Employment Hero drives product activation for 350K+ accounts with ElevenAgents

Employment Hero is a fast-growing AI powered HR, payroll, and recruitment platform, serving over 350,000 businesses and 2.5 million employees worldwide. After launching a new AI Recruitment Agent inside its platform, Employment Hero needed a way to drive awareness and adoption at scale. The company built an outbound AI voice agent on ElevenAgents to call existing customers, introduce the new capability, and help them activate it directly.

The challenge: activating 350,000 customers on a new product

Employment Hero's AI Recruitment Agent automates some of the most time-consuming tasks related to  hiring, including CV screening, phone screens, and candidate shortlisting.The challenge was getting customers to try it. In-platform notifications and email nurture sequences drove initial adoption, but Employment Hero determined that a direct phone call was a more effective way to educate customers on the new product. Doing that with human staff across 350,000 accounts was not economically viable, so they turned to ElevenAgents.

Deploying quickly on a robust agents platform

Employment Hero's team chose ElevenAgents because they found that expressive mode offered extremely natural sounding conversations and represented a clear step forward from previous solutions in the market. They also wanted a platform where they could focus on conversation design and optimization rather than building core infrastructure in house. ElevenAgents offered that platform, with built in knowledge base management, testing frameworks, conversation logging, and integrations with their CRM and other tools.

The team at Employment Hero set up a robust agent in a matter of days, leveraging  the platform's tools for agent design, prompt tuning, voice selection, tool calling, and real-time previews. They leveraged the Twilio integration to start making real calls almost immediately, and comprehensive API documentation and data endpoints let them quickly move from MVP to a live outbound campaign. After they launched their initial agent, they also used experiments to quickly iterate and optimize different components.

Measurable results from the first outbound campaign

The first phase of the campaign validated AI voice outreach as a direct activation channel:

• 33% answer rate on outbound calls to existing customers
• 3%+ activation rate on answered calls, driving direct adoption of the AI Recruitment Agent
• 4% unprompted demo request rate among answered calls

Each activation carries a meaningful revenue impact for the business, and the relatively strong conversion performance of this cold customer outreach gave Employment Hero the confidence to scale the program

For us, the ability to quickly change a voice, update a prompt, add a tool, and immediately test the impact is what made the difference. The transcript review, call logs, and data endpoints are first-class, which matters enormously when you're optimising conversation design. We want to spend our time building the best possible voice agent for our use case. We don't want to spend it reinventing the orchestration layer underneath it. ElevenAgents let us focus entirely on the use case and ship value to our business faster.

- Daniel Brady, AI GTM Lead, Employment Hero

Unlocking customer communication that was previously not viable

Employment Hero had long wanted to use direct conversations as part of its customer communications - activation calls for new features, lifecycle nurture, re-engagement for dormant accounts - but the economics of running scaled activation calls never added up. This campaign proved that a whole class of customer conversations which was previously out of reach is now possible.

The team is already picking the highest-value moments in the customer lifecycle and building new campaigns around them using ElevenAgents. That is the real story: A permanent shift in how Employment Hero communicates with its customer base. Conversations through high touch channels that feel human, tailored to the right moment, at a scale that was previously not possible.