Episode 54: Mike Stafiej - Unleashing the Power of Data with ERIN

Thanks for trenching in. You're listening to TA in the Trenches, the podcast for HR and TA leaders making workforce decisions with real financial and business consequences. I'm Matt Reimer, co founder and COO at Rogue Hire. Rogue Hire runs the largest healthcare TA benchmark program in the land, where we know one thing acutely, that top performers don't have more applicants. They waste fewer of the ones they have. Each episode I sit down with CHROs, VPs of TA and recruitment operation leaders living at the front of that problem. Operator to operator, less opinion, more evidence. Let's get into it. Talent acquisition in the Trenches is brought to you by Rogue Hire, the team behind the 17 year Healthcare TA benchmark program and the makers of medics. Your ATS tells you what happened. Medics tells you what to do next. A patient monitor for every open rec, continuous vitals, early warnings, one clear signal on track, watch or critical. Your team works from the same truth. Your dollars go only where hiring risk actually exists. Learn more@roguehire.com. Hey, Ryan, you got me. I hear you. Good. Good deal. Mike, how are you doing? I'm always good when I'm hanging out with you guys. Hear you loud and clear. All right, you trench in, Ryan, or want to give it a second? Maybe give it just 30 more seconds just to see if we have a few more live attendees rolling in. But otherwise, let's get rocking and rolling when you're ready. Cool. Well, thanks everyone for trenching in. I'm your host today, co founder and CEO at a company called Rogue Hire. Matt Reimer. Today we're going to continue on our series of digging into the power of data automation and advanced AI. And so we are excited to have and I think Mike, this is our second or maybe third show together. Mike Staffi back, he's the CEO of Aaron Tech leader, visionary, led a lot of different opportunities and directions in the industry. Serial entrepreneur, great guy from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aaron is one of the industry's leading exper and employee referrals, which we're going to dig deep into today and internal mobility. And so we also have with us today Ryan Affilter. He's the co host with me and he here at Rogue hires our product manager on a product that we call Signals. And so Ryan has a deep expertise in candidate experience, employer, brand and programmatic marketing. And so Ryan, can you talk a little bit about what we're hoping maybe to unpack here today with Mike? Yeah. So the goal today is moving past kind of the outdated idea that referrals are just a Nice to have bonus. And uncovering how Mike and the team at Aaron are using some of those high velocity data signals to identify which jobs based on predictive data points are prime for referral automation. With the goal to turn a workforce into a scalable sourcing engine. So we're hoping to dive in, learn how healthcare leaders can leverage these automated push models not only to slash time to fill, but also to replace some of that high cost dependency on agency and overall make things easy. A self sustaining culture of day one advocacy. So excited to be here, let's go. So Mike, let's maybe talk a little bit about and let's get specific about referrals. And so, you know, we here at Rogue Hire believe that, you know, referrals are, you know, in that, you know, kind of top three strategies of things that you should be doing, you should be doing it at a very high level day in and day out. Not a nice to have rather, you know, a core hiring strategy. And so that being said, right, in healthcare, as in many industries, there's certain roles that are very hard to fill and require extra time and attention. And you could go down the list here if we wanted to in health care. But the core question I've always had is, and I think from my experience at not only UPMC, but also at Trinity is how do you get people to actually participate at scale in a referral program? Yeah, great question. And my mic just switched, so let me switch that back super fast. Your mic switched on my. Sorry about that. Hopefully that sounds a little bit better, but thanks for having me on guys. And I think, yeah, we chatted here before and let's get some of the basics out of the way so we can actually dig into some of the fun stuff. Right? Everybody, I think everybody on this call probably has a referral policy in place. The problems they deal with just in a very basic level are employee engagement and automation. Right? So it's a pain in the butt to administer these things, make sure the right things happen at the right time, but it's also a pain in the butt to get people engaged in an ongoing way. So this, assuming everybody agrees with that, going to some of the things you just mentioned, it's how do you, if you, if you can get at least some foundation poured for managing your program and at least having a way for people to participate, whether it's a platform or just a process, then how do you actually use, how do you actually fill the roles that you need to fill? Not only because they're hard to fill, but Maybe. Maybe there's more cost effective way to fill it, right? One thing we spent pretty much most of last year on is focusing on really that. And you can't fill a hard to fill position through referrals unless you have the engagement, right? So one thing we really focused on is leveraging a lot of the new technology that's now available. I'm not the first person on your podcast to say AI, am I? No. Just a second, actually. So tell me more about it. I don't know if you guys heard of this. What is that thing called artificial intelligence? If you haven't heard about it yet, it's coming. If you've been to any HR show in the past five years, it's all people talk about. But I'm a firm believer we see a lot of the problems in this industry when AI is making decisions, people are getting sued for it. A lot of the major platforms are running into legal difficulties. Businesses are running into legal difficulties. I think that's the right