Employment Hero Unleashes Swag: The AI Solution To Help NZ SMEs Win The Talent War Against Big Corporates

The world’s first employment superapp, Swag by Employment Hero, launches to even the playing field for SMEs with AI hiring tools and a suite of new features to deliver a world-class candidate experience.

Swag by Employment Hero was launched to solve two major employment challenges: SME employers struggling to hire talent, and employees struggling with the rising cost of living

Swag by Employment Hero leverages AI to make it easier for employers to find and secure talent, significantly cutting down time to hire and saving SMEs thousands per year

HR, payroll, and employee engagement platform Employment Hero is on a mission to reinvent the entire employment relationship with its new, world-first employment superapp, Swag. With AI-powered recruitment functionality designed to streamline the job search for small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and jobseekers - and buoyed by a network of 200,000+ employers and 1M+ employees - Swag makes finding, onboarding, and rewarding talent easier.

Employment Hero’s core mission is to make employment easier and more valuable, which, to date, the company has done by digitising employment for SMEs with a platform that gives employers confidence in the accuracy, compliance, and transparency of their HR and payroll processes. The next stage in the company’s development is tackling the employee side of the equation: making the traditionally tedious (and discouraging) task of job hunting better. Debuting in the top five App Store business apps at launch, Swag introduces two core features for users in New Zealand: Work and Career to seamlessly integrate the recruitment journey into a comprehensive employee experience, with more benefits scheduled to be released on the app soon.

This evolution is spurred by the need to solve two massive issues in today’s employment landscape:

The struggle for SMEs to find and retain employees

Expectations of a global recession and slower growth in New Zealand have driven up SMEs' overheads, making it harder for them to operate and expand. Most SMEs, due to sheer size and fewer resources, lack the number of skilled and qualified staff needed for better productivity and future growth. And when they do have experienced staff on the books, retaining these employees is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s volatile job market.

The consumer cost of living crisis

Interest rates and inflation are high, with skyrocketing cost-of-living pressures taking a toll on New Zealand employees. Workers are concerned about their financial outlook, which impacts their mental health and productivity at work. Swag evens the playing field by giving SMEs the most advanced tools to attract and retain great talent and give jobseekers and employees a way to match with great roles.

Swag by Employment Hero cuts the cost and time to hire for SMEs

With the help of AI, Swag proactively addresses these pain points by empowering employers to streamline key parts of the recruiting process, including:

Using the power of AI to produce first-draft job descriptions

Using AI to predict a business’ future hiring needs

Matching eligible candidates with suitable roles

Posting jobs to hundreds of popular job boards in a few clicks.

Swag also features a job board called Swag Jobs which gives SMEs free access to hundreds of thousands of work-ready applicants - with no job posting or advertising costs. Unlike other players like SEEK and Indeed that work on a transactional model, Employment Hero uses a SaaS model to offer free and unlimited job postings with Swag, a process that traditionally costs employers up to $800 each time a job ad is posted.

Ben Thompson, Co-founder and CEO of Employment Hero, said: “Our SME base has repeatedly told us that record-low unemployment rates are making it extremely difficult to find, attract and retain the talent they need to grow their business. And with interest rates rapidly rising, more and more businesses are walking a fine line when matching throughput with overheads. The big problem causing these tensions is a lack of resources and assistance for employers to find, secure and maintain talent. And so, we have sought to alleviate these issues on a societal and economic level from first principles with Swag, using innovation and optimisation to enhance the recruitment process.”

Streamlining every stage of the employment experience

Once employed, Swag becomes the primary interface for all work-related tasks, including time and attendance management, leave tracking, and rostering. Swag’s Work features allow employees to reduce onboarding administration and common HR inefficiencies by keeping timesheets, payslips, leave requests, induction policies, and certifications within one central location. Swag also promotes reward and recognition initiatives such as peer shoutouts and accredited personal achievements within the business.

Swag uses AI to match jobseekers with great roles

Swag also does the heavy lifting for employees throughout the job search process, including:

Using the power of AI to produce first-draft cover letters

AI-powered job suggestions based on a candidate’s profile and skills

One-click ‘apply’ functionality to apply in seconds

Automatic CV and resume parsing to avoid manual data entry

Mr Thompson continued: “We are rapidly adding new features that will match candidates with a job before it’s even posted - and faster than the job boards can. In the next 12 months, we plan to replace even more manual tasks with AI, further streamlining the process and freeing up people’s time to focus on what they do best.

“Through AI and applications like Swag, the entire recruitment process can be streamlined and personalised. We developed Swag to help employers stand out in a competitive hiring market and to help jobseekers cut down on manual tasks such as sifting through open roles and writing up time-consuming cover letters.

“While AI serves as an assistant in the hiring process for both employers and employees, it by no means replaces the human elements of recruiting. Rather than automating every interaction, Swag streamlines the manual, tedious aspects of the hiring process, such as writing job descriptions, finding promising candidates, sorting through swathes of unsuitable applicants while enhancing the personal parts, from discovering your next great hire and speaking 1:1 with interested applicants, to forming meaningful relationships with talent for future recruitment. With more time back in the day, SMEs can focus on growing their business and finding the best people in the market to do so,” he said.

A first-of-its-kind Digital Employment Passport

In addition to these time-saving AI features, Swag’s Career feature gives jobseekers access to a free jobs board - Swag Jobs, where they can create a digital employment passport and view thousands of job ads across multiple industries. Once candidates have applied for a role, they can access an interactive, real-time messaging function between themselves and hiring managers, keeping jobseekers in the loop at every stage of the hiring journey - whether successful or not.

“The Swag superapp can engage the candidate with the employer in a much more interactive, authentic way. You get direct messaging between the hiring manager and the candidate through the interview and recruitment phase, then Swag becomes the onboarding tool to bring that employee into the business, where it becomes the tool to manage work, and then it's how you get paid and how you save and spend,” said Thompson.

“Put all that together and you've got a unique value proposition for candidates to find and apply for jobs, to be recruited, onboarded, manage their work, and then access benefits and perks that make the most of their pay.”

Employment Hero is also working on the launch of earned-wage access and a credit-free pay option for employees, as well as a range of employee discounts and rewards with high street and online brands, as part of the next phase of rollout of the superapp in New Zealand, delivering further benefits to employers and employees.

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