As Canva and Atlassian cut jobs, this Aussie-founded, AI-powered employment platform says agents are lifting output per employee rather than replacing staff
For much of the past year, the story in Australian tech has been AI and job losses. Employment Hero is telling a different one.
The
For HR leaders, the more interesting number sits elsewhere in the accounts. Co-founder and chief executive Ben Thompson told the AFR the business has no plans for redundancies and has recorded a 33 per cent improvement in revenue per employee. AI has been used to speed up growth rather than
Employment Hero didn't disclose its headcount, but employee expenses still rose 29 per cent over the year.
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Going against the grain
The contrast with its peers is hard to miss. Canva told staff last week that 1,271 roles, or 22 per cent of its global workforce, would be affected by its first company-wide restructure. Atlassian cut 1,600 jobs in March, and WiseTech Global announced 1,700 job cuts earlier in the year, in line with forecasts that AI and reorganisation would fuel redundancies in 2026.
Thompson doesn't accept that Employment Hero has to follow suit. "I don't buy into the idea that you can't go against a trend," he told the AFR. In his view, investors have been too quick to sort tech companies into two boxes, legacy software or AI. Employment Hero, he argued, is simply a business using AI to deliver more for its customers.
Much of the productivity gain comes from a fleet of internal AI agents the company has put to work across product development, marketing and customer experience. Sitting underneath them is a new semantic layer, which translates Employment Hero's business data into plain language an agent can read and act on. Thompson credited it with a big lift in returns.
Fighting AI with AI in hiring
The other engine of growth is recruitment, where employers are being buried under AI-written applications. Employment Hero's recruitment agent checks that CVs belong to genuine candidates, runs screening interviews and hands hiring managers a shortlist to take forward. Customers only pay when a candidate is successfully placed.
The tool is already running at scale. In July, David Holland, the company's managing director of talent solutions, told HRD the agent reviews more than 600,000 applications a month. It had completed more than 5,000 interviews and cut screening time by 67 per cent, with hiring managers still making the final call. Holland said the average number of applicants per role on the platform had passed 150, and that AI-polished CVs meant "we're losing the hiring signal".
It's a problem well beyond Australia. More than a third of about 1,230 recruiters and hiring managers surveyed by hiring software firm Greenhouse now spend half their working week weeding out spam and junk applications, Bloomberg reported in July.
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What people leaders can take from it
For HR teams under pressure to show an AI dividend, Employment Hero offers a different scorecard. Tracking revenue per employee, rather than roles removed, gives leaders a way to show the board productivity gains while keeping experienced staff in place. Slowing the pace of new hiring is also a far easier conversation with a workforce than a redundancy round.
Governance matters too. Liam D'Ortenzio, Employment Hero's head of performance operations, told HRD that every AI capability the company builds sits inside a responsible AI framework covering human oversight, privacy by design and bias mitigation. He added that those guardrails become more important, not less, as the technology takes on more on its own.
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Backers staying the course
Employment Hero counts Insight Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and KKR among its global investors, alongside long-standing local backers OneVentures and Airtree Ventures. It last raised $263 million in October 2023, at a valuation of just under $2 billion. Insight Partners managing director Rachel Geller praised Thompson and co-founder Dave Tong for executing exceptionally well on their vision for the future of employment, in a statement to the AFR.
Thompson said there are no plans to list the company.
Read next: Don’t miss joining hundreds of the country’s leading HR practitioners next week in Melbourne
Employment Hero is headline sponsor of HRFest Australia 2026, which takes over The Timber Yard in Melbourne on Wednesday (18 November). AI in recruitment is expected to be one of the hottest topics of the day.