way to use AI and what you were talking about there. It's like when you have a hard to fill position. Think about how we do it, like without any tools first, right? So if you're trying to fill a specialty role within a hospital system, the first place you go is to the manager of that role and then hopefully to their team, right? So it's like a walk down and like, hey, Bob, Karen, who do you know? Right? Like, how do we fill this? So how do you scale that and how do you, how do you replicate that? With software, right? So one thing that we came out with last year that's really cool is using AI to say, hey, you have people in the organization that are a good fit for this. Now we just need to tell them about it because we already know they're not thinking about talent acquisition. So if we have a way to identify those people and then a way to tell them in a meaningful way that doesn't interrupt their job, you can get a lot more results. That's not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but that was our main focus last year and we're seeing huge results from it already. Now. There's a few problems that you need to think about. It's easier said than done. One is how do you identify the role that you need? That's a hard time. I know everybody on this call probably feels it, but what I think Rogue Hire does a great job of is helping them understand what's working and what's not, right? So once you have that level of data and information and therefore intelligence, then exercising that and bringing that into action is kind of where we've been falling into. And exactly what I just said is that automated outreach to tell them rather than the whole company, hey, I got this radiology role open. It's now, hey, 30 people that have previously interacted with talent acquisition for these roles before or have similar roles or have at least some level of engagement, we need to go to them first to get them involved in recruitment. And this is all just a big fancy way of saying how to get a referral out of the right people. You talked about automated outreach. You know, I guess when, when you think about that and using automation to outreach, I mean, that's not a new idea, I guess from, you know, kind of like an email perspective or a messaging perspective. And I think sometimes, right, historically, you know, this has fallen on maybe deaf ears, meaning that like, hey, yet another email from, you know, the, you know, system HR office about some position that they need to be filled and it gets washed away, it gets lost in the noise. And so, you know, by default, I think some of these referral programs, you know, continually go back to, you know, the, like you said, hey, the who do you know game. And hey, you know, I'm picking up the phone and I'm calling Ryan and saying, ryan, I've got this great role and I've got to find three of these. And so I guess maybe help us understand with where, you know, technology is today and maybe where it's headed, how, you know that the use of AI, if you will, helps with that automated outreach with maybe some layers of personalization or adding capacity to the recruiter's desk, Right? And so, like, when we think about the problems that we're trying to solve, whether through automation, you know, the reduction of waste or redundant processes, and ultimately the two things that every TA shop in the US is looking for, which is reduce of cost and increase of productivity. And so where do you fit within that ecosystem and maybe help us understand where this technology is actually headed? Yeah, and maybe just the very quick background kind of going off the theme I've seen before, these things go stale fast, right? So even if you have a great policy that gets everybody excited, great payments, great incentives, six months later, they forget about it. Even if you roll out a product like Aaron and you have an easy way for them to participate, six months later, they still forget about it. We've been doing this for almost a decade now, and we've seen customers on that journey, they had a decent enough policy to Start, we got them to the next level with Aaron. But then how do you just keep it? How do you keep it ongoing and interactive? One is whether you're using a product or not, you have to meet your employees where they need to be met, right? There's employees in your office and in your buildings and your hospital systems that are going to want to participate on a web browser. They're going to want to communicate through email. There's going to be some that live on teams, there's going to be some that live through text message because they're never at their computer. They can't even remember their teams to log in. Again, regardless whether you're using a product or not, making sure that when you engage your employees, it cannot be the generic email that goes to the whole company. We all know that doesn't work, right? So we reference this often just because it's what people know. But now tailoring that to say, hey, here's another email notification that's very specific to you. Or here's a text message that's very specific to you. And then here's. Or here's a link on teams that's very specific to you. Not only does that meet them where they want to be met, it's going to increase their likelihood to participate, right? So the other step beyond that is it has to be smooth on the other side. Think of it as like you're a marketing team, right? Hey, we got this cool thing like you find a new website, you look at it, you give it the quick scroll, then you get off of it, right? So you have to make sure there's no friction in that process. I mean, one thing that you and I ran into way back in the day, like, single sign on can be a bitch sometimes, right? Multi factor authentication. Now, these might be realities of what people are dealing with on this call and we have to take that into consideration. But if you can make it like a click and interact and get back to work process, it should not take any more effort than typing in somebody's email or somebody's phone number to send them a