Joe Pavlisko is the founder of Referrio, a start-up that makes getting and writing recommendations easy. Joe graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a concurrent master’s degree in finance. In addition to English, Joe speaks Spanish and German and taught English in rural Spain. After graduating from college he went to work as a data scientist at Autobytel. He left after two years to found Referrio.

Can you tell us a little about yourself? Your background and where you grew up? [1:33]

You already covered a lot of it in your intro, but I’ll add that I was a foreign exchange student in high school. I was one of those people who never knew what I wanted to do – I was excited by everything. I went from econ in undergrad to computer science in grad school. I am from Cleveland but ended up at Alabama – beautiful weather helped!

How did you come to found Referrio and what is it? [2:57]

Referrio is a platform that makes writing letters of recommendation simple. It can be used for college, grad school, jobs, study abroad, whatever. You get the recommendation once (you can never see it, it is always confidential), but you can reuse it anytime for the rest of your life.

Referrio makes it easy for the recommender since it formats the letter, inputs dates, names, contact info, recipient name and contact info, which is entered in box format online. The only thing the recommender has to do is write a 3-5 paragraph letter body. We have also curated advice from the Harvard admissions office on how to write paragraph by paragraph in a really compelling way.

Let’s say I was going to use Referrio for two letters of recommendation. What steps would I have to take? [4:22]

You would login to the platform and select that you are asking for a letter of recommendation. A few questions will flash through – where is it going, who are the recipients, universities applying to, how it will be sent (email, physical address), that type of thing. Then we will ask for all the information we can about the recommender – name, email, professional address to plug into the letter body. We ask you to give the recommender a few bullet points to talk about. We don’t ask for a resume since we don’t want a recommender just rehashing your resume. Instead we ask you to remind the recommender of some moments spent together that showed positive personal qualities about you. Then we send the request to the letter writer.

How much does it cost? [5:57]

It is free. With the free version you can use the letters for one year. The Plus version allows you to reuse recos anytime for the rest of your life (for a fee of $17.99/year) .

How does Referrio help recommenders to write the recommendations? [6:56]

First with all the stuff I previously mentioned – saving them time not having to put in recipients, addresses, etc. The only thing they have to do is the 3-5 paragraph letter body. We even do the formatting. We did a lot of research on what types of formatting are appealing and ours is ranked very high. It looks pretty, and that can really make a difference. It updates for every recipient. We also have a letter writing wizard to help. If the recommendee wants to reuse the letter, the recommender is sent an email, “Is Joe allowed to reuse this letter?” So the recommenders always have control of when/where their letter can be used.