Southeast Asia | 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 digitizing employment for SMEs by creating 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 Southeast Asia: 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 Malaysia/ Singapore 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

Skyrocketing cost-of-living pressures are taking a toll on Malaysia and/Singaporean employees. Employment Hero’s recent 2023 Talent Insights Report found that a whopping 92% of Malaysian employees are career cushioning, with nearly half (45%) feeling that their salaries are not catching up to inflation rates. Meanwhile, the survey reported that only 51% of Singaporean respondents felt secure in their roles, the lowest among all countries surveyed, and 49% of respondents were looking externally for new job opportunities.

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 a pool of hundreds of thousands of work-ready applicants – with no job posting or advertising costs. In a time where job board advertising fees have skyrocketed, Swag gives SMEs the tools to get their jobs in front of the best candidates whatever their budget.  

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 

Ben Thompson, Co-founder and CEO of Employment Hero, said: “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 personalized. 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 a candidate has 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 they’re 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, 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.”