referral. Again, whether it's using a product like Aaron or not, because not everybody on this call is going to have a product like ours. Apologies if the microphone is switching again, but my advice to everybody on this call would be, even if you aren't using a system like Aaron, like make that process easy to get to the way they want to get into it, and then seamless. So there's really like three layers kind of wrapping up the Two topics we just mentioned. One is like, you need to know the right job and the right person to reach out to for that job. You need to reach out to them in the right medium because it's not scalable to have your managers go down and individually track down people for referrals. And it needs to be super simple. On the other side, there cannot, it cannot be. If it's something that takes more than 15 seconds, your risk of losing that person's good referral is super high. Ryan, while Mike tries to figure out his mic issues here, talk to us a little bit about your point of view. Since you've got all of this experience and background on talent strategies at top of funnel, how significant referrals are as part of that, and when you're working with clients, what kind of barriers or challenges are you seeing clients come up with as it relates to creating high performing referral programs? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I see when interacting with recruitment marketing teams and talent acquisition teams is that there's this misconception that referrals kind of sit on their own island or referrals are handled by a different department, when in reality I see referrals as a huge opportunity for the recruitment marketing team to kind of come in and help amplify that. In fact, I think it should be one of their top three, kind of ignite the funnel channels that they should pull, you know, before even, you know, expensive expenditures on programmatic or big campaigns. But that should be a part of your recruitment marketing cadence. How can you put together good content and support the team in the referral process and make sure that it's not just seamlessly going out to the, to the broader ecosystem, but communicated effectively through your internal channels. So I preach that this should be a process whether it's owned or not by recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing as a stake in the success of a referral program. Yeah, and Ryan, it's a great point. Like, I mean, we're not the first ones to say that talent acquisition is transforming pretty fast and in a lot of these segmented rules are now being combined. But I'll tell you the interesting trend that we've seen on our side. Like for the first time ever, we have CMOs that are in the conversation. Right? Like they are looking at marketing and you know, and recruitment, recruitment marketing more specifically. But even marketing is a more general department as being, being part of. Sorry, there's no bothering me. So you keep going. So you saw, we still can hear you. So you're fine. Perfect. So, but like it is interesting to see just being on the front lines when people are rethinking, implementing products and just processes like this, that they are combining that effort because it will go stale. I mean, that's the general theme. You're going to crush it for a year or two and eventually other priorities come up and things fall to the side. So having this as a company initiative and spreading out that responsibility is only going to get you more results. And you know, referrals are the number one reflection of culture. Right. So when we, when you, if you have a bad culture, people aren't going to say anybody's going to work there, right. So they're not going to refer their friends. So culture is not a talent acquisition initiative, it's a company initiative. So you bring this all together. And while it may not be a reality for everyone on this call to say, oh, I'm going to get recruitment, marketing and marketing more in general involved, it is a mindset that we should have because that's going to be the long term success of kind of recreating the funnel in the new world. Things are changing. Indeed's not working as well. Certain things that you've done for the last 15 years are not working as well. And there's new technology available to us and while it does feel like it's being jammed down our throats, the right technology does have the right results. Right. When you see. And so like, let's talk some data just here for a bit. You see an organization that has a good culture. Right. By whatever definition, what is the optimal mix of referral based hiring? Is it, you know, and sometimes source of hire is like really hard to put your fingers on for whatever reason. Certainly probably a different topic for an entirely different podcast. But is it 20% of your hires, 30% of your hires? You know, obviously there's can be diminishing returns at some level. Right. I would assume it can't be 100%, but talk to me a little bit about, you know, all right, I get it. Mike and Matt and Ryan, referrals are important. That's what I've heard here over the last 15 minutes or whatever. But help me understand, you know, what does good look like, number one. And then you know what, talk to us about maybe like a journey that somebody went on to get to. Good. And what were some of the key things that they did on that journey to get from, you know, where they were to where it's a significant part of their source of hire. Yeah, yeah. The mistake that I see made time and time again, when people are trying to answer that question is that they give a one size fits all answer, which I will give you. But I'm going to give you a more specific answer as well in the reality. And the reason I share that is because especially in healthcare, it depends on what part of healthcare you're in, right. If you're at home care with dealing with super high turnover, you have a different problem than a large hospital system. Right. So your right mix is going to depend on kind of the situation that you're dealing with. And usually I'd say the