ERIN

What it is

ERIN is employee referral software: the system that captures a referral, checks it against your eligibility rules, pushes it into the ATS, and gets the bonus to payroll without a recruiter touching any of it. The company was founded in 2018, is based in Pittsburgh, is run by CEO Mike Stafiej, and raised a $5M round led by Reformation Partners in October 2022. It stays small — around 65 people as of mid-2026, per Tracxn. The closest thing in the catalog is Radancy’s referral module. ERIN is the standalone version of that job.

The product is three pieces. ERIN Refer runs the program: a referral portal, text-to-refer with no login, automated eligibility checks and waiting periods, tiered bonuses, and payout handoff across 30+ ATS, HRIS and payroll integrations — Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Taleo, SuccessFactors, ADP and more. ERIN Reach is the sourcing half: paste a job URL and ERIN scores which employees are likely to know qualified people, maps their second-degree connections, then runs the campaign over email, LinkedIn, SMS, Slack or Teams. It needs no ATS integration at all. ERIN Studio is a free AI assistant that benchmarks bonus amounts against ERIN’s payout history, drafts a referral policy, and generates posters, QR codes and branded video.

What ERIN is not: an ATS. Requisitions, interviews, scorecards and offers stay in Greenhouse, iCIMS or Workday.

Why it shows up in recruiting stacks

The part of a referral program that breaks is never capture. It is administration — who qualifies, how long the ownership window runs, which tier the bonus falls in, and who tells payroll. ATS referral modules hand employees a form and stop short of all four, so the program lands in a spreadsheet and the bonus arrives two quarters late. That is what kills participation, and it is the specific leg ERIN automates, with the source written back to the ATS so referral attribution survives into your reporting.

Text-to-refer is the second reason, and it explains why ERIN’s customer stories skew to healthcare, senior living and property services — JLL, Methodist Retirement Communities, Vi Living. A nurse mid-shift will not log into a referral portal. A one-tap SMS link with no password will get the referral submitted.

Third: the Reach Team tier ships MCP access with Claude and ChatGPT integrations. That makes ERIN one of very few referral tools an agent can query directly instead of through a scraped CSV export.

Pricing reality

ERIN publishes its prices, which almost nobody in this category does.

Refer is free until your third referral hire starts — full platform, ATS and HRIS integrations included, no card. After that it is billed annually and metered on referral hires per year rather than seats: $799/month at 100 hires a year, for up to 2,500 employees. ERIN’s own slider puts unit cost at $107/hire at 50 hires, $95 at 100, and $89 at 200 — unit cost falls 17% as volume quadruples. Enterprise is custom and buys unlimited hires and employees, custom integrations, SSO and a dedicated CSM.

Reach is priced per seat instead: $99/seat/month annual ($139 month-to-month) for Recruiter, including 500 outreach credits a month, and $139/seat/month annual ($169 month-to-month) for Team — the tier that carries sourcing agents, LinkedIn messaging, MCP access and SSO. Credits do not roll over, and seats share one pool. Discounts exist for nonprofits, education and volume commitments.

Two anchors for the negotiation. Third-party review sites still quote ERIN’s older headcount-based tier — $999/month for up to 1,000 employees, per SelectSoftware Reviews, verified 29 June 2026 — so a quote priced per employee is the stale model, not the current one. And against agency fees at 20-30% of first-year compensation (see cost per hire), a single avoided agency placement covers the whole annual Refer bill at the 100-hire tier.

Best for

TA operations owners at 1,000-10,000-employee companies with a large non-desk or distributed workforce — healthcare, senior living, manufacturing, logistics, retail — running 50-300 referral hires a year, where eligibility rules and bonus payouts run today on a spreadsheet plus payroll tickets. ERIN’s average customer is around 5,000 employees (SelectSoftware Reviews, June 2026), and that is where the hires-based meter prices best.

Do not buy it under about 200 employees or under about 10 referral hires a year — the free tier already covers you, and past that your ATS’s referral field plus a quarterly payout batch is cheaper than a platform. Do not buy it if you want career site, job advertising and a recruiting CRM on one invoice; that is Radancy or Phenom. And do not buy Refer when what you actually want is sourcing — buy Reach on its own.

Versus the alternatives

Radancy’s Employee Referrals is the enterprise incumbent. Radancy acquired Firstbird in January 2022 and folded it into the Talent Acquisition Cloud next to career sites, programmatic advertising and a CRM. Pick Radancy when referrals are one line item in a suite purchase and you want one vendor across attraction. Pick ERIN when referrals are a standalone buy and you are not signing up for a suite rollout.

EmployeeReferrals.com is the other large-program option: 80,000+ hires to date, aimed at companies above 500 employees, from about $10K a year per GetApp. Pick it for a branded, engagement-led program at enterprise scale. Pick ERIN when the no-login path for non-desk staff and the payroll handoff matter more than portal branding.

Teamable competes with Reach, not Refer. It maps employee networks for warm intros and sourcing-led tech recruiting, and has been part of TopFunnel since 2021. Pick Teamable when sourcing is the job. Pick ERIN Refer when bonus administration is.

Hellora is the entrant to watch and the one that will turn up in healthcare deals. Formerly Eqo, it rebranded in 2026 from referral-only into an AI recruiting CRM for healthcare hiring, at $18K-$150K a year (SelectSoftware Reviews, June 2026). Pick Hellora when you want referrals plus database rediscovery in one healthcare-specific tool. Pick ERIN when referrals are the purchase and your ATS handles the rest.

The real default is your ATS’s own referral module — Greenhouse, Workday, iCIMS and Jobvite all ship one. Stay on it while referral volume is under roughly 20 hires a year. The moment eligibility disputes and late bonus payments start landing in your inbox, that is the buying signal.

Watch-outs

• The meter is referral hires, and a working program raises that number. A program that doubles from 100 to 200 hires roughly doubles the bill. Guard: get the hires-per-year band and the mid-term overage rule in writing before signing, and model the invoice at your target hire count, not last year’s.
• Reach credits expire monthly. 500 outreach credits per seat do not roll over, so a slow month is money burned and a heavy month stalls mid-campaign. Guard: run one seat month-to-month at $139 for a quarter, measure credit burn per filled role, then commit annually at $99.
• MCP and the sourcing agents sit on the top Reach tier only. Guard: if agent access is the reason you are buying, price Team at $139/seat/month, not Recruiter, and make the rep demo which objects the MCP endpoint exposes — campaigns, candidates, referral records — before you sign.
• The vendor is small, at roughly 65 people. That is a real procurement question at enterprise headcount, not a knock on the product. Guard: ask for named references at your employee count and on your ATS, and get the SOC 2 Type II report and the DPA into security review early rather than at contract stage.
• Third-party listings carry a stale product shape. They still show headcount pricing and describe internal mobility as a headline module from a 2023 release. Guard: price from erinapp.com/pricing on the day you quote, and make the rep confirm in writing that internal mobility is included in the tier you are buying.