How Employment Hero helped this outdoor brand group fill an urgent role in 5 days

About Compendium

Compendium is the quietly-not-so-quiet powerhouse behind some of the most loved outdoor and active lifestyle brands across Australasia, the US and Europe. Think Hydro Flask for your desk-to-dunes hydration, Allbirds for cloud-like commutes, and Cotopaxi for colour-pop to your outdoor adventures. The team runs wholesale, eCommerce and marketplace channels, with boots on the ground in ANZ to keep every brand singing in tune.

Growth is delightful… and messy. New brands, new markets, a brand-new retail arm. When People Lead Rachel Ah Koy arrived as employee number eight, HR lived in Word docs and Google Drive folders. 

Fast forward to today, the employee count is 46. What happened in between?

Every PDF and email thread, now in one system

Before Employment Hero, Compendium’s HR looked like many small-but-scaling ops: JDs in Word, CVs hiding in inboxes, contracts were PDFs sitting somewhere in the drive. It worked, until it didn’t. Retail was launching, headcount was climbing, and the old way simply couldn’t stretch any further.

“There’s just no way we would have been able to do that without a system like Employment Hero,” Rachel says, looking back on this moment.

Recruit like a team of ten (even if you’re a team of one)

Rachel knows recruitment should be a team sport, with everything happening on the same field. 

With Employment Hero’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), it finally felt like one. Roles spin up from refined job templates with built-in screening questions, and roles publish straight to SEEK, LinkedIn, or the Employment Hero job board. Templated emails fire at each step to keep candidates warm and comms tidy.

Instead of being dragged into email chains, hiring managers are invited into the workflow. With clear stages – Initial Screen, In Review, Phone Screen, Interview, Background Check, Offer – they are given instant visibility and agency in the process.

“The ATS is so helpful,” Rachel says. “I add hiring managers and they can instantly see our notes and where each candidate sits in the process.”

In a cross-border business, a single source of truth isn’t just efficient, it’s sanity-saving.

A hire in one week

Retail hiring moves fast and SmartMatch, Employment Hero’s AI recruitment feature, keeps pace. When store demand spikes, Rachel turns to SmartMatch and sends shortlisted candidates straight to the store manager.

She shares a time they filled the role a week after posting. 

The role went live on Monday; an application came through that evening; phone screen on Wednesday; interviews on Thursday morning; reference checks completed Thursday afternoon; contract sent and signed on Friday; the new hire starting the following Monday. Five business days, across countries, with every box ticked.

“There’s no way we could’ve completed that end to end without the system,” Rachel says. “It shows what’s possible when the platform does the heavy lifting and people focus on high-value thinking.”

“We didn’t skip a step – reference checks and everything were captured and documented in the system. Doing all of that in five days is just incredible.”

Contracts and onboarding without the paper chase

Offer accepted? No switching between systems. Rachel moves straight from ATS to onboarding in the same platform. Contracts generate from templates she’s built for multiple entities and jurisdictions, then go out for e-signing.

“They get an email from Employment Hero to sign their contract and then finalise all their onboarding – it’s all in one place,” she explains.

From there, onboarding checklists kick in automatically: IT gets the nudge for laptops, managers get their to-dos, and new starters complete forms and policy acknowledgements online. Everything is recorded as it happens.

Performance and pulse, built in

The work doesn’t end on day one. With Employment Hero, Compendium now runs performance reviews and regular happiness surveys: two people cadences the business hadn’t formalised before. As headcount grows, leaders have a clear, timely pulse on team performance and engagement, and can act fast.

Want to experience Employment Hero for yourself?

Rachel can’t pin down the exact hours saved.

“We didn’t have a system before Employment Hero so there’s no ‘before’ baseline, but the time and energy we’ve saved have been ridiculous.”

Compendium’s journey will feel familiar to ambitious HR leaders: shifting from manual to modern as growth hits… and making it stick.

With Employment Hero, a one-person HR team delivered collaborative hiring, fast and compliant onboarding, and a solid foundation for performance and engagement, across three countries and multiple business models.Ready to level up recruitment like Compendium? Book a demo with our business specialists today.