Temporary truce between Employment Hero and competitor Seek in court fight

Job hunting platform Seek has agreed to call a ceasefire in a court fight brought by a competitor.

Brothers Andrew Bassat (left) and Paul Bassat (right), co-founders of online employment website, Seek.com.

Recruitment giant Seek has agreed to halt its plans to cut off competitor Employment Hero from its platform.

The Australian technology firm launched a legal fight against Seek late last week in a bid to stop the major recruitment platform from terminating their agreement, effective August 25.

Seek is currently integrated with Employment Hero, allowing customers to share job ads directly to Seek.

Employment Hero offers recruitment, human resources and onboarding services to more than 300,000 businesses and 2.5 million employees on its platform.

Ben Thompson and Dave Tong, co-founders of Employment Hero.

An administrative hearing at the Federal Court was cancelled at the last minute on Wednesday after an interim truce was reached between the parties, with Seek agreeing to allow Employment Hero users access to its platform across the web and via phone applications at least until the conclusion of the trial.

As well, Seek agreed not to “deliberately disrupt or degrade (Employment Hero or its) customers’ use of the job post and optimised apply Seek API (application programming interface) integrations,” court orders said.

Seek has agreed not to refuse or delay “to provide the (Employment Hero or its) customers with the functionality, information or support, such as a “Seek HirerID”, customarily provided to allow them to use the Seek API integrations to integrate Seek with (Employment Hero’s) products”.

Seek, which has a market capitalisation of $8.7bn, can scrap the agreement with five days notice to the court if Employment Hero takes action that would give Seek “a right to suspend or terminate the Applicant’s access to the Seek API under the terms and conditions which govern its access to the Seek API”.

Employment Hero, launched by Ben Thompson in 2014, agreed to prosecute its claim “expeditiously”, according to court orders.

The court action was revealed on Monday, after Employment Hero accused Seek of engaging in anti-competitive conduct.

Paul Bassat, co-founder and CEO of Seek.

In an earlier statement, the Australian tech-firm said it had to take court action after Seek gave notice to terminate its API agreement with Employment Hero with access set to be cut from August 25.

“Seek is a critical integration for many customers and our foremost priority is continuity and confidence for every employer,” she said.

“To this end, we have reluctantly commenced Federal Court proceedings to apply for an interim injunction with the aim of stopping the termination.

“We consider that the termination was a breach of the competition laws. As the matter is now before the court, we are unable to comment further.”

A Seek spokeswoman declined to comment on the substance of the allegations but said Seek intends to defend them.

“At a more general level we note again what we have said in many strategy presentations: Seek operates in a highly competitive market with many competitors, from multinationals to start-ups, and believes that the vibrancy of competition generates innovation that is very beneficial for all customers,” she said.

Seek was co-founded by co-founded by brothers Paul and Andrew Bassat and Matt Rockman in 1997 and disrupted traditional print classifieds.

Seek is an investor in Employment Hero via its investment arm, the Seek Growth Fund. But it reduced its $95m stake earlier this year offloading shares to global private equity firm KKR.

Employment Hero has emerged as a competitor to Seek, which has built an artificial intelligence tool that can assess workers and find suitable jobs for them in seconds.

The companies will appear in court at a date to be determined.