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For founders

You don't have an HR team.
Hire right anyway.

Compono is an applicant tracking system (ATS) and culture platform for founders making their first twenty to fifty hires themselves. It does the posting and the pipeline any hiring tool does, and finds fit, so you have evidence before the offer and a culture you chose rather than inherited. If compliance is the only problem, a payroll-first platform will do.

Talk to usSee how Hire works 
Compono Hire · Candidate match
Senior account manager25 candidates
AOA. OkaforAccount manager88%Strong fit
Culture FitHigh · The organisation91
Job FitHigh · The role86
Work Personality FitHigh · The team90
Skills and qualsMedium · The CV74
AOA. OkaforWork personality1 of 8Campaigner
Campaigner

Same type as five of the client’s top performers in this role. Two-sided, so the blind spots come with it.

Evidence before the offer

4 to 70 staff in two years, across more than 50 markets

Read the story 

Culture built deliberately, in the words of its Chairman and CEO

Hundreds of applications ranked instead of read one by one

4.8 out of 5 on CapterraISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified

How it shows up for founders

A founder and her first hire talking at a shared desk in a small start-up workspace

Hiring is your job now, on top of your job

You write the ad, you read every application, you run every interview, and you make the call with nothing to check it against. The roles that matter most are the ones that stay open, because the work only moves when you have a spare evening.

32% of small and medium businesses say it is now harder to find the right person for the business than it was a year ago.

Source: SEEK Hirer Survey, February 2026

The first senior hire is the one you can least afford to get wrong

You hire someone to run a function you have been running yourself. The interview tests whether you like them and whether they have done the job elsewhere. Neither question tells you how they will work with the eight people already here.

Turnover can reach 50% in the first 18 months of employment, and replacing someone costs six to nine months of their salary.

Source: Gallup, citing SHRM, on onboarding and retention

Your first ten people are setting the culture

How the company argues and how it decides is being written now, by whoever you hired first, whether or not anyone writes it down. By the time it reads as a problem it is a habit, and it is defended by the people who set it.

Across more than 150 start-ups tracked since 1994, companies that later changed the founder's model for employee relations were three times more likely to fail.

Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Project on Emerging Companies

No record when the first people lead arrives

Every hiring decision you made lives in your inbox and a spreadsheet of names. The person you hire to take it over starts from nothing, so the first thing they do is rebuild what you already knew.

Employee records have to be kept for seven years, in English, and produced for a Fair Work Inspector on request. The reasoning behind each hire is not in them.

Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, record-keeping and pay slips

Everything a good system tracks.
And what only Compono finds.

Compono Hire

An applicant tracking system (ATS) one person runs

  • Like any ATSJob-board posting, applications and one ranked pipeline
  • And what only Compono findsFit against the job, the team and the company you are building

Hire brings the applications out of your inbox and into one pipeline, which is the applicant tracking system job. Every applicant is then scored against the job, the team and the company you are building, and ranked on that. You read four people properly instead of forty badly, and you can show a co-founder why the shortlist is the shortlist.

See how Compono Hire works 

Compono Engage

An employee engagement platform that finds the culture you are creating

  • Like any engagement platformA survey, an engagement score and a response rate
  • And what only Compono findsThe culture you are creating, before it hardens

Engage runs the survey and gives you the engagement score, the same as any tool in the category. Nothing else in a startup stack records culture, so it goes unnoticed until it is a problem. Engage measures it across 12 dimensions, current against desired, with the work personalities already in the room. At twelve people that is one afternoon of work.

See how Compono Engage works 

Compono takes away the heavy lifting early in the recruitment stage.

Paul Gloster, Chief Marketing Officer, Lyre's

4 to 70 staff in two years, across more than 50 markets

Read the Lyre's story 

Hire runs the pipeline and finds fit

Wherever you operate

Written for a founder in Adelaide or Auckland, and it works the same way once you hire your first person in London or Singapore.

What it isAustralia and New ZealandEverywhere else
Where your data sitsBuilt and hosted in Australia and New ZealandData is hosted in Australia and New Zealand wherever your team sits
Where your roles goSEEK and the major Australian and New Zealand job boards, from HireThe same posting flow covers the boards used in the market you are hiring into
Security an enterprise customer will ask aboutISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifiedBoth are international standards, so the certificates travel with you
Tickets and certificatesA White Card (the Australian construction induction card) or a first-aid certificate recorded as a competency with its expiry dateA CSCS card in the United Kingdom or a state licence in the United States recorded the same way

What it costs

For a team under 100, one product is circa $5.5k to $6.5k AUD a year, and a second product comes down by about 30%.

Under 50 people, the Ambitious 50 offer is six months free on the platform with a $1,000 onboarding fee, no lock-in and no auto-charge.

See the Ambitious 50 offer 

See pricing by size band 

One platform, one engine.

Hire, Engage, Develop and Assure run on one validated behavioural science engine, so what you learn about a candidate in Hire is the same read you get on the team in Engage. You start with Hire, and whatever you add later already knows your people. People decisions backed by behavioural science and AI.

See how the platform works 

Compono Hire

A. Okafor, senior account manager

Culture Fit91%
Job Fit86%

88% overall fit

Compono Engage

Delivery team, 16 of 16 responded

InnovativeRisk Averse
ResponsivePlanned
CurrentDesired2 of 12 shown

3 of 12 dimensions misaligned

Compono Develop

Site supervisor, 42 people in the role

Safety leadership88%
Coaching others44%

68% capability held

Compono Assure

Working at heights, 38 people hold it

Verified competency recordCurrent

Renewal due 14 Mar 2028

Four products, one behavioural science engine.

Common questions

Yes. Compono Hire is a full applicant tracking system: job ads, a careers page, every application in one pipeline, and a ranked shortlist. There is no administrator role to fill and no consultant to hire. Founders run it themselves until there is someone whose job it is to run it.

Days, not months. You describe the role, the assessment and ranking are already built, and your own team becomes the benchmark you compare candidates against. Most founders have their first job live in the first week and a shortlist ranked in the second.

The opposite, in the part that eats your time. The assessment happens up front, so instead of reading every application you open a ranked list with the reasoning attached. The interviews you do run are shorter, because you already know what to probe.

A payroll-first tool tracks the application: received, screened, interviewed, hired. That is useful and Compono does it too. What it cannot tell you is whether the person fits the role, the team and the culture, which is the decision you are actually making. Compono reads that and shows you the evidence.

You can keep running whatever interview and reference process you trust, and Compono sits underneath it with the behavioural and culture read. Most founders drop a paid personality test once they see the same signal arrive inside the hiring flow at no extra step.

For a team under 100, one product is circa $5.5k to $6.5k AUD a year. Under 50 people, the Ambitious 50 offer is six months free on the platform with a $1,000 onboarding fee, no lock-in and no auto-charge. The bands are published on the pricing page.

Usually somewhere between 30 and 50 staff, which is when hiring stops fitting around your week. The handover is the part founders underrate: your first people lead inherits every role profile and culture read already in the system, instead of starting from your memory.

Compono is built and hosted in Australia and New Zealand, and data is hosted there wherever your team sits. It works the same way for your first hire in Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States or anywhere else you land, because the assessments and the culture read are not country-specific. Job boards differ by market, so we confirm yours first.

Talk to us about your next five hires.

Tell us the roles you are about to open and the people already around you. We will show you what Hire does with a pipeline like yours, and say so if a payroll platform is what you actually need first.

Rudy Crous, Compono's CEO, speaking on stage at a Compono event in Sydney

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