Employment Hero review: is it the right fit for your team?

Employment Hero is an Australian-born HR and payroll platform built for small to medium businesses. It is strong on automated payroll, Single Touch Payroll (STP) compliance, award interpretation and centralised employee records. Where it is lighter is workforce intelligence: understanding the people behind the records, not just storing them.

Last reviewed July 2026.

What Employment Hero does well

For Australian businesses, staying on top of STP and complex award interpretation is a genuine burden. Employment Hero automates much of it, reducing manual entry errors and helping with Fair Work compliance. It handles superannuation clearing house integration and automatic tax table updates, and it connects to a wide range of accounting software, which makes it a convenient choice where finance and HR sit close together.

For many small business owners, automated award updates alone justify the platform. Pay runs stop being guesswork, and employees get a clear digital portal for payslips and payment summaries.

Onboarding and self-service

Employment Hero's digital onboarding lets new starters sign contracts, upload bank details and complete tax declarations before day one. That creates a professional first impression and saves HR teams hours of data entry. The self-service portal and mobile app also let employees manage their own information, from updating an address to submitting leave requests and timesheets, which matters for a dispersed workforce.

Performance and engagement features

The platform includes performance reviews, 1:1 meetings, KPI tracking and peer recognition through its "shout out" feature. It also offers engagement surveys and a benefits platform called WorkLife. These tools support more frequent, meaningful conversations than the dreaded annual review cycle.

Their effectiveness depends on what the manager brings to them, though. A performance review is only as good as the manager's understanding of their team's natural strengths and blind spots, and that is data a system of record does not capture.

Where the gaps are

Employment Hero covers payroll, HR administration and employee benefits in one system, and it does that well. But most HR platforms in this category are built as systems of record: they store data. Once the paperwork is digitised, the harder question remains. How do you actually improve team performance?

Managing a team of 50 or 100 people takes more than tracking leave balances. It takes an understanding of how different personalities interact, where friction is likely, and whether the people you hire genuinely fit the culture they are joining. That is a different category of tool: a system of intelligence rather than a system of record.

Where Compono fits (and where it does not)

To be clear about the boundary: Compono is not a payroll platform. If automated pay runs, STP and award compliance are your biggest headaches, Employment Hero is a strong contender and Compono will not replace it.

Compono solves the other half of the problem. Compono Hire matches candidates on culture and work style before they start, and Compono Engage maps how the eight work personalities on your team actually collaborate, so managers can design teams deliberately instead of reacting to conflict. Plenty of organisations run an administration platform for the process side and Compono for the people insight side. The two solve different risks, and most businesses eventually need both solved.

The verdict

Choose based on the problem in front of you. Buried in spreadsheets, manual pay runs and compliance risk? Employment Hero is built for exactly that, and it is a polished product for the Australian mid-market. Hiring the wrong people, losing good ones, or managing teams on gut feel? That is a people insight problem, and it needs a platform built for decisions about people rather than records of them.

Frequently asked questions

Is Employment Hero suitable for small businesses?

Yes. It is designed for small to medium enterprises that need to centralise HR and payroll, and it is particularly helpful for businesses that find manual award interpretation difficult or time-consuming.

Does Employment Hero handle Australian payroll compliance?

The platform is built for Australian requirements, including STP, superannuation clearing house integration and automatic tax table updates. That compliance focus is a large part of why local small businesses choose it.

Can I use Employment Hero for recruitment?

It includes an integrated applicant tracking system (ATS) for posting jobs and managing candidates. Businesses that want deeper assessment of culture and work-style fit typically add a specialised tool such as Compono Hire, which predicts how well a candidate will match the team before an offer is made.

What is the difference between an HR system of record and a workforce intelligence platform?

A system of record, like Employment Hero, stores essential data and manages transactions such as payroll and leave. A workforce intelligence platform, like Compono, focuses on the why behind the data, using personality and behavioural insight to improve hiring, engagement and team performance. They complement each other rather than compete.