specific answer for each business is going to be kind of tied into that turnover issue that they have right across the board. Like a third of your funnel coming from referrals is ideal. We've seen it up in over 50% and obviously we're huge fans of that. But you want to have the right different mixes of sourcing one, because when one starts drying up a little bit, for whatever reason, whether it's indeed or whether it's referrals, something else, you need to have a balance and you can't go into crisis mode. The other side of that is that you want to have a healthy candidate pool as well, Right. Like you can't only be sourcing through referrals because that would be problematic for many reasons. Right. So yeah, we deal with some businesses I use at home care and even like senior living because they have different challenges. Like the more like geographically, how your business is set up is going to be a big deal as well because you're in different regions. Right. So if you're a high turnover business or if you're geographically spread out like a lot of like senior living communities and whatnot, you have different challenges. And having a higher source from referrals is actually preferred because one, you have to keep up with that turnover and you know, boomerang employees and everything else becomes a real part of your strategy and referrals tie into that. But also when you're segmented all across the country or just all across the region, you deal with these factions that happen within the organization and you need to be able to get into this communities. Right. So the community driven approach has to be thought of and referrals is a big part of that. It's not the only part of that. Now if you're not dealing with those problems and you're more centralized, that 30% number is where you should strive to be. It should actually be a little bit higher when you're dealing with the turnover in the geographical separation There's a second part of your question which was, how do we do it? Was that. Yeah. So, like, talk to me a little bit about, all right, so if I got to be at 33% and in your point of entry and, you know, you bring, you know, your platform and I'm at 5% or I'm at 10%, what are the gates or the things that will have to happen for me to move from that 5 to 30 to 40, like, what's. What actually will have to occur? Well, and I'll tell you, and this builds into it, one thing that I think is very relevant right now in 2026 is that we're. We're so still kind of caught up in this, like, huge influx crisis mode coming out of COVID that where these referral bonuses went through the roof for specialty rules and stuff. And they should still stay there because, you know, for a lot of reasons, you're probably paying a lot more money through other channels to fill certain roles. However, we got to kind of break this mindset that I still need to pay 5 or $10,000 for certain roles because the reality is, if you can afford it and that's your play, great, like, give the money to the employees, but you actually don't have to spend as much anymore. Like, it's all about, like. So it starts with the incentive structure in a meaningful way. Like. Like, you want to have a big enough of incentive to get people's attention. But I'll tell you, from our data, like, three grand versus four grand makes zero difference in the outcomes that you're going to have. So why would you pay the four grand? And I say this because financial, your budget and how you source is going to boil down to your cost per hire in a lot of ways, and you want to be mindful of that, and you shouldn't be scared of changing that and reacting to environments. So one strategy, and I'm trying to give strategies that everyone on the call can benefit from, not necessarily if you have a platform like Aaron, but one strategy is once you kind of figure that out, you don't be afraid to mix it up halfway through. And I'm not saying change your full policy, but if I have a hard time filling nurse rules in Pittsburgh, I can't have an exception for that. Right. So I can temporarily say, hey, for whatever reason, we just had a lot of openings in this area. We're having a hard time filling them. We can go hard on just that region rather than as a full company policy. And the benefit of that Is it's going to give you marketing material. You can only say the same policy over an email or during our orientation so many times. So when you have a reason to influx, it not only makes you look better, it's a reason for the employees to get excited. So it all kind of stems from that policy because without a good policy, everything else falls apart. But the trend in healthcare has been a little bit too aggressive. I think the reason I say that is because it's aggressive without the results, like you just go hard, we're going to pay more and it doesn't actually mean anything. So once you have these policies in place, that's good. Look, going back to Ryan's comments on just the marketing aspect of it, this has to be something that people have a reason to constantly think about but not interrupt their day job. So we saw back in the day, Matt, I use this as an example all the time, like cupcake parties, which is well meaning, right? Like, hey, we're going to like throw a little cupcake party for this one region and everybody in the office that they get cupcake and says like make a referral today with a little QR code. That's great. It does not scale and you can only make so many cupcakes, right? So like you need to figure out the things that are going to hit at the right times or the right areas to get the results. Some parts of your organization will be on autopilot and that's great because that's what you want. Hey, we have 50% of our employees participating in the last 12 months one way or another. Even if it's just looking at the jobs in measuring that is really important because then you can identify that's not where you need to do the specialty work. Doing it in the whether it's a department region or whatever, focusing and shifting to adapt to why they could be