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

HR has never had a longer to-do list. Compliance rules keep moving, hiring volumes are climbing, teams are spread across sites, shifts and time zones, and leaders want better people data on demand. For most small and mid-sized businesses, all of that lands on one or two people.

UK employers felt it this year. New Employment Rights Act obligations reshaped how many businesses think about hiring, on top of the ever-present duties around right to work, statutory pay and pension auto-enrolment. The teams coping best have stopped treating HR as a long series of manual tasks. They let software and AI carry the routine work so people can focus on the human side of the job.

That’s the thinking behind everything we built.  Our teams have shipped 630+ Employment Hero product updates so far in 2026, and AI has moved from answering questions to getting things done.

Here’s a quick tour of the highlights, all designed to make employment easier.

Hero AI: from assistant to actor

Hero AI started the year answering HR questions. It now gets things done.

Take action, right in the chat

In January, managers could approve, reject or cancel leave straight from Hero AI, and anyone could ask about personal and team details like start dates, time zones and employment history. By April, Hero AI had a permanent home in the navigation bar, role-based prompts, recent chats and the ability to create leave requests. It also arrived on mobile with actions for leave, timesheets and unavailability, and it’s now in global search.

Ask about almost anything

We’ve taught Hero AI to 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. It also understands your Company Values when helping with feedback and development guidance.

Insights, reports and rostering

AI Insights now sit above charts across all 12 standard report groups, surfacing the trends, alerts and actions that matter for your role. The Hero AI Report Builder turns a plain-English description into a pre-filled custom report, and you can edit it by prompt, then accept or undo the change. Conversational Rostering handles open shifts, swaps and compliance checks through chat.

A full-screen workspace you can trust

Hero AI grew from a side panel into a full-screen workspace with room for generated reports and full conversation history. A live action timeline shows every step it takes in plain language, and @mentions (now including whole teams) make sure it always knows who you mean. It’s in the ATS too, explaining candidate scores, summarising CVs and comparing candidates side by side.

Built for UK compliance

• Zinc background checks are now ordered directly in Employment Hero (May), with nine check types from an employee file or candidate profile. In July we added director-level checks (Directorship, Adverse Media and PEP), and in October the same 12 checks became available for contractors and volunteers to support right-to-work obligations.
• The UK Compliance Pack (April) consolidates Zinc reports, automates passport and visa expiry notifications and adds policy owners with automated review cycles.
• Mandatory policies and induction can be required as part of onboarding before an employee completes it.
• Disciplinary reporting gives admins one sortable, exportable view of all cases, with new permissions for who can see them.
• Bradford Factor in custom reports lets you combine absence data with any employee data.
• Leave accuracy: time-based partial-day leave, a block on overlapping leave across different types, declined leave synced to payroll, occupational sick leave that correctly uses the Continuous Start Date for TUPE-transferred staff, and a Return to Work minimum duration (1 to 7 days).
• TOIL upgrades let you choose