First impressions matter: including the first impression an employer makes on a new hire. Employees who go through structured onboarding stay longer: the data on this is consistent across industries. Yet for most organisations, onboarding remains a compliance checkbox: forms to sign, policies to acknowledge, an awkward first day. Enboarder, founded in Sydney in 2015 by CEO Brent Pearson, was built to change that: and it did so well enough that Workday, one of the world’s largest HR software companies, acquired it in 2023.

Before the acquisition, Enboarder had raised approximately $45 million USD and built a customer base that included global brands like Shopify, McDonald’s, and Hugo Boss: evidence that the platform works across very different industries and workforce types.

What Enboarder Does

Enboarder is an employee experience and onboarding platform that transforms the new hire journey from a transactional administrative process into a personalised, human-centred experience. The platform connects all the stakeholders in onboarding: the new hire, their manager, HR, IT, and even teammates: through automated, AI-driven workflows.

Rather than sending a new employee a single overwhelming welcome email with 47 attachments, Enboarder delivers information, tasks, and social touchpoints progressively: the right thing at the right time, tailored to where the employee is in their onboarding journey. Managers receive timely nudges to check in, set up introductions, or complete their own onboarding responsibilities. IT gets automated equipment requests. HR can monitor completion rates and engagement levels in real time.

The result is onboarding that feels less like bureaucracy and more like a genuine welcome. For distributed or remote workforces: increasingly the norm in Australia and globally: this kind of structured, digital-first onboarding is not a nice-to-have but a necessity.

How AI Powers It

Enboarder’s AI operates across several layers of the onboarding experience:

Personalisation: The platform adapts the onboarding journey based on the new hire’s role, location, team, seniority, and even communication preferences: so a junior retail employee in Melbourne gets a meaningfully different experience to a senior engineer in Sydney.
Nudge intelligence: AI determines the optimal timing and channel for each communication: email, SMS, push notification, or Slack message: to maximise engagement without overwhelming the recipient.
Predictive retention signals: Machine learning models analyse onboarding engagement patterns to identify new hires who may be at risk of early attrition, enabling HR teams to intervene before the employee disengages.
Content optimisation: The platform tracks which content, tasks, and interactions drive the best engagement outcomes and continuously refines the onboarding journey accordingly.

The Workday acquisition in 2023 gives Enboarder’s AI capabilities access to Workday’s vast HR data ecosystem: employee records, performance data, workforce planning: creating potential for much richer personalisation and predictive analytics over time.

Why It Matters for Australian Business

Australia faces genuine workforce challenges: skills shortages in key industries, high rates of early-tenure turnover, and the ongoing complexity of managing remote and hybrid teams. Every employee who leaves within their first six months represents a significant cost: recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge.

Enboarder’s platform addresses this directly. By making the onboarding experience genuinely engaging and structurally sound, organisations reduce early attrition and get new employees productive faster. For industries with high turnover: hospitality, retail, logistics, healthcare: the ROI is particularly clear.

The Workday acquisition also matters for the Australian tech ecosystem more broadly. It’s validation that Australian HR tech companies can build world-class products, attract global enterprise customers, and exit at meaningful valuations: providing returns that flow back into the local startup ecosystem through angel investment, mentorship, and founder networks.