Employment Hero lifts revenue 30% as AI agents cut hiring noise in Australia

Employment Hero has lifted revenue 30% to surpass $400 million in annual recurring revenue, adding $100 million in the past 12 months, according to HRD America. The Australian-founded AI-powered HR, payroll and recruitment platform has grown more than tenfold in six years, from A$37 million in September 2020 to over $400 million ARR.

The company recorded a 33% improvement in revenue per employee, though employee expenses still rose 29% over the year. Employment Hero did not disclose its headcount, but said it has no plans for redundancies and no plans to list. Co-founder and chief executive Ben Thompson told the AFR: “I don’t buy into the idea that you can’t go against a trend.”

The AI hiring agent in practice

The most concrete detail in the announcement concerns Employment Hero’s recruitment agent. David Holland, the company’s managing director of talent solutions, told HRD in July that the agent reviews more than 600,000 applications a month, has completed more than 5,000 interviews and cut screening time by 67%. Hiring managers still make the final call.

The agent checks that CVs belong to genuine candidates, runs screening interviews and hands hiring managers a shortlist. Customers only pay when a candidate is successfully placed. Holland said the average number of applicants per role on the platform had passed 150, and warned that “we’re losing the hiring signal” as application volumes rise.

That volume problem is not unique to Employment Hero. Bloomberg reported in July that 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. For Australian HR teams running high-volume recruitment, the practical question is whether an agent that screens, interviews and shortlists can restore enough signal to justify changing existing workflows.

What the semantic layer means for payroll and HR data

Employment Hero said a new semantic layer translates its business data into plain language an agent can read and act on. The company has put a fleet of internal AI agents to work across product development, marketing and customer experience.

For payroll and HR readers, the semantic layer matters because it determines whether an AI agent can answer questions about awards, leave balances, pay runs or onboarding steps without a human having to structure the data first. Employment Hero has not published technical detail on how the layer handles Australian award interpretation or Fair Work compliance questions, so payroll teams should treat any AI-generated advice on those matters as needing human review.

Liam D’Ortenzio, 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. That is a statement of policy, not a guarantee of outcomes, and Australian employers remain responsible for decisions made about candidates and employees.

Contrast with the wider Australian tech jobs picture

The revenue news lands in a week when Australian tech companies are cutting jobs. Canva told staff last week that 1,271 roles, or 22% of its global workforce, would be affected by its first company-wide restructure. Atlassian cut 1,600 jobs in March. WiseTech Global announced 1,700 job cuts earlier in the year.

Employment Hero’s position is different in two ways. First, it has stated no plans for redundancies. Second, its revenue per employee improved 33% while employee expenses still rose 29%, suggesting the company is growing output faster than headcount costs. The company has not disclosed headcount, so the revenue per employee figure cannot be independently checked against a published employee number.

What Australian HR teams should watch next

Employment Hero is headline sponsor of HRFest Australia 2026, which takes over The Timber Yard in Melbourne next week. That gives Australian HR and payroll leaders a chance to see the recruitment agent and semantic layer demonstrated, and to ask how the tools handle local award interpretation, privacy obligations and bias testing.

The company last raised $263 million in October 2023 at a valuation of just under $2 billion. Investors include Insight Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures, KKR, OneVentures and Airtree Ventures. 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.”

For payroll and HR teams evaluating AI agents, the key checks are unchanged: where does human oversight sit, what data is used to train the agent, how are bias and privacy risks tested, and who carries liability when an agent makes a mistake. Employment Hero’s framework answers some of those questions at a policy level, but Australian employers should confirm the details for their own state, award and workplace situation before relying on AI-generated hiring or payroll decisions.

Sources: HRD America

Photo: Hiring our Heroes workshop held aboard Combat Center 151007-M-UD149-016 by Lance Cpl. Thomas Mudd, Public domain