What you need to know

• CareerOne has overhauled its platform with AI-powered job matching, moving from a traditional job board model to an active talent matchmaking system.
• Early results show a major impact, with employer-candidate matches up 65 per cent and job seeker engagement surging 8x.
• The AI-driven approach involves an innovative partnership model with Decidr via a joint venture and a revenue share
• The new solution moves beyond simple keyword matching, using deep-learning to dynamically match candidates to roles based on hundreds or even thousands of dimensions.
• The shift aims to solve recruitment’s biggest pain points—job seekers struggle to get responses, while employers are overwhelmed with applications but can’t easily find the right talent.
• CareerOne is positioning itself as an AI-powered agent for recruiters rather than just a job board, and actively working on behalf of candidates by surfacing them to employers.
• More AI-driven platform updates are coming, with real-time employer engagement and talent scouting set to expand in the next quarter.
• If the trend holds, CareerOne’s AI-powered model could disrupt the job board industry, making traditional job ads obsolete.

CareerOne is going all-in on agentic AI-driven talent matchmaking and the early data is very encouraging. Meet Banjo, its new AI talent agent that trawls 500,000 live job listings across 3000 company sites, analysing skills, experience and preferences to tee up the perfect match. 

The results? Employer-candidate connections are up 65 per cent, and job seeker engagement has skyrocketed 8x. Forget classifieds—CareerOne is now an AI-powered recruiter, reshaping hiring for its 30/70 Agency and Corporate client mix.

The company is a long-time player in the Australian job board market. It started in 1999 during the dotcom boom, part of News Corp’s strategy to hold onto the classified “Rivers of Gold". That morphed into a joint venture with Monster Worldwide in 2008. Acquire Learning took control of the business in 2015 although News and Monster remained on the share registry for another two years.

Access Learning had its own problems and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2017 "Cor Cordis [and insolvency firm] ... sold Acquire's 90 per cent stake in CareerOne for an undisclosed sum to Octomedia. Creditors will discover the sum at the next creditors meeting in September."

The Herald report noted that on July 31, Octomedia and a group of experienced investors established a new company named Career Media Group for the acquisition. Octomedia took a stake in Career Media Group, while four individuals took 16.7 per cent and among the individual investors was Octomedia's chairman, Nati Harpaz, then managing director of Catch of the Day.

These days, CareerOne is a subsidiary of the holding company Career Media Group, currently owned by a group of private investors including prominent business figures such as  Harpaz, and John Winters (Superhero)

The Problem: Job Hunting is Broken

Now the business is looking to use agentic AI to bludgeon its way back as a contender among the top tier of online recruitment services by tackling one of the sector's most stubborn challenges: Connecting the right talent with the right job at the right time.

For years, job seekers have been stuck in a painful cycle, applying for dozens of jobs, rarely hearing back. Employers, meanwhile, drown in applications but struggle to identify the right people.

According to CareerOne COO Moussa Namini: "A job board is trying to get a candidate into their next job. And the way traditional job boards do that is they present job ads, and candidates have to then apply themselves to those jobs. In the new world, we are using AI to find matching jobs for candidates,  based on their suitability as well as their preferences."

The old way—relying on keyword matches—wasn’t cutting it, says Namini, "A quality candidate, now you can describe them as someone who meets all of the criteria for a job. However, in the real world... there’s a whole lot of subjectivity that goes into determining whether or not the candidate is quality."

The Fix: AI-Powered Job Matching with Decidr

CareerOne tapped Decidr’s agentic AI platform to build a matching solution, which ditches keyword searches for deep-learning-driven candidate profiling. It’s a leap from CareerOne’s previous system, says Namini.

The AI-driven approach involves an innovative partnership model with Decidr via a joint venture and a revenue share,  part of Decidr's go-to market strategy to partner with one company is several key vertical markets.

"We had matching, and that was using around 19 dimensions to create these matches. We are talking about a completely different kettle of fish with the way that matching works now using hundreds and sometimes thousands of dimensions."

Unlike traditional systems that surface candidates based on a rigid checklist, Decidr’s AI reinterprets profiles dynamically. The difference? Candidates are presented in the best possible light for each role. Namini provides a real-world example:

"There was a candidate in our platform, [Let’s call her Sonia] and she had spent the best part of the last decade working in reception. However, the last couple of years, she was working as a commercial cleaner... If Sonia, on a traditional job board, goes and applies for a receptionist role, there’s a very likely chance that she comes across as a cleaner, and the employer will say, ‘Hey, why is this cleaner applying for my role?’"

The new system highlights relevant experience while de-emphasising less applicable roles, ensuring better candidate-employer matches.

While its AI-driven model is still fresh, data suggests it's working. "The number of eligible employers being matched to new candidates increased 65 per cent over a six-month period," Namini says.

Candidate engagement is up even more: "Job seeker applications through the Decidr AI-powered job matching are up by 8x."

The biggest shift? CareerOne is no longer a passive job board, it’s actively working on behalf of job seekers.

"The idea with CareerOne is that as a user, you’ll be able to onboard, and then the next time you’re interacting with the platform is when employers are interested in your profile and trying to connect with you," Namini says.

That’s a seismic shift away from the ‘post and pray’ model that’s defined online recruitment for decades.

Model results

CareerOne is rolling out major platform updates in the next quarter, fine-tuning AI-driven hiring and enabling employers to engage talent in real-time. If the numbers keep trending up, the company’s move into AI-powered recruitment could be a model for the industry.

"We’re at the stage now in terms of the technological revolution of AI, that we can actually achieve [this] at scale," says Namini. "Decidr is certainly having a huge impact for us in capability to achieve that in market."

With AI doing the heavy lifting, CareerOne’s bet is the recruitment industry is shifting from manual matchmaking to automated talent scouting at scale.

And if the early results hold up, the old job board model might be on borrowed time.