Employment is perhaps the most complex yet consequential function for New Zealand small businesses. The right software can relieve that complexity. But for business owners wanting to go further – and eliminate the burden entirely – there has been no next step. Until now.
HeroForce fills a crucial gap in New Zealand’s labour landscape. Employment Hero likens it to the power grid for employment – plug in and get recruitment, payroll, compliance, onboarding and HR as an integrated managed system. It’s built on a foundation of $140B+ in payroll processed annually to over 350,000 businesses globally, decades of regulatory experience and a real-time compliance engine. It rewrites the relationship between a business and its people and turns employment – an SME’s biggest operational risk – into something that runs in the background, like electricity.
All small and medium business owners understand the drag of red tape on their operations. Kiwi SMEs navigate industry-specific collective agreements, KiwiSaver employer contribution obligations, ACC levies and health and safety requirements, plus the Holidays Act – regarded as one of the most complex pieces of legislation in the developed world. Employment Hero estimates the duplication of employment admin costs businesses $12B a year.
The pressure of managing compliance keeps employers up at night. Fewer than 10 per cent of SMEs with <50 employees have a dedicated HR function, even though they make up 96 per cent of businesses, so the owner is generally forced to wear the HR hat.
HeroForce allows owners to offload the most stressful parts of employment and instead focus on the functions that are key to growth.
HeroForce: The Power Grid for Employment
Many sectors have been disrupted in recent decades. Receiving online payments was a convoluted process until Stripe simplified it with seven lines of computer code. Twilio likewise revolutionised telecommunications. In each case, a critical business function that demanded specialist teams and enormous overhead became something you could plug in and build on.
But business owners hoping a white knight would rescue employment management have been left disappointed. If anything, the field has become even more difficult to navigate, particularly for SMEs. More than a century’s worth of regulation, social policy and reforms have been layered together, yet every employer tackles that complexity alone, solving the same compliance problems from scratch.
“Most businesses aren’t failing at compliance because they’re careless or dishonest. They’re struggling because individual employers are trying to solve an extremely specialised regulatory problem while also running the business,” says Ben Thompson, CEO and Co-Founder of Employment Hero. “The system has become too complex to manage manually.”
Employment Hero General Manager for NZ Neil Webster hears the frustration of SME owners first-hand. “Running a business in New Zealand increasingly means becoming an expert in payroll, HR, the Holidays Act and KiwiSaver,” Mr Webster says. “HeroForce is about letting employers get back to running their business and doing what they love, instead of poring over employment legislation, which will ultimately benefit Kiwi workers as well as businesses.”
Introducing Employment, Done For You
The HeroForce model is straightforward. It works by effectively splitting employment management into two parts: the paperwork and the people. Employment Hero takes over the paperwork. It becomes the legal Employer of Record for a business, taking on payroll, award compliance, superannuation, contracts and all regulatory obligations. The business retains full control over the people: the daily direction of tasks, culture and performance. The admin burden disappears. The value of the employees does not. This structure reduces administrative load, ensures accurate and timely pay, and enables teams to scale without establishing new entities.
“Employment essentially becomes a background utility, and the SME can scale headcount across borders without ever needing to scale its back-office,” Thompson says.
Within HeroForce is an intelligence layer called HeroAI. HeroAI is not a generic language model; it is an agentic system underpinned by regulatory integrations and live government data. It operates with two live agents: the HR Agent, which provides policy-aware guidance; and the Recruitment Agent, which handles candidate screening and AI-conducted interviews. A third, the Payroll Agent, is in development to automate real-time compliance monitoring. It has already transformed recruiting at Thermosash, one of New Zealand’s largest specialists in the design, manufacture and installation of curtain wall systems and glass façades. “It used to take us a week to process and screen a single applicant. Now we can review 10 candidates in under 20 minutes,” says recruitment leader Craig Gillett. “By condensing scheduling, interviewing and note-taking into one workflow, I can make quality assessments in under 30 seconds, freeing up more time to focus on quality shortlisting, face-to-face interviews, candidate assessment and final selection.”
A New System But Same Rights For Workers
The most common question about this structure is what it means for employees. In New Zealand, the Employer of Record model is expressly recognised under the Employment Relations Act 2000 and relevant triangular employment guidance.
“Workers covered by HeroForce retain the full suite of rights they would hold under direct employment, including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining,” says Thompson.
HeroForce also creates mobility for employees that didn’t previously exist. It makes employment portable. A worker’s verified credentials, tax file details, super fund and skills profile travel with them through the network, making shifting between HeroForce employers as frictionless as an existing employee picking up an extra shift”
For New Zealanders who work multiple jobs, or want to, this is a material improvement in their working lives,” Thompson says.
Historically, working for a small business meant a trade-off: the intimacy of a small team, but none of the administrative safety net a large employer provides. HeroForce ends that trade-off. It handles the parts of employment that shouldn’t have been human judgment calls in the first place.
When Employment Works, Everyone Benefits
Any assumption that reducing administrative friction would eliminate jobs misunderstands economic capacity. Following the Jevons paradox, when technology reduces the cost of a productive activity—in this case, employment—the volume of that activity tends to increase. International evidence from the US shows businesses using this model grow at twice the rate of comparable firms. By reclaiming the 40 per cent of the working week often lost to admin, owners can reinvest in growth.
Currently, in the labour market, casualisation is growing at 18.3 per cent annually – dwarfing the 1.1 per cent growth in full-time jobs and 5.6 per cent in part-time roles – as employers opt for flexibility over the risk of direct management. HeroForce provides the infrastructure to bridge this gap, offering a scalable path back to secure, permanent employment.
“It fundamentally changes the economics of employment administration,” Thompson says. “By removing the friction that prevents employment, employment becomes cheaper and simpler and, as decades of historical evidence tell us, businesses will employ more people to build more, serve more, expand into new areas. Every hour reclaimed from repetitive administration is an hour redirected to work that actually grows economies.”
- Employer of Record: Acts as the legal employer to manage all liabilities.
- Holidays Act and Legislative Compliance: Automates calculations for New Zealand leave entitlements and employment laws
- Managed payroll: Handles end-to-end pay runs, KiwiSaver, and PAYE/IRD filing
- AI recruitment: Automates candidate screening and matching via HeroAI.
- Global hiring: Employs talent in 180+ countries without local entities.
- Contract management: Issues and stores compliant employment documentation.
- Risk mitigation: Manages ACC reporting and regulatory compliance.
Find out how your business can remove complexity and make room for growth with HeroForce.
