Katrina Leslie named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Australia
Company News
Katrina Leslie, Founder and Chair of Swipejobs, has been named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Australia.
Announced at EY’s national awards on 22 October, the win places her among the country’s most celebrated founders and sends her to represent Australia on the world stage at Monaco in 2027.
For Katrina, it’s recognition of an idea she’s championed for more than a decade: the right jobs should find people, not the other way round.
The category technology forgot
Katrina grew up on a cattle property in Central Queensland before building a career in recruitment. Over decades in the industry, she saw how little hiring had changed. “We had help wanted ads in business windows hundreds of years ago,” she says. “That moved to help wanted ads in newspaper columns, and now we have help wanted ads in the cloud.” To Katrina, jobs is the last consumer category technology never really transformed.
The cost lands on both sides. Jobseekers send hundreds of applications and hear back from almost none. Employers often receive more than 700 applicants for a single role. And the AI meant to fix it has only made it worse: black-box tools that screen people out in the first few seconds, qualified applicants included. “Efficiency is important,” she says, “but effectiveness and fairness are far more important.” Trained on biased public data, those tools risk automating exclusion at scale.
Turning the job hunt upside down
In 2014, Katrina founded Swipejobs to turn the job model upside down. “You have to focus on the job seeker as a consumer,” she says. That means delivering every matched job in the economy to them in real time, and handing them transparency and control over the AI, so their matches sharpen with every interaction.
It works the same way for employers. Instead of posting a role and sifting through hundreds of applications, they load a job and see matched talent straight away.
AI wasn’t bolted on later. It has been the engine since day one, long before it was the word on every pitch deck. Today it powers hiring across the US and UK, built and run from our home base in Sydney.
It’s a shift the incumbents struggle to make. The biggest job platforms earn on advertising and clicks. Until a platform is built around the quality of the match, the old model stays stuck.
Next stop: the world stage
Katrina now goes on to represent Australia at EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year in Monaco, with the whole Swipejobs team across Australia, the US and the UK cheering her on.
From a cattle property in Central Queensland to Australia’s top entrepreneur, it’s been a remarkable journey, and she’s just getting started. Congratulations, Katrina.
