Employment Hero launches AI Recruitment Agent in Canada
Employment Hero has launched an AI-based Recruitment Agent in Canada, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses navigating a difficult hiring market.
Built into the company's broader HR, payroll and recruitment platform, the software focuses on first-round screening interviews. It uses a structured video interview format, with voice prompts asking role-specific questions and assessing responses against set criteria.
Employment Hero says the product can cut screening time by 75% and shorten the overall hiring process by up to 10 days. Hiring teams receive AI-generated summaries, scorecards and ranked shortlists, while human recruiters and hiring managers make the final decisions.
Hiring pressure
The launch comes as employers across Canada face uneven labour conditions. Some sectors are dealing with high volumes of applicants, while others continue to report shortages of suitable workers. For smaller businesses, that has increased pressure to fill roles quickly without sacrificing consistency.
The Recruitment Agent is designed to replace early resume screening with structured interviews based on questions approved by hiring managers. It can also ask follow-up questions when answers are vague, giving candidates more opportunity to demonstrate their suitability beyond what appears on a CV.
The tool is powered by Hero AI, Employment Hero's in-house artificial intelligence system. The same technology also supports Ask Hero AI, a tool within the broader platform that provides employers with policy guidance, organisational insights and HR support.
In Canada, Employment Hero is positioning the launch as a response to pressure on both employers and job seekers. The recruitment market has become harder to navigate as businesses contend with administrative burdens and candidates face long waits for responses.
"SMBs are stuck between two extremes right now, either they're overwhelmed with applications, or they can't fill roles fast enough," said KJ Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Employment Hero Canada. "Recruitment Agent changes that equation. It gives businesses speed and clarity, and it gives candidates a real opportunity to show what they can do, not just what's on their resume."
The system includes human approval points, custom scoring rubrics, candidate communication features and data handling controls. Employment Hero says these measures form part of its approach to responsible AI use in recruitment.
Early user
Among the early Canadian users was BigGeo, a Calgary-based spatial data company. It used the Recruitment Agent during beta testing as applications rose across finance, sales and engineering roles.
"Building the Spatial Cloud requires us to be an AI-first company from the inside out," said Arden Styles, Chief Operations Officer of BigGeo. "We constantly use internal AI agents to automate and scale our operations, so it was a natural progression to extend that agentic thinking to our recruiting. When we experienced a surge in applications, leveraging Employment Hero's Recruitment Agent allowed us to seamlessly manage the volume. It ensures that by the time our team sits down with a candidate, we are confident they are the right fit to help us build the future of spatial intelligence."
The company is also seeking to address frustration among applicants who submit large numbers of applications without hearing back. It cited the experience of Toronto-based digital marketing professional Daniel Vina, who said he applied for nearly 500 roles over eight months without receiving a meaningful response or interview opportunity.
"At this point, it's not even the 'no' that's hardest, it's the silence," said Vina. "No update, no closure, no acknowledgement that you exist in the process."
Employment Hero says its platform now serves more than 350,000 businesses and manages over 2.5 million employees worldwide. The Recruitment Agent is now available to its customers in Canada.