What’s new at Employment Hero: Here’s our 2025 product recap

Employment Hero isn’t just a platform, it’s your ticket to an ever-evolving world of innovation. Every month, our teams are tinkering, testing and building to make employment easier, smarter and more valuable for every organisation in New Zealand.

In 2025, that commitment really kicked into gear. Our R&D engine has been running at full throttle, delivering over 200 product releases and enhancements. Each one turns your subscription into something even more powerful, helping you manage compliance, automate the boring stuff and keep your payroll humming along happily (because who doesn’t love a smooth pay run?).

Here’s a quick look at just a few of the updates we’ve rolled out this year, all designed to make your Employment Hero experience better, faster and a little more magical.

Where AI meets employee experience

Our team focused heavily on embedding artificial intelligence into our software and enhancing the employee interaction to transition from simple automation to a fully-personalised intelligent experience. See what’s new:

New Employee Benefits Dashboard

We released a new centralised dashboard for tracking benefits and perks in April. This ensures your team can easily access and utilise the full value of their total compensation package.

Peer Feedback for Development

As of January, we now empower employees to take more ownership of their growth by allowing them to request feedback directly from colleagues. This fosters continuous development and a more collaborative performance culture.

Intuitive Performance Reviews

We released an update to performance reviews in August, to offer improved two-way flexibility and new features for 9-box assessments. This offers greater visibility around performance and succession planning within the employee lifecycle.

Smarter Hiring Transition

In June we supercharged our recruitment to onboarding process, auto-populating candidate data (like phone numbers and addresses) into new employee profiles, saving significant manual effort.

Workflows that give you time back

We focused on eliminating manual friction across complex HR processes, giving you back valuable time.

Smarter Rostering

In January, we unveiled a new one-click save and publish process as well as a drag-and-drop shift edit workflow. Plus, you now have the ability to copy and paste shifts. Managers can now also see employee certification statuses and shift clashes directly when rostering, managing compliance and accuracy.

Streamlined Offer Management

We launched a streamlined Offer Management process in August meaning HR managers can send offers directly within the HR platform. Employers can easily create, manage, revise and rescind offers, providing a clear, interactive process for candidates.

Critical Workflow Enhancements

In June, we delivered key automation updates including the ability to set Blackout Periods for Leave Requests (preventing leave during critical times) and a toggle to restrict admin overrides in leave workflows for enhanced compliance.

New Custom Forms and Automation

With the release of our Custom Form templates and a New Employee ‘Forms’ page in August, your team can easily find and start forms without admin assistance.

Built for security and peace of mind

We put your business’s compliance and data security first, rolling out key updates in 2025 to keep you safe and ahead of every regulation.

Passwordless Security (Passkeys)

Passkeys for Payroll Web offers a simpler, more secure, passwordless login experience. Made available in August, this was backed by a new security layer that detects and verifies suspicious logins to protect your data.

Final Payments & Security Centralisation

As of June, you can include terminated employees in a pay run even if their profile was terminated outside of that run. We also centralised all your Payroll security settings into a new Payroll Security page for easy management.

Enhanced Financial and Statutory Reporting

In January, we introduced a new report type for the Stats NZ Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) and in April, a report providing oversight of your total workforce costs. We also delivered cleaner payroll data by ensuring only approved expenses now sync to payroll and adding a Payroll Integration Issues Dashboard to track sync errors.

Thank you for choosing Employment Hero – your partnership fuels the innovation that makes employment easier and more rewarding for everyone. You can read more about all our product developments in our monthly blogs from January to date:

• January 2025  
• February 2025  
• March 2025  
• April 2025  
• May 2025  
• June 2025  
• July 2025   
• August 2025 
• September 2025