better. Like how do we replicate this success over here is really important. So when you're stuck at like 10%, a refresh of the policy will help short term. Right? But it's again, the theme is going stale and how do you break past going stale. So constantly driving that through focused efforts, whether it's competitions, giveaways, we've seen a lot of success with like this department versus that department or something like that, or this location was that location. That focus is what's actually going to drive it even more up. Now the goal is once you hit that, once you're around that 30% level, what that really means is you have well over 50% adoption of the policy and the program with your employees. So you can start coasting a little bit there. But we've seen it time and time again with really good policies and even with really good tech implementations where then it starts dropping back off again, this lack of ownership that happens after three, four, five, five years of success, then people kind of start forgetting about what they did to get back to it. And the goal is not to create a bunch of work. It's just to be intentional about where we're putting our efforts. Right. And Ryan, I'll let you go, but I think one thing we should focus back to is just like, how do you do that in an automated and scalable way? Because it is exhausting. Right? Yeah, it sounds like a lot. Right? Go ahead, Ryan. Yeah, so my question is. So I have a lot of these conversations with talent attraction and recruitment marketing leaders, and one common best practice that I'm seeing as becoming more of a trend that I'm advocating for is kind of this tiered triage support, right? There's a lot of reactivity in recruitment marketing. Right. You have many stakeholders, from hiring managers to facilities that you have to react to this demand. And how do you do that at a scalable way? And I think a lot of it is by having a baseline playbook of activities that should be happening regularly before you start hitting that panic button for we need, indeed, we need programmatic, we need to spend to attract. So, you know, I put a comment in the chat earlier about this, but instilling these best practices of candidate advocacy, so having a lockdown, rediscovery process, campaigns for alumni and boomerang, you talked about that. But also, should the referral practice be a check the box activity for all hiring managers, all departments, before they hit that, hey, we got a post done. Indeed. We gotta spend more programmatic dollars. Yeah, yeah, it's. I mean, there's a lot to it, Right. I think one thing is that, like you just going off your last comment there, the hiring manager, they need to be empowered. But we all know how hiring managers are, right? So I think again, it comes back to like, what roles are you filling and what are you trying to do? But where we've seen a lot of success is having somebody to run that, like that playbook that you mentioned, right? Because again, going back to this exhaustion and the staleness that people hit even after they're successful, if you're bogged down with answering questions from employees and dealing with disputes on payouts or managing the approval process for payouts, you'll never get there. Right. So we don't have unlimited resources. I'm sure everybody in this call can relate. Somebody's dedicated to running this process and the real question is where are they spending their time? Is it on the administration or is it on the engagement? Because the engagement only works if you have somebody quarterbacking it. Now hopefully we can use technology to alleviate that quarterbacking, but you definitely need to use technology to alleviate the administration, right? Because now the trap that people fall into is that you're either so bad that the administration does not drive you crazy and, and then you do a lot of things we just talked about and then you scale up and then the administration drives you crazy, then you scale back down or you're so good that you forget about it. Right? Like, and you're not, you stop driving those things. So, so I think it's when you just look at resource allocation like somebody, somebody has to drive your efforts. Is that a full time job or is that like, is that like a, is that like a part of somebody's job or like what is that in your mind? Usually this is part of somebody's job because a full time job seems like a lot. Like I would never ask somebody to have a full time job managing our product. But it happens. We see it all the time. And honestly part of its bureaucracy of larger organizations, right? It feels natural to have a full time person and the processes are so convoluted. To get anything done you need a full time person. However, I would say the ideal situation is to have it as a halftime job, right? You need somebody as a point person. Like we're talking millions of dollars of payments, right? So this is, and we're talking about saving millions of dollars in other sources. So having a point person that, that ultimately just kind of like keeps this going is really important. But to make it their full time job I would only say is required if you're a true enterprise company. And I'd even say beyond like the definition of traditional enterprise, like I'm talking if you're 20,000 employees or more, then this, then because of the real return on investment, you can get out of this easily. Justifiable. If you're a 1500 person organization, like this person is going to have to do other things, right? But that's only going to be possible if you can alleviate administration and if you can automate some of the stuff that we're talking about, right? So let me just give you an example. I am going to refer specifically to our software at this point. If you didn't have to worry about any eligibility checks if you didn't have to worry about. And this isn't trying to be a sales pitch. I'm just trying to give context. If you don't have to worry about eligibility checks, if you don't have to worry about being the frontline support for thousands of employees, that's going