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From platform rebuilds to AI governance, the 2026 Readers’ Choice winners show what genuine innovation looks like in HR
Mediocre platforms no longer survive a reader vote. Across the 2026 HRD Readers’ Choice Awards, 383 human resources (HR) professionals across Australia and New Zealand cast confidential ballots between 1 and 26 June 2026 to name the HR service providers that truly earned their place across 29 categories.
With no sponsorship, no submission documents and no polished case studies standing between the nominees and the verdict of everyday users, two names stood out for genuine ingenuity: Xref, winner in the Pre-Employment Screening Provider category, and Frontier Software, winner across four HR Technology categories.
Together all the winners span 29 categories and eight practice areas, from consultants and education providers to HR technology and workplace health and safety. But the defining story is what separated Xref and Frontier Software from competitors who merely showed up: a refusal to settle for incremental upgrades.
Xref tore down and rebuilt its platform from the ground up, walking away from a major takeover bid to protect its capacity for disruption. Frontier Software proved that a unified platform beats a shelf of disconnected point solutions.
As Megan Reed, head of people and culture at Infinity Coaching Group, based in the greater Brisbane area, puts it, HR teams ‘have moved from feature shopping to ecosystem thinking’. Readers are no longer rewarding vendors for flashy feature lists; they are backing the ones willing to rebuild, rethink and risk getting it wrong in pursuit of getting it right.
The past year has transformed how HR leaders across Australia and New Zealand evaluate vendor partnerships. According to senior HR leaders consulted for this report, the core focus has shifted towards accountable, long-term collaboration.
Integration and governance: Megan Reed of Infinity Coaching Group says integration is non-negotiable. “If a platform does not plug cleanly into our core HR system, our collaboration tools and our identity stack, it rarely makes the shortlist, however impressive the demonstration was,” she says.
Reed also notes that governance now drives the buying decision from day one, describing how an internal AI governance committee reshaped vendor selection at her organisation. That caution lines up with national data: a Gartner Global Talent Monitor survey of 574 Australian employees in the first quarter of 2026 found that 38% are expected to use AI in their role, of whom 85% are given enterprise AI tools – yet 86% also rely on unsanctioned ‘shadow’ personal AI tools to get work done.
Operating environment realities: Tanith Jones, chief people officer at Gallagher Bassett Australia, describes a similar shift away from feature-led buying. “The biggest shift I have seen is a move away from buying technology primarily for its features and towards assessing whether it will genuinely work within the organisation’s broader operating environment,” she says. “Tight budgets now demand measurable value rather than promises of transformation.”
Not-for-profit considerations: Gil Sewell, chief people and culture officer at Ember Korowai Takitini in New Zealand, offers a counterpoint from the not-for-profit mental health sector. “There’s no spare money for ‘bells and whistles’ at the moment,” Sewell says, noting that tighter budgets demand personalised, tailored solutions over an ‘off-the-peg’ product.
Personalisation, governance and genuine partnership now matter just as much as raw product capability – a shift HRD has tracked closely as HR leaders build AI governance frameworks. That is the backdrop against which this year’s two feature winners stand out.
Xref, winner in the Pre-Employment Screening Provider category, spent the last 18 months demonstrating ingenuity under intense market pressure.
Around 18 months earlier, in 2025, major Australian job board Seek attempted to acquire Xref. Xref’s shareholders – many of them clients themselves – voted the bid down. Lee-Martin Seymour, CEO and co-founder of Xref, based in Sydney, describes the period that followed as ‘pure liberation’.
Clients had feared an acquisition would lead to asset-stripping and a decline in customer service and innovation. Seymour confirms the platform rebuild was already under way before Seek’s approach and says an acquisition would likely have foreclosed the company’s broader ‘moonshots’, reducing Xref to a collection of references and 16 years of historical data, rather than the complete technology platform it has since become.
Xref originally automated reference checks, but over the past five to six years, the company has rebuilt its entire technology stack around a central idea: a candidate, an employee and a former employee represent ‘one person with one journey’. The platform now integrates reference and background checks at hiring, engagement and pulse surveys during employment and exit surveys on departure – representing a research and development investment Seymour describes as exceeding $60 million.
Part of what makes that investment worth it, Seymour argues, is what it replaces: “People that used to have to chase referees on the phone, write them down, convince the line manager” now click a single button instead. “Because our Xref button replaces what they hate doing, they have an emotional attachment with us ... there’s no bloatware with Xref,” he says.
