. You're coming into a world where you know we're leaving, a world where 60 applications from a job board per one hire is acceptable. We're coming into a world where you're going to have 10,000 applications per one hire, because AI is being used on both sides. It's not just talent acquisition teams using AI, it's also the candidates using AI, and we can't be mad at them for it. If we're going to screen them against it, they're going to use it against them, right? So you're going to have now a world where somebody on the job hunt and we see it already has 10,000 applications. There's going to be a lot of noise, a lot of noise. And how do you create that connection, that more personal, upfront experience, when you don't have any recruiters left on your team?

Speaker 3: 18:44

Employee referrals is the secret weapon, right? So that is keeping that human element in there at scale and at efficiency, right? And it's still creating a vetting process that's not happening in the interview process today and therefore AI will not be able to replicate it, because it doesn't exist. What I mean by that is hey, bill, I refer you for a job, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's up and how it works here, and you're going to have a little bit more information than just somebody coming in from a job board. You're going to know a little bit of the dirty laundry in a good way and that's why referrals across the board stay longer than traditional hires, because there's a level of vetting that's happening and connection and culture that's being established even before you start on day one. So hopefully that was a solid answer for you. But I think you know we'll bring on the AI and we'll bring in the humans, right.

Speaker 2: 19:42

A couple of hours ago I was interviewing a C-suite executive at a very large, well-known brand that I shall not mention, and we're talking about how ai is uh impacting uh internal ta professionals and um you know, her line of answers were a lot were long lines of it's wonderful, it's freeing up their time. Then I asked the follow-up question yeah, but how many people have you let go in that department over the last year? 31%, 31% went in the last 12 months.

Speaker 3: 20:11

There we go. I mean you've got to pay for the tools, right? I mean that's the thing. It's an efficiency play. No one's adding extra costs just to do it. So often when those decisions are made it gets offset somewhere else, and with ai, it's it. That's that's why they buy ai.

Speaker 2: 20:32

It's to reduce the cost elsewhere okay, we are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation, so my last few questions for you are those wrap-up questions where we like to leave our listeners with tangible takeaways. Uh, so next answer a bit of a summary of some of the things that you've already said, but I'm going to challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less, so in one minute or less. Mike, for organizations struggling with high turnover or engagement issues, where do you suggest that they start when rethinking their referral or mobility strategies? Go?

Speaker 3: 21:08

Perfect One. Automation frees up time and ability to do other things, and it allows you to put in processes that are super cumbersome without technology. So use technology to automate the things that you've always wanted to do. For example, make referrals part of your onboarding process. Right, if you're not doing that today, technology can enroll them in a drip campaign from day one to get them in there. So, when you're thinking about the things that are holding you back, if there is software that could accelerate that for you, don't let it hold you back anymore.

Speaker 2: 21:40

Oh, three seconds to spare, good work. Okay, let's talk about your roadmap. What's coming up for, aaron? What are you particularly excited about that you can share with our listeners today?

Speaker 3: 21:48

For sure. We're working on several really cool things right now A lot of engagement factors that just make it easier for employees to participate, but also more advanced capabilities for the talent acquisition team themselves. For example, one of the biggest problems we hear is that when I hire somebody, they're ready to go right away, but they may not start for 30 days. So we have a new feature coming out, called pre-hire, where the second they get hired they're able to start participating in the program. We'll automatically merge it with their employee account when they start and then we'll make sure that they get paid based on the policy for those pre-hire employees. So it's a super cool feature that really opens up the door to things that were not possible before. Um, and you know, that brings us earlier into the process to get heavier participation.

Speaker 2: 22:37

Make them part of the program on day one. I love it. Uh, you've got a bit of an hr gazette exclusive there, I think, listeners, um, my penultimate question before I ask you how folks can connect with you has to be what's up with the sloths behind you? So this is an audio only podcast, but, um, um, mike is a very dynamic person, it would appear that's what I'm getting from from this call. He's, uh, he is a charismatic, gregarious kind of guy, but he's got a painting of four sloths and a sloth teddy bear behind him. So what's that about?

Speaker 3: 23:08

there's multiple sloth, uh stuffed animals back there. You just can't see them. So, like the? Uh, the real, the simple story is I like sloths, but the real story is that, uh, years ago, when we were doing our first sherman annual conference, we needed something to give away and my whole take was nobody wants our junk, they're just going to take it, throw it out, so let's not spend the money on it. However, what everyone wants is something to take home for their kids.

Speaker 3: 23:34

So we got this floppy arm sloth. We had a hundred of them sitting at the booth and they went almost immediately. Everyone had to sign up for a demo to get them. They didn't care. They wanted to take something back to their kids after being gone for a week. So that you know, that kind of stroke of marketing genius settled in and we're like well, let's just kind of make that part of our culture. It's fun. Um, like there's cat people and dog people, but everyone's a sloth person. So the? Uh. You know, if you ever are in pittsburgh and you're at our office, it will creep you out because there's a lot of sloth stuff all around and just finally for today, mike, how can our listeners connect with you?

Speaker 2: 24:09

is that linkedin, email, instagram, wherever else? And, of course, how can they learn more about erin?

Speaker 3: 24:16

yeah, check us out at erinappcom. E-r-i-n-a-p-pcom. My email is just mike at erinappcom, so that's simple enough. The harder thing would be to figure out how to spell my last name and find me on linkedin, but I invite you to try that as well and, uh, looking forward to chatting yeah, I do have to say listen.

Speaker 2: 24:33

I did double check with mike the pronunciation of his surname before we hit record day, because regular listeners of this show will know that pronunciation is not my strong suit. Mike, uh, you're a nice chap. I want to do this again with you soon, but for now, thank you very much for being my guest. Thank you, bill and listeners. As always, until next time. Happy working.

Speaker 1: 24:56

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