Inside Employment Hero’s plans to disrupt the jobs market

The Aussie unicorn start-up boasts its new product that will give real-time wage transparency, drawing from the payslips of more than 2 million workers.

Ben Thompson, the founder and CEO of Employment Hero, wants to disrupt the jobs market. Picture: James Gourley

Employment Hero is looking to radically shake up the jobs market as the human resources tech group dives into wage transparency with what it claims is the most accurate and up-to-date salary data in the world.

The company is using AI to now read and assess the salaries of the 2 million workers employed by its 300,000 small to medium business customers across its platform and provide that data to both jobseekers and employers free of charge.

Its founder and chief executive Ben Thompson says the shift is part of a mission to become the world’s largest employment marketplace.

Mr Thompson also believed workers have not been able to accurately gauge their value and that real-time insights, which come directly in payslips on the platform and include bonuses and overtime, would prevent people being paid less than what they’re worth.

“For a jobseeker, you have to realise that everyday you work you acquire new skills and experience, that makes what you’re worth in the market changes every day, SmartMatch can tell you that,” he said.

The platform wouldn’t just benefit employees but also give employers insight into the market rate, and potentially stop them from overpaying.

“If you’re an employer, it’ll tell you exactly what your competitor and other people are paying in the market. That level of price transparency can shift the market,” he said.

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

Mr Thompson said he believed the new insights would disrupt the likes of Seek, Indeed and LinkedIn as those platforms only posted advertised salaries.

“For example, when Seek releases jobs data, what they’re talking about is the salary that was advertised when a job posting was published,” he said.

“What the ABS looks at is 18,000 jobs from 3000 companies which are volunteered from businesses.

“In our case, we’ve got 300,000 businesses, 2 million employees, and we’ve got real-time data from the payslip that tells us exact market conditions.”

Employment Hero was so confident in its data that it has compiled it into a new report it’ll release on Tuesday. The company will launch a new SmartMatch Employment Report, which found that wages are up 8.8 per cent over the past 12 months. That figure surpasses inflation by more than double.

“Price transparency is more important now than it has ever been,” Mr Thompson said.

The new wage transparency data is an extension of a feature the company released earlier this year called SmartMatch.

It was originally designed to help employers find jobseekers on its Employment Hero’s Swag platform who had identical skills to a position they were hiring for. It was powered by artificial intelligence.

On the opposite end is a feature for part-time and casual workers, which is able to provide shift opportunities, especially in the hospitality sector, at businesses which use the Employment Hero platform.

Employment Hero decided to invest further under a new goal, which was to become the world’s most powerful employment marketplace, Mr Thompson said.

“The data transparency and the market efficiency that we can offer is one of the core reasons that we will become the largest platform on earth for managing employment,” he said.

Online jobs boards were ripe for disruption and that they often had little to no data on roles that are filled through their platforms, Mr Thompson said.

“The job board doesn’t know whether that role was ever filled or who it was filled by, or how much somebody was paid. Once the role was filled, all they know is that somebody paid to post a job,” he said.

“Our platform closes the loop. If somebody is recruiting, not only can we identify and match candidates to that particular vacancy or that particular role, we know when the role was filled, who filled the role, how much they’re actually getting paid, what their skills and experience actually are, who they report to and who reports to them. And our SmartMatch database is updated daily.”

The platform had also developed a way to warn off title inflation, with an automatic reference check feature which calls or emails a jobseeker’s past reference when they create a profile, Mr Thompson said.

“If you tell us that you’ve worked somewhere, and you’ve got a certain amount of experience, that’ll be checked as part of the Swag application process,” he said.

Employers also now needed to understand that their benefits would be benchmarked alongside competitors.

“Employers should understand now that you’ve got the ability to offer more than just employment with benefits over and above just a salary,” Mr Thompson said.