The platform also features fraud detection built to address the risks AI has introduced into recruitment technology at scale:
Digital body language: A fraud-detection algorithm analyses patterns between referees and candidates to flag potential fabrications
Scale of the threat: Xref identifies between three and nine fraudulent references within organisations. The issue is likely to grow: research firm Gartner projects that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide could be fake, driven by a rise in stolen identities and AI-generated applications.
Seymour is candid about the risk-taking behind that shift. “People thought I had my head on backwards when I said we’re going to automate reference checks,” he says of the company’s early days – a pattern repeated with Xref’s global background-check marketplace and, most recently, the launch of xref.me, a free digital resume and reference wallet that lets candidates arrive at interviews pre-referenced and pre-checked.
He is equally candid about where he believes the broader HR technology market needs to catch up. “We have some old, clunky behemoth vendors of technology that need to either spend more on R&D and give us some fresh thinking or move aside,” he says.
HR leaders are increasingly rejecting point solutions in favour of platforms that integrate, switch on quickly and deliver a return on investment without a lengthy implementation. “If it’s a point solution, they’re probably struggling right now,” he says.
Xref has shifted its business model away from charging strictly on hiring volume – a model that rewarded high turnover – towards a retention-focused approach. Seymour draws a sharp distinction between turnover and attrition: an organisation can report flat attrition while masking 40% turnover through continuous like-for-like replacement hiring.
The stakes remain real even as the headline trend flattens: the Australian HR Institute's (AHRI) Quarterly Australian Work Outlook for the September quarter 2026 found average annual employee turnover held at 13.4%, broadly unchanged from 13.5% in the June quarter and down from 15.2% in the December quarter 2025. Even at a near three-year low, more than one in eight Australian employees left their employer in the past year – meaning replacement costs remain a live issue for employers.
Xref’s engagement and pulse survey data is designed to diagnose where an organisation’s “leaky bucket”actually sits, by division, region or role, turning the platform into a retention tool as much as a hiring one.
Xref uses exit surveys to build what Seymour calls long-term ‘corporate memory’. Company data shows that 60% of past employees will complete an exit survey even after time has passed, and 25% of those indicate a willingness to return.
By preserving exit records as corporate memory, Seymour says organisations can maintain alumni relationships regardless of staff turnover on their own recruitment team – unless a client specifically marks a former employee as not eligible for rehire. He also notes that former employees often give more honest feedback months or years after leaving than they do in their final two weeks.
For Seymour, the readers’ choice format carries particular weight precisely because it removes any commercial influence from the result. “We’ve selected Xref without any sponsorship or case studies or anything,” he says of how the award works, adding that he hopes clients chose the company “because of the service they got and the partnering that they get from us, not just the product that we provide.”
Frontier Software won across four categories at the 2026 HRD Readers’ Choice Awards: Human Capital Management (HCM), Payroll Solutions, Performance & Talent Management and Time & Attendance.
Why do HR leaders choose Frontier Software across multiple categories?
According to Frontier Software, the sweep reflects the value of having payroll, HR and workforce management operate from a common data foundation, built around its ichris product. Clients can select the specific modules they need, but as workflows connect, employee data supports payroll, time and attendance, performance, talent, recruitment and onboarding without duplicate data entry.
How does Frontier Software handle payroll compliance in Australia and New Zealand?
Navigating local regulatory requirements is critical for Australian and New Zealand employers:
Australia: Frontier Software helps clients manage workplace law obligations administered through the Fair Work Ombudsman, continuous Single Touch Payroll (STP) reporting and preparation for Payday Super, which requires superannuation to be paid alongside wages from 1 July 2026 – a reform the Australian Taxation Office introduced partly to address unpaid superannuation, estimated at more than $6 billion in the prior financial year.
New Zealand: Frontier Software helps clients manage payday filing, which requires employment information to be submitted to Inland Revenue within two working days of each payday.
Frontier Software maintains dedicated payroll capability for both markets, delivering legislative updates through its release programme and building audit and validation controls directly into ichris – the kind of systems readiness HRD has urged employers to prioritise ahead of the Payday Super deadline.
Vacancy Management (VCM²¹): connects high-volume recruitment, candidate approvals and hiring data into a centralised workflow, designed to streamline onboarding and reduce re-keying. “For us, this is where HCM technology should be moving: practical tools that improve day-to-day execution while building a stronger, more connected workforce platform for the future,” the company says.
Performance management: integrates performance data alongside roles, employment history, learning, skills and succession data, turning reviews from an isolated annual event into an ongoing part of the employee lifecycle.
Time and attendance: gives earlier visibility and tighter control by checking proposed rosters and recorded attendance against business rules before discrepancies reach payroll, while still allowing managers to handle genuine exceptions.
Frontier Software points to a library of published customer case studies as evidence of the connected-platform approach.
