Swipejobs founder Katrina Leslie wins EY Entrepreneur of the Year as AI hiring platform hits $1.3bn revenue

Katrina Leslie built her career watching how Australia hires people — from help-wanted cards taped in shop windows to the algorithmic matching engines that now decide who gets a first interview. On October 22, that career was handed the country's most prominent founder trophy: EY Entrepreneur Of The Year, awarded at Melbourne's Regent Theatre before 27 national finalists across six categories.

The recognition went to Leslie as founder and chair of Swipejobs, the hiring platform she started in 2013. The numbers behind the gong are what make it a story for anyone tracking Oceanian capital: Swipejobs booked $1.3 billion in revenue in 2025 and now operates in the United States and United Kingdom as well as at home. The platform uses AI to match jobseekers with employers on skills and preferences rather than keywords and CVs. The judging panel, chaired by Naomi Simson OAM, singled out Leslie for turning a bold idea into a globally scalable business and for challenging orthodoxies about what recruitment can look like.

For outsiders, the Leslie biography explains why this resonates locally. She is the daughter of a Queensland cattle farmer, and her path into the industry ran through in-house recruitment roles at Westpac, Microsoft and BHP before she went out on her own in 1997 with IPS, an assessment and career services company. Two more ventures followed — ePredix, which screened and ranked applicants, and HRX, an applicant tracking and sourcing platform launched in 2005. That is three decades inside one unglamorous but enormous sector, and it means Swipejobs was not a lucky pivot but an accumulation. Her own framing is impatient with nostalgia: if you want to drive at 100 kilometres an hour, she says, you cannot be looking in the rearview mirror.

The award also carries a commercial subtext that matters in a small, open economy like Australia's. EY notes that past winners of this programme collectively support roughly 135,000 jobs and contribute $21.4 billion to Australian GDP — a reminder that the country's growth story increasingly rests on founders who build abroad from day one rather than waiting to saturate a market of 27 million people. Swipejobs' US and UK footprint fits that pattern, and it is the kind of service export that does not appear in mining statistics but shapes how global labour markets function.

There is a wider signal here about where Oceanian wealth is being created. Recruitment is a cyclical, people-heavy business, and Leslie has spent her career layering technology over it — screening, ranking, tracking, and now AI matching. The $1.3 billion revenue figure puts Swipejobs in a different weight class from most Australian software exporters, and the EY platform gives that scale a public face. Lou Tandy of The APT Travel Group took the Consumer category, a reminder that the old economy and the new one still share a stage in Melbourne.

Leslie's next appointment is in Monaco in 2027, where she will represent Australia against national winners from more than 60 countries for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year title. Swipejobs, meanwhile, is eyeing further international expansion. For a correspondent's notebook, the question is whether an Australian hiring platform can keep compounding abroad as labour markets tighten and AI regulation sharpens — and whether Leslie's win pulls more local capital toward the unglamorous plumbing of how people get hired.