Managing the fast-moving talent behind marketing and advertising
Marketing and advertising agencies often manage fast-moving teams, shifting client demands and frequent hiring needs. Employment Hero helps streamline onboarding, payroll, leave and recordkeeping, reducing manual admin and giving your business clearer oversight as it scales.
What’s making it harder to scale your agency operations?
PAIN POINT #1
Manual admin keeps interrupting client delivery
In many agencies, internal admin gets handled around meetings, deadlines and campaign work, which means tasks like leave requests, contract updates, new starter setup and employee documentation are often more reactive than streamlined. As the team grows, that behind-the-scenes workload can start to eat into time that should be spent on clients, creative output and running the business.
✦ EMPLOYMENT HERO
Employment Hero helps take pressure off day-to-day admin by replacing manual tasks and scattered follow-up with guided workflows, easier approvals and more reliable employee records.
PAIN POINT #2
Fast hiring can lead to an inconsistent employee experience
Agencies often need to hire quickly to support new accounts, replace roles or build specialist capability, but when onboarding relies on ad hoc checklists and email follow-up, the experience can vary from one new starter to the next. That inconsistency makes it harder to set expectations early, complete key setup tasks properly and bring people into the business smoothly.
✦ EMPLOYMENT HERO
Employment Hero helps agencies create a more consistent start for every new hire with structured onboarding flows, automated task management and clear documentation, helping teams get people up to speed faster without relying on manual coordination.
PAIN POINT #3
It’s harder to make resourcing decisions when team data is scattered
When leave information, employee details and workforce updates sit across inboxes, spreadsheets and separate systems, it becomes harder for agency leaders to get a clear view of team availability and capacity. That lack of visibility can make resourcing decisions more difficult, especially when balancing campaign deadlines, client needs and a growing headcount.
✦ EMPLOYMENT HERO
Employment Hero gives agencies a clearer view of workforce information in one place, making it easier to track changes, manage availability and support better planning decisions as the business grows.
Ready to automate your agency admin? See how we help
Centralised digital profiles to manage rapid team changes instantly
Employment Hero centralises your agency’s documentation into a single cloud-based system. When promotions, role shifts or contract variations happen, the platform handles the update digitally, routes it for electronic signature and refreshes the employee’s live profile instantly. This keeps your compliance records perfectly accurate and easy to retrieve without manual file cross-checking.
Automated mobile onboarding for a polished first-day experience
Employment Hero automates your entire hiring sequence by pushing digital onboarding packs straight to a new hire’s phone. Creatives, strategists and account managers can complete their tax, bank and super declarations inside the app before day one. This data flows directly into your payroll database, ensuring every specialist role starts on a consistent footing without any admin chasing.
Smart recruitment tools to fill roles faster
Employment Hero speeds up your hiring process with a built-in applicant tracking system and smart sourcing tools. When new client accounts or campaigns ramp up, you can post job ads across multiple platforms in one click and use automated features to screen and shortlist applicants. This cuts out the manual hours spent sorting through portfolios and resumes, helping you land top creative and strategy talent ahead of your competition.
Built-in performance tools to drive talent retention and creative culture
Employment Hero builds a reliable rhythm for professional growth with automated performance tracking. The software schedules review cycles, locks in recurring 1:1 agendas and tracks individual goals alongside agency milestones. This keeps talent development on track behind the scenes, ensuring your people feel supported even during your busiest campaign cycles.
How one business took the admin out of their people operations
Brand Influence Group
Marketing and merchandising | 2,300+ employees in AU, 3,000+ in NZ | Australia and New Zealand
THE CHALLENGE
Brand Influence Group was managing a large, distributed workforce across Australia and New Zealand, with constant high-volume onboarding, complex rostering and heavy administrative demand on the HR team. Before Employment Hero, onboarding relied on spreadsheets, email chains and legacy systems, making it difficult to keep employee documentation accurate and up to date across platforms. Employment Hero helped simplify this by automating onboarding, centralising records, improving access to real-time HR data and giving employees self-service tools that reduced day-to-day admin pressure on the team.
“The employee self-service model is probably the most useful feature. Without it, we’d need six more people just to handle basic requests.”