to free up a lot of time right there, right? Then you have to think about what are you doing with your time. And what most people are falling into is that the same email generic blast out that we talk about that gets stale too fast. So, so tailor that, reach out to use some of the automations again, whether it's us or something you build or even some, I mean there's some engagement tools out there that can do stuff like this. Even a texting service that reaches out to people, if you can get that off your plate now you can do the things that Ryan was just talking about, which is like, I need to keep these hiring managers engaged and informed, right? I can identify in my rogue hire data that we're doing worse over here. So this is where we're going to make a new strategy and attack that and we're going to do a bonus boost. We're going to double at that time. So you got to alleviate that administration, you got to alleviate the repetitive tasks. It's got to be automated. And then you can actually use that 20 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week to go after the high impact stuff like keeping the hiring managers engaged and up to date and all that super tactical question. So you know, you go and you read, you know, Buffett and Munger and you know, all the success they've had in this entirely other world and they boil everything down to incentives, right? Like, do we have the right incentives in place? And so you had said that a couple of different times. And so one thing that I'm curious about is and I just think about recruitment at a very high level and what recruitment is, you know, at some level, right? And so a lot of times getting somebody in a job and hired is, you know, that human needs to be available and ready to go mentally and otherwise at the same moment that I have that specific job posted. And so like basically we've got to all. We're always threading this needle to fill a job, right? Hey, I might really want to hire Mike, but he's busy being the CEO at Aaron and he's not really ready to go just yet. But three years down the road, maybe that changes, right? And so you know, we see a lot, especially in health care and you know, post hundreds and thousands of jobs. And so like, I've often wondered if the referral mechanism gets lost in all of that noise. Meaning, like, if you're constantly trying to refer to an individual job, there's just a lot of movement happening. You know, you take somebody like, you know, pick a large health system, you're filling like 30,000 jobs a year, 20,000 jobs a year, 10, five, even a thousand, a lot of jobs. So it's a lot to keep track of. And so I just wonder from like an incentive standpoint if, you know, you have any clients that have a different incentive model that incense building pipeline in the hardest to fill areas versus attaching a referral to a job, because ultimately the outcome of both of those is positive, which is what everybody on this call wants, which is a job filled with a high quality person. But sometimes it's timing that is the ultimate issue. And so just tactically curious, if you see that pipelining idea show up and what your thoughts are on that. Yeah. Specifically in the last, let's say year to maybe a year and a half. Right. So I'm going to tie in a bunch of stuff that you just said. We have incentives, we have candidate pipeline building, we have constant engagement. Right. Maybe now is not the right time, but later it is. So one is, if referrals are going to be a source of building any of that, you got to get the name right. So we still have to like give them the hook. But here's the thing. If I'm referring for a job, as I probably have done a dozen times before, like me, statistically, if I refer 10 people, you're only going to hire one. Right. So say that again. Statistically, your stats show that you, you know me, Matt, I refer 10, and out of those 10, maybe I get one of them through the door. That's the. Across the board, 10 referred candidates. Referred candidates. Which is different than making it into the ATS. Right. So applied candidates, I have a 10%. So like, I get super excited about referrals. Yay, referrals, whatever. But the reality is, is my hit rate on actually getting somebody hired into the organization that I work for is 10%, generically speaking. Yes. Now here's the thing. I'm trying to hammer that home because like, I get. And I just don't want us to lose track of incentives. And so if you're trying to incent me to do something and I fail at it 90% of the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Not necessarily making me feel great. See what I'm saying? I hear you. So now just to finish that stat of applied candidates at six to one, so if they actually apply to the job, then you're gonna have a 6 to 1 conversion ratio there. So if you're referring people that actually respond, it gets much better right away. Which, to your point, depending on the organization, could be, here's a general job, here's a specific job, whatever. Now, the thing that has been surprisingly, a new trend. I don't want to say surprisingly, but it's. People are more open to it is. And we're kind of. I'm personally kind of obsessed with this idea of dynamic bonuses right now. But think about this going off that stat. Let's focus on the 10 to 1 you had 90% failure. I refer you. Maybe I get three grand, but maybe I don't. And even if I do, it's 90 days from the hire. So, like, I mean, I can't plan for my Christmas shopping with that. Like, it's just too far out. Not real enough. Right. A lot of people now are starting to think about, hey, I will pay you $100 if we interview them. Right. So now this feeds into that, which is an earlier incentive much quicker. It's going to be a week or Two later, not 90 days from the hire date, which is going to be 120 days out. Right. So $100 for the interview because they've applied for the job, they've gone through what other mechanisms we have to identify good candidates or whatever, screening them through our processes, and we've decided they're good enough to bring to