What’s new at Employment Hero: Here’s our 2026 product recap

Employment moves fast, and in 2026 AI moved from answering questions to getting things done. Our teams have shipped 630+ Employment Hero product updates across the platform this year, so common tasks in HR, hiring, payroll and scheduling take fewer steps, and teams stay connected and secure.

Here’s a quick tour of the highlights available to customers in every region, all designed to make employment easier.

Hero AI: answers and actions in one place

Hero AI has grown from a tool that answers HR questions into an assistant that can also take action for you.

Take action in the chat

Managers can approve, reject or cancel leave directly from Hero AI, and employees can ask about personal and team details such as start dates, time zones and employment history. Hero AI now has a permanent place in the navigation bar, with role-based prompts and recent chats, and it can create leave requests. On mobile, it supports actions for leave, timesheets and unavailability.

Ask about more of your people data

Hero AI can now answer questions about 1:1s, company announcements, tasks and checklists, goals, 9-Box ratings, 360 feedback, feedback and recognition, learning progress, Happiness Survey results, performance reviews, employee profiles and HR documents, and disciplinary records. Answers respect your existing permissions. It can also apply your organisation’s Company Values when helping with feedback and development guidance.

Insights, reports and rostering

AI Insights now appear above charts across all 12 standard report groups, highlighting the trends, alerts and suggested actions that matter for your role. The Hero AI Report Builder turns a plain-language description into a pre-filled custom report, and you can edit reports by prompt, then accept or undo each change. Rostering tasks such as finding open shifts, requesting swaps and checking compliance can be handled through a conversation.

A full-screen workspace

Hero AI now has a full-screen workspace with room for generated reports and full conversation history. A live action timeline shows each step it takes in plain language, and @mentions, including whole teams, make sure it focuses on the right people. Hero AI is also available within the ATS, where it can explain candidate scores, summarise CVs and compare candidates side by side.

Recruitment Agent and hiring

Recruitment Agent kept growing through the year.

• AI Hiring Criteria lets hirers see and control how candidates are scored, including must-haves and nice-to-haves.
• AI Notetaker transcribes and summarises Google Meet and Microsoft Teams interviews and adds the notes to the candidate record.
• Free standalone Recruitment Agent lets hirers sign up, create a job and send AI interview invitations on their own.
• Automated AI video interviews can invite qualified candidates before a recruiter reviews their application.
• Recruitment Agent Hub is a chat-based starting point that helps build job ads, set hiring criteria and view salary and talent insights.

The ATS also gained skills and coding assessments, interview self-scheduling, reference check fraud detection, bulk CV upload (up to 1,000 at once), Talent Pool CSV import, automated candidate communications with HeroFlow and confidential jobs.

Chat and the EH Work app

Employment Hero Chat is here, with 1:1 and group chats, file sharing, real-time notifications and full web and mobile sync, so team conversations stay in one place. Since launch it has added public and private channels, voice notes, mobile search, dynamic audiences by group, location or work site, unread message reminders, colleague profiles that open without leaving the conversation and a Chat Engagement Report.

The EH Work app also received: – a streamlined Home dashboard – Forms with digital signatures and conditional logic – performance reviews on mobile – facial recognition clock-in for Hero Time Clock – timesheet attachments – a native mobile onboarding experience, now available across all regions

Workflows, people and performance

• Workflows: edit live workflows in a few clicks, trigger automations on certification expiry, personal detail changes and leave cancellations, preview workflow emails before publishing and check a run log for execution history and failures.
• Unified workforce: Volunteers are now a recognised worker type, and a unified People List shows employees, contractors and volunteers together.
• Performance: review cycles can be scheduled or set to recur, questions can be optional or restricted by role, 1:1s support collaborators and the 9-Box Talent Grid has been redesigned.
• Documents: Doc Studio, a unified document editor with smart clauses and multiple signatories, is available to all customers.
• Leave and scheduling: a Unified Team Calendar combines leave and public holidays, leave evidence requirements can be optional, recommended or mandatory, and managers can see sensitive leave details limited to their own team. Rostering gained calendar sync, operating hours, staffing indicators and the ability to create leave directly from a shift.
• Reporting and visibility: custom reports have been redesigned with a live preview and can include compensation cycle data, the Issues Summary Hub brings payroll, leave, timesheet and compliance issues into one view, and the What’s New Hub lists new releases in one place.

Security and trust

Your data’s safety always comes first. This year we added SAML single sign-on for Payroll (Okta, Microsoft Entra or Google Workspace), passkey sign-in for Payroll users on EH Work, mandatory two-factor authentication on password recovery, identity verification when changing an account email and automatic expiry of payroll self-setup links.

Thank you for choosing Employment Hero. Your partnership fuels the innovation that makes employment easier and more rewarding for everyone. For the full list of releases, visit the Help Centre in your platform.