— Leo Yuan, HR and Payroll Manager, Brand Influence Group
OUTCOMES
Reduced admin overhead across a high-volume workforce with employee self-service
Streamlined onboarding for thousands of casual and part-time staff across ANZ
Improved visibility into starters, leavers and turnover trends with real-time HR data
Staying on top of compliance in marketing and advertising
Marketing and advertising businesses often manage a mix of permanent employees, contractors and freelance talent while working across multiple clients, deadlines and cost centres. That creates its own compliance pressure, from payroll accuracy and employment classification to leave records, policy acknowledgements and contractor documentation. Employment Hero helps marketing and advertising teams maintain clearer records, more consistent workflows and stronger oversight across day-to-day employment obligations.
Award coverage
Support pay processes across varied role types
Agencies often employ a mix of coordinators, account staff, creatives, specialists and support roles, sometimes with different working patterns, salary structures or award considerations. When payroll inputs, employee classifications and pay-related records are handled across multiple systems, it becomes harder to maintain consistency and reduce administrative risk. Employment Hero helps connect payroll, employee records and workflow data in one platform, making it easier to support more accurate pay processes and stronger recordkeeping.
Super reform
Payday super: 1 July 2026
Super will need to be paid on every payday, not quarterly. Employment Hero’s payroll engine is being updated to calculate and remit super on each pay run, including for part-time, casual and shift-based clinical staff.
Timesheets and hours records
Maintain clearer records of hours worked across clients
In marketing and advertising, hours can be difficult to track consistently when employees work across campaigns, client accounts or fluctuating workloads. But recordkeeping requirements still apply, particularly where hours, overtime or other pay-related inputs need to be evidenced accurately. Employment Hero helps teams maintain more reliable time and attendance records, reducing reliance on spreadsheets and making it easier to align payroll records with what was actually worked.
Employment documentation
Contractor and freelancer documentation
Many agencies rely on freelance creatives, contractors and short-term specialists to stay flexible. But that flexibility can create inconsistency when documentation, onboarding steps and policy acknowledgements are managed informally. Employment Hero helps centralise contracts, records and acknowledgements in one place, supporting clearer documentation and stronger oversight across different workforce types.
Employment Hero works alongside the tools your agency already runs on
Wiise
Wiise connects with Employment Hero to give Australian businesses one operating core for finance, operations, and people, no juggling separate systems.
Xero
Payroll figures sync to Xero automatically after every pay run, no double entry, no manual reconciliation at period end.
MYOB
For businesses running MYOB, Employment Hero connects directly, keeping payroll and accounts aligned without additional admin.
QuickBooks Online
If you use QuickBooks, payroll data flows across automatically so your business’s finances stay current.
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Frequently asked questions
Pricing follows a per-employee-per-month model, so you only pay for the people you're actively managing on the platform. For agencies with a fluctuating mix of permanent staff, casuals and project-based contractors, you can talk to our team about how the model applies to your headcount as it scales up and down. Most agencies find the cost is quickly offset by the hours they save on onboarding, leave management and payroll each month.
The clearest return comes from reclaimed time and fewer errors. When you automate onboarding, leave approvals and payroll, your team spends less time on admin and more on billable client work. We can help you map your current admin hours against expected savings, giving you concrete numbers to bring to your leadership team before you commit.
Yes. You can structure teams, departments and reporting lines to reflect how your agency actually works, including staff who sit across multiple accounts or client groups. Managers get visibility over their people without needing access to the whole business, which keeps things clean as projects and teams shift.
Most agencies we work with were running separate systems for HR, payroll, onboarding and leave, often alongside spreadsheets. Bringing these into one platform removes double handling and the cost of several subscriptions. The value sits in consolidation: less manual data entry, fewer mistakes and clearer visibility across your whole team.
It does. Your team accesses everything through a web dashboard or mobile app, so whether they're in the studio, at a client site or working from home, they can submit leave, view payslips, complete onboarding and update their details. There's no need to be at a desk, which suits the flexible way most agencies operate.
Yes. You can manage different employment types in one place, with the right pay rules, leave entitlements and onboarding flows for each. This is useful when you bring on freelancers for a campaign or scale casual support during busy periods.
Focus on delivering great campaigns. We’ll handle the employment side
Employment Hero gives marketing and advertising teams a simpler way to manage the people side of the business, bringing onboarding, payroll, admin and compliance into one place so your team can stay focused on clients.