ISS: an aged and disability care provider that moved from manual onboarding to integrated, app-based self-service, cutting payroll setup time for new starters from days to minutes.
AngliSchools: used payroll, self-service and onboarding tools to manage growth across multiple schools.
Northern Territory Primary Health Network: modernised payroll and strengthened security through an integrated cloud-based solution.
Looking ahead, Frontier Software expects payroll depth and implementation risk to matter more, not less, as buyers grow more sceptical of AI as a standalone selling point. “The strongest business cases will be based on operational outcomes: dependable pay, reduced manual handling, clearer workforce information, better service outcomes and a platform that can adapt as legislation, workforce expectations and organisational needs continue to change,” says CEO Nick Southcombe.
Asked what a reader-voted recognition – rather than a judged submission – means to the business, Frontier Software was direct. “There is no submission document shaping the result; people choose the providers they believe deserve recognition,” Southcombe says, adding that being named across four categories reflects the breadth of the platform being understood and valued by development, implementation, support, payroll services and account management teams. “It is also a responsibility,” Southcombe adds. “Frontier Software has a long track record, but we see this recognition as momentum rather than a destination.”
An analysis of the broader 2026 data reveals clear market trajectories:
Total placements: 86 placements were awarded across 29 categories spanning eight practice areas – Consultants, Education, Employee Engagement/Rewards and Benefits, Health/Safety and Wellness, Employment Law, Recruitment, Learning and Development and HR Technology – to 45 distinct winning companies.
Category distribution: Consultants and HR Technology led with 15 placements each, while Employment Law formed the smallest group with three.
The breadth trend: Nearly one-third of winning companies (13 of 45) placed in more than one category, pointing to a market that increasingly rewards multi-capability providers over single-function tools.
This breadth-over-depth pattern lines up closely with what Jones observes from the buyer’s side. “Organisations can end up with several good individual products that do not work well together, creating duplicate data, manual workarounds and inconsistent reporting,” she says – a frustration that likely explains why multi-category providers feature so heavily among this year’s winners.
As the industry looks towards 2027, the intersection of AI integration, localisation and partnership depth will shape market leadership.
The reality of AI in HR: Megan Reed says AI is delivering genuine value in smart automation, knowledge management and open-text survey analysis – provided humans remain firmly in the loop. She warns against fully automated hiring, promotion or exit decisions, particularly under Australian and New Zealand regulatory settings.
The governance gap: Tanith Jones notes that without disciplined governance, an AI agent may confidently operate on outdated or conflicting information. That structural vulnerability shows up globally too: Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise survey of 3,235 business and IT leaders found that only one in five organisations has a mature governance model for autonomous AI agents.
The two-speed performance economy: Reed warns of an emerging performance divide, in which teams equipped with modern tools pull ahead of those still bound to legacy workflows. She argues the leading providers of 2027 will be judged on measurable business impact and on whether pricing and adoption models extend genuine access to frontline workers.
True localisation: Jones stresses that localisation in Australia and New Zealand cannot be cosmetic: employment law, payroll rules, awards and privacy requirements dictate how a platform actually needs to operate in practice.
Q: What is the HRD Readers’ Choice Awards?
A: The HRD Readers’ Choice Awards is an annual, reader-voted awards programme run by HRD Australia and HRD New Zealand. Rather than judged submissions, winners are determined entirely by confidential votes from HR professionals across both markets.
Q: Why does a reader vote carry more weight than a judged award?
A: Because it reflects direct, unfiltered market experience and user trust rather than a polished marketing pitch or submission document.
Q: What HR technology trends are shaping vendor selection in 2026?
A: HR leaders are prioritising end-to-end integration over standalone features, robust AI governance, proven business outcomes and genuine baseline localisation for Australian and New Zealand regulatory frameworks.
Q: Where is AI currently delivering the most value in HR?
A: Contributors point to smart automation, knowledge management, drafting routine communications and analysing open-text survey data as areas of genuine value.
Q: How many organisations were recognised in the 2026 awards?
A: The awards recognised 45 distinct winning companies across 86 placements and 29 categories.
The survey for the second annual Readers’ Choice Awards 2026 took place between 1 and 26 June 2026. HRD Australia and HRD New Zealand opened service provider nominations to compile a list of vendors and suppliers across the HR community in both countries, drawing on the editorial team’s knowledge of the market together with additional research in each category.
Readers were invited to cast confidential ballots through an online survey. Depending on the category, participants could select up to a set number of organisations from the compiled list and were also able to nominate additional organisations they felt should be considered. The three nominees who received the highest number of overall votes in each category – including ties – received the Readers’ Choice designation.