Employment Hero’s ambitious vision clashes with its own workplace reality
Employment Hero’s mission is to simplify HR for businesses — but former staff say its own workplace is marked by confusion, pressure and sudden departures.
When hundreds of remote Employment Hero staff gathered in Bali this September for the company’s annual “Global Gathering”, CEO Ben Thompson delivered an impassioned speech about the company’s mission: helping business owners navigate the burdens of being an employer.
"No one goes into business to be an employer," Thompson told the assembled “Heroes” — the company’s internal name for staff. "When you take that risk, and this becomes your reality, and you're the people who create the jobs, this is crazy, because you don't want to employ people, and employment is so fundamentally important to everything in society."
It was a rallying cry for Employment Hero’s mission: to simplify employment for businesses, reduce administrative burdens and ultimately transform workplace practices through its HR software. The company is one of Australia's most highly-valued startups, at just shy of $2 billion.
Yet investigations by Capital Brief have revealed a stark disconnect between the company’s external ambitions and its internal culture. Multiple former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described it as a “vile workplace” ruled by a “fear culture”, where staff were “fired on an almost daily basis and disappearing into the abyss with no explanation”.
