Employment Hero takes on Seek with AI-recruitment tool SmartMatch

A human resources tech platform’s first major foray into artificial intelligence might just disrupt online jobs platforms and uncover the nation’s hidden jobs market.

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

A human resources tech platform’s first major foray into artificial intelligence might just disrupt online jobs platforms and uncover the nation’s hidden jobs market.

Growing HR platform Employment Hero has built an AI-powered tool that can instantly assess workers at a company and find a near identical or suitable applicant within seconds.

The platform can then draft an offer of recruitment and have it sent directly to that worker, without ever having to leave the platform or list a job posting on jobs platforms such as Seek.

It’s a proposition that could do serious damage to the likes of pay-to-advertise competitors, many of whom have made a fortune on the back of digitising what were once printed job advertisements in newspapers, and in some cases charging $1000 just to advertise a role.

“Leaving a platform to hire people just makes no sense. This is just a radical disruption to the way recruitment works,” Employment Hero founder Ben Thompson told The Australian.

Mr Thompson said Employment Hero had been working on a suite of AI tools for about six months and SmartMatch, the new disruptive recruitment tool, was the first that its customers would see and use first-hand.

The tool will analyse about 2 million roles on the platform that belong to its 300,000 customers.

Employment Hero expects that the tool will become incredibly popular among users and draw a lot of attention. That was because only about one in five jobs in Australia were actually advertised publicly, with many often only shared on internal job boards or via word of mouth, Mr Thompson said.

Now those roles would be analysed with AI in a way that gives its customers a real-time market view of their value and what others could bring to the role.

On why employers should use the tool, Mr Thompson said there were two main reasons: first, it was instant and could basically find any staff for them and have them onboarded almost instantaneously should they choose; second, the platform could track a person’s career trajectory in real time, and retrieve data from their most recent roles with Employment Hero customers.

In a bid to curb poaching, the platform would not show employees already working for Employment Hero customers. Instead, it would analyse and suggest those who have downloaded its jobs app, Swag.

It’s a move that is likely to cause upset to the likes of Seek, which has anywhere between 250,000 and 300,000 roles advertised at any one time.

But perhaps Employment Hero’s most disruptive tool of all is one that is yet to be released and should arrive in its app around mid-year.

That tool is one called ShiftBooster, which can provide employers an almost instant pool of staff to choose from to fill last-minute shifts.

ShiftBooster will be able to access the availability of casual, part-time and other staff open to extra work on its platform and show employers a curated list based on distance from the business. And when they finish the shift, they’ll be paid instantly, out of Employment Hero’s pocket, which will later take the pay from the business when salaries are scheduled to go out.

The tool will this time be pitting the HR platform against job platforms like SideKicker which matches temp staff to shifts.

“If you’re working in a hospitality venue, we know how many hours you’ve done in front of the bar, behind the bar, in a management position and how many times your boss has given you a shout-out for top performance,” Mr Thompson said.

“It’s got less friction between the employer and employee starting work and when they finish their shift, they’ll already have been paid once a manager has approved it, so it just changes the whole relationship between working money and time.”

The goal of that particular product was to bring part-time or casual employees closer to full-time employment without having to bother with any of the hassle like paperwork, as Employment Hero already had it on file, Mr Thompson said.