ERIN’s Cloud Transformation Cuts Costs, Promotes Growth, and Enables New Features

ERIN, the Employee Referral Invitation Network, empowers employees to help their company, friends, and themselves achieve their employment goals. With an intuitive experience built to motivate and engage users, the company's passion is to facilitate job searches and solve recruiting problems for customers. ERIN’s employee referral platform allows large enterprises to automate employee referral processes and make employees active participants in talent acquisition efforts. This approach can reduce hiring time, cut recruiting costs, and keep employees engaged and informed on their career path, boosting employee morale.

ERIN's impressive capabilities and focus on customer satisfaction quickly garnered it a growing client base. But as a company of 25 employees, ERIN was growing faster than it was in a position to handle. To support its escalating customer count and deliver new features, it was constantly adding more services to its setup, which created maintenance challenges and increased expenses. While ERIN was already utilizing the cloud for some of its architecture, it needed to rebuild its foundation so business expansion could be cost-efficient and limitless.

After careful consideration, it became clear that SourceFuse was the ideal AWS Partner to fulfill ERIN’s objectives. A digital transformation company and an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, SourceFuse specializes in guiding small- and medium-sized businesses from legacy IT to agile, cloud-native solutions. With a focus on scaling and efficiency, SourceFuse worked with ERIN to create a tailored plan that prioritized business growth through improved stability and flexibility. This would allow the software company to more readily achieve its goals of onboarding more customers swiftly and providing innovative features. Mike Ginsburg, chief technology officer at ERIN, noted, “A lot of consulting firms have a blueprint, and they offer that solution to you because that's the solution they know how to build. SourceFuse worked hard to understand our underlying problems and what outcomes we were trying to achieve, then collaborated with us to create a plan that was purpose-built for our situation.”

To help ERIN deliver support to more customers and develop features faster, SourceFuse used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a custom solution that used resources more efficiently. Services such as AWS Control Tower reduced complexity and made it easier for ERIN to manage and expand its setup as the business grew. SourceFuse helped ERIN adopt modern development practices, creating end-to-end CI/CD pipelines with infrastructure-as-code that enabled the company to roll out serverless application environments on demand, quickly and reliably. Today, ERIN deploys workloads using Amazon Aurora, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB. Plus, Amazon CloudWatch aggregates logs and alerts for improved DevOps.

The solution allowed ERIN to meet both current and future needs while improving performance and keeping costs down. It also offered the flexibility to easily add more advanced features later on. “Communication and transparency during this project were excellent,” said Ginsburg. “SourceFuse was available for weekly calls and standups, and they were always empathetic, understanding, and super responsive. They helped us minimize costs and go from being a startup to something much bigger.”

The close collaboration with SourceFuse enabled ERIN to advance its roadmap for new features. This includes use cases for integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to expedite language translation, which allows the company to localize its services. Additional AI- and ML-based features will enhance mapping and location services and improve job matching. With over five million jobs in ERIN’s system, AI models will identify the skills and experience required for various roles, helping candidates find better jobs.

Overall, ERIN has gained the foundation it needs to expand, evolve, and improve support for its customers. In fact, year over year, ERIN experienced near triple-digit growth in revenue. SourceFuse’s expertise, paired with the capabilities ERIN gained from smart use of AWS solutions, lets the company offer customers new and improved services at a faster rate. On average, businesses working with ERIN see referral hires jump to 30 percent or more. These internal referrals help recruiting teams cut costs and companies experience better retention. New hires sourced through ERIN typically stay with the company 25 to 50 percent longer than traditionally sourced hires.

In addition to helping its customers cut costs, ERIN reduced its hosting costs by 40 percent. The combination of new AWS offerings and more efficient use of existing services let the company streamline operations, eliminate redundant processes, and reduce dependence on external vendors. These improvements have increased ERIN’s potential for business expansion. Added Ginsburg, “The foundation is a repeatable model, which means we can take the same model that SourceFuse helped us build and create dedicated environments in other regions—quickly and easily.” This enables ERIN to expand globally by setting up regional hosting in various countries, ensuring compliance with data privacy laws, and enhancing performance for local customers. As ERIN continues to broaden its services and expands to meet the needs of its rapidly growing customer base, it’s positioned perfectly to explore new opportunities and act on them more easily.