Responsible Innovation

Employment Hero ensures its AI systems are fair and inclusive by focusing on skills, experience and qualifications—not personal attributes—when making recommendations, helping to reduce bias in hiring. Our AI decisions are transparent and explainable, with clear insights and audit trails and always include human oversight to ensure fairness and accountability. We regularly audit and refine our models to prevent unintended bias and through initiatives like the Hero Foundation, we also use AI to create positive social impact by connecting disadvantaged job seekers with opportunities.

Employment Hero actively mitigates bias in its AI systems through a combination of design, testing and oversight. Our recruitment tools, like SmartMatch, deliberately exclude protected attributes such as name, age, gender, or location, focusing only on skills, experience and qualifications to ensure fair outcomes. We apply privacy-by-design principles, conduct regular bias audits and performance testing and continuously monitor our models after deployment to detect and correct any emerging issues. Importantly, all AI outcomes remain explainable and subject to human oversight, so hiring managers make final decisions with clear insights, ensuring fairness and accountability at every step.

Employment Hero uses AI to make work easier, fairer and more valuable for everyone. Our tools, like SmartMatch, connect candidates and employers based on skills and experience rather than personal attributes, helping to reduce bias and open up opportunities. Hero AI, our HR assistant, simplifies complex policies and tasks so employees and managers get quick, clear answers. By automating repetitive processes, our AI frees people to focus on meaningful, human-centred work, while initiatives like the Hero Foundation use our technology to connect disadvantaged job seekers with employment opportunities.

Our Responsible AI page is the best place to start. From here, or any other page on the Employment Hero site, you can explore detailed information about our products and services using the top navigation, tailored for businesses, partners, employees and job seekers. We also provide a dedicated Support Centre in every market, with in-depth help articles and our HeroBot is available 24/7 to answer questions or you can connect with our team via phone or webform.

Yes. Employment Hero ensures there is always human oversight in the use of AI and users have the ability to question, challenge, or seek clarification on AI-driven outcomes. For example, our SmartMatch recruitment tool provides transparent explanations of how candidates are matched, along with clear audit trails. Employers and job seekers can review these insights and final hiring decisions are always made by humans, not AI. This guarantees fairness, accountability and a clear path to contest or correct outcomes if needed. If you believe an AI system has made an incorrect decision, there are many channels in which you can contact us about this, including our HeroBot, via phone or web form

We collect certain types of data in order to deliver market-leading products and services to businesses, partners, employees and job-seekers. This data depends on which services we provide to you, however largely falls into personal and contact information, employment and financial data and platform usage / technical data. All data is collected and used in accordance with our Privacy Policy, which is regularly reviewed and updated in line with regional and global best practice.

Employment Hero collects your data for four main reasons, which are grounded in legal and business requirements: to fulfill our contractual obligations with you and your employer, when you have given us your explicit consent for specific uses, when it is necessary for a legitimate business interest and to comply with legal and regulatory obligations. All data is collected and processed in accordance with our Privacy Policy, which is regularly reviewed and updated in line with regional and global best practice.

Your personal data is stored securely in data centres located in Australia, Ireland and Canada by our trusted third-party providers. Across all our AI initiatives, zero‑data‑retention and no‑training settings are configured by default with our third-party model partners.We retain data only for as long as necessary to deliver our services, meet legal or operational requirements and enhance your experience, after which it is securely deleted or anonymised. Some data (such as account information, marketing preferences, or usage analytics) may be kept for longer where required by law or business needs. You can learn more about our practices in our Privacy Policy.

Keeping your data secure is our top priority. We use advanced encryption (TLS), multi-factor authentication and regular security audits to protect our platform. Employment Hero is ISO/IEC 27001 certified, meeting the same standards as banks.

We also employ firewalls, DDoS protection, strict access controls, continuous patching and detailed logging. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest on secure AWS infrastructure.

The SmartMatch system only shares relevant information (e.g. job title, skills) and no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is shared. Where this kind of data is required for service to employers and employees, for example in onboarding or payroll, we have stringent data and privacy security processes to ensure PII is protected. You can find out more via our Trust Centre.

We do not use personal data to train third‑party foundation models. For models we build or refine within Employment Hero, we may use aggregated or de‑identified data consistent with our Privacy Policy.

No, never.

Employment Hero has been trailblazing with new technology since it was founded in 2014 by Ben Thompson and Dave Tong and strong governance of emerging technologies has always been a critical focus. Over the past decade, CPTO and Co-Founder Dave Tong has built a world-class product and technology function that embeds Responsible AI principles into every stage of development. We follow a clear governance framework that includes formal AI impact assessments, privacy-by-design standards, bias testing and audits and continuous monitoring to ensure fairness, security and accountability. Our leadership team champions this approach company-wide, ensuring that every AI innovation—whether powering recruitment, HR, payroll, or employee experience—is deployed responsibly, transparently and with human oversight.

Employment Hero’s AI-powered tools are helping businesses save time, reduce costs and create fairer outcomes. SmartMatch cuts recruitment time from weeks to days by instantly matching candidates based on skills and experience, while reducing bias by ignoring personal attributes like age or gender. AI-driven payroll automation has reduced processes that once took days down to hours, giving HR teams more time to focus on people. Across the platform, AI features streamline tasks like drafting job descriptions, performance feedback, or rostering, boosting productivity and reducing manual admin. These solutions not only improve efficiency and accuracy for businesses of all sizes but also open up greater opportunities for job seekers by making hiring faster, fairer and more accessible.

Our mission is simple: make employment easier for everyone. That principle guides every product decision we make, quarter by quarter. We don’t just build technology for the sake of it – every feature is designed to deliver measurable outcomes for business owners, HR managers and their teams. SmartMatch is already proving the impact of this approach. Compared to traditional hiring methods, it helps businesses spend 92% less time contacting candidates, screen 87% fewer applicants and review 70% fewer profiles to make a hire. By cutting down on the most time-consuming parts of recruitment while still improving outcomes, SmartMatch shows how AI can drive efficiency, reduce costs and give people more time to focus on higher-value work.

We remain mission-first: to make employment easier and more valuable for everyone on earth. As work continues to evolve, we believe AI will be one of the most powerful forces shaping the future. That’s why it sits at the core of how we innovate, develop and operate. For us, AI is not about replacing people, but about empowering them — amplifying human creativity, judgment and potential. By removing barriers, reducing bias and streamlining repetitive tasks, we can create new opportunities for businesses and employees everywhere. Our vision is a world where every worker, regardless of location, background, or role, can thrive in the age of AI, with technology that is safe, fair, transparent and built to serve humanity’s best interests.