an interview. So I'm going to give you 100 bucks for that. Now, not only can this provide a better incentive up front. Front and make it much more real. And your success rate is now dramatically better because if you just go off the stats I gave you now you're probably getting six out of 10, which is pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, if I don't have to thread the needle on the one I. But I got. Yeah. So, yeah, I've got three more. Yeah. I'm throwing darts and six of them got me a paycheck. That's pretty good. So now. But what this actually can do, and this is again, the. What I've been obsessing over is now I don't have to pay you as much on the end. So where I maybe gave you five grand before, hey, maybe it applied. I gave you 100 bucks. Maybe I gave you 500 when they get interviewed and then maybe I give you two grand when they get hired. You as an employee are actually much happier in that scenario because not that you're feeling like you're getting cheated out of money because it just was never there to get. Now you're like, man, just by participating, I'm getting this constant reward and ongoing. Right. So what that means is not only can you make the employee happier, but you can actually spend less money overall and get better results. Which is I think probably the, in terms of like the, you know, we all know the employee referral space is so hot. Like I think that concept in the next five years is going to change everything. Hmm, that's interesting. Ryan, I know we're coming near the end of the show. Is there any other learning objectives that we were trying to get to here today that maybe we haven't got to. A little bit. A question for Mike. Not to spin it too much on the data side, but I'd love to kind of lean into intent a little bit. So like from your vantage point at Aaron or working with your customers, are there any kind of specific high intent data signals? Maybe they're referral based? Not referral based, either from the market or one of your customers networks that talent leaders are ignoring. Or how does capturing those signals earlier change the entire map of a referral and overall hiring strategy? Yeah, yeah. One thing that. And look, the benefit of everybody on this call is that they're in the rogue hire community, generically speaking. And we work with organizations as small as a couple hundred, up to 300,000 people. Right. So generically speaking, a lot of people, when we're talking to them before they become a customer, they do not have a good understanding of their data at all. So the benefit that I think the community members have is that you guys have excellent understanding of data. Once you understand that data, then you can start actioning on it. But just to give you a specific answer, the other thing that we've been really focusing on, because it's all about conversion now, right? It's not just about get the referral. We know we can get the referral, but now we need to convert the candidate. So that's where a lot of our product has shifted as well. And a good signal that people should be looking at is once somebody applies to a job through referral, are they applying to other jobs? Right. As simple as that. Like it's different. If I say I want you to work here, click here. I might get a bonus. But when I say I want you to work here, click here, I might get a bonus. And then you apply to three other similar jobs in the organization. That is a candidate that really wants to work there. And that is data that for various reasons can get very much lost in the mix. But that is a person that whether it's now or later, is going to have a much better chance of being converted into an employee. And there's a lot of tactics you can focus on on that is simply just keeping in touch with them, whether it's through CRM, through manual efforts, through a product like ours. But like converting that candidate at some point is the ultimate goal. And that's probably the most overlooked signal I see. Well, hey, we're coming near the end. I really am intrigued by that dynamic bonus strategy that we had talked about. Because you think about, and sometimes this is us probably getting caught in our TA and HR echo chambers at a little bit like that's a model that works in sales and that's basically what a SDR, a sales development reps doing is they're getting paid for, you know, every time they set a meeting. Right. And so it's just interesting. And that works, right? Hey, I get whatever like you said, 100 bucks or 200 bucks or 500 bucks for every meeting set. And so I'm incented to get you to the interview. What happens after the interview? If we close it, I get a percentage of it and we move on. Right. And so it's really interesting. Wendy had asked in the, in the kind of on that same thread. It must have caught her attention as well. She thinks that that dynamic program would be hard to administer. So impossible without software. Impossible without software, yeah. So 100%. Now here's another way to look at it. So just going off your comments and Wendy, this is an excellent point. I completely agree with you. Before you could ever do anything like this, you need to understand what that funnel and that conversion looks like. So you need to have the data to understand like okay, If I paid 100 bucks for every interview, would I actually get conversions on the other side at a better rate? Or am I just blowing a bunch of money? Right. So one is so getting that data understood before you implement a policy like this would be really important. And I will just before I answer Wendy specifically, the other side of dynamic bonuses is not just when you pay, but it's how much you pay. I may not have to pay as much for rules right now as I did last year. Right. So like having that go up and down would be a kind of A nightmare to do manually. This is why we see people boil down to simple policies because they're easy to understand, but they're easy to administrate. Right. So having this, having software basically do this for you, one, because it can simply, it can spread out and track the payments better. So even if it's not going up and down, knowing that hey, this person got to this stage, now it's time to trigger this event. That would be really difficult to do in a spreadsheet with large organizations, but if you have automation behind it, you don't have to worry about it at all. You can just say our data tells us if we pay $100 here and two grand here, it's still better than paying five grand on the other side. So you can automate that through software. Again, whether you buy something, you build something in house, whatever. But then the other side, where I think this gets really interesting is then using data to say these ones are harder to fill. And we've seen better results in these types of rules because they're community based hires or specialty based hires. And then triggering like, okay, Maybe it's not $100 here, it's a $500 here, and it's $2,500 here, but it's still different than just a flat policy. Right. This is really the power. This is like when we talk about AI and everything else, like not only can it help us understand it, and I'm not saying that AI should necessarily do this for you, but it can say, hey, I had 50,000 referrals last year, 10,000 hires, and I operate out of 300 locations. Like what's working, what's not. And then we can, we can, once we understand that in a very easy to understand way, we can apply a policy that's just as easy to understand but still automated on the administration side. Well, hey, appreciate this talk today, Mike. If somebody wants to learn more about you all. Aaron, what's the best way to engage? I see Evan is, has been linking a bunch of stuff in the chat here. So Aaron app, I think he's got it covered. Yeah, he got me covered. Before we get off here, Wendy asked another question. Let's not, let's not leave Wendy hanging. Her name. I was going to follow her up, follow up with her directly. Yeah, yeah. Before we go, let's just, let's finish it off. What data points do you recommend measuring? Like what are your most important data points? Kind of off that last rift that you just had. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be A reflection of a lot of things I shared here. Start simple. First, don't overcomplicate this. How many referrals do we get? How many are hired? Right. And then we want to zero in a little bit more. How many referrals do we get? How many actually apply for the job and how many get to the interviewing stage. Right. Those middle stages are what matters. Like that's what creates the middle of the funnel. We can't go like this to this. It might look like this. Right. So measuring the steps. So just in your ats, you don't need anything else here. Referrals made. We have a referral source. How many that made it to applied. So you won't see the first part. It's just how many applied that are referred. With Aaron, you'd see the first part, how many make it to interviewing and then track whatever your process is, how long, how much further do they go. Then you also want to understand that against your regular candidates as well, because ideally it would be a little bit more impactful and you'd see better conversion rates at different parts of the funnel. That's why we want referrals over just an application through. Indeed. Right. So start with that and then if you can break it down by anything that's meaningful, whether that's department. So do the same funnel for different departments. Do it by location. If you're a multi location organization, the first question I ask new customers is how are you geographically set up? Because it will be different here than there. Part of that's culture, part of that's middle management. There's a lot of reasons for that. So not to get too complicated. Just create the funnel and then apply it in different ways in different sectors or different breakdowns and then see if you can identify any trends there. And that's gonna let you know your operational roles may get super high engagement, but your nursing roles won't. That would be something that you'd want to pull out of it. And then you can start applying policy to think about what would this incentive do at this stage. And then you can really have some fun with it at that point. But start with the funnel, find out your breakdowns and then figure out how you can incentivize to later stages. Most people are going to be focused on the top of the funnel, which is right when it comes to referrals to start. Because how do I get the referred candidates to an interview? That's really the first step. From there, the regular process really takes over. Cool. All right, Wendy. Hey, we appreciate all the questions. We appreciate folks jumping in to today's show. Ryan, I guess we'll be back here in a couple weeks. And for those joining, as a friendly reminder, we are in benchmark season here at Rogue Hire. And so last year we had over 200 healthcare organizations give us data to create the most formative benchmark study in the land. A lot of really good information there that is free to participate. And so if you're not in it, I'd suggest you getting in it this year and enabling your organization with some metrics that matter. And so, hey, Mike, we always appreciate the partnership. We also appreciate all that you do for the community here and how you think about technology and really trying to drive solutions in. And so thanks again for joining the show today. Mike and Ryan, thanks for setting us up. Thanks for having me on, guys. Yep, we'll see you now. Thanks for trenching in with us today. If a benchmark, a framework or a question from this conversation is worth taking back to your leadership team, please do that and let me know how it lands. You can always find me out on LinkedIn. For more on Rogue Hire's Healthcare TA Benchmark program and medics, the decision intelligence layer for talent acquisition, visit roguehire.com if the show is useful to you and your peers, a subscribe and a review always go a long way toward getting it in front of the leaders. Making these calls day in and day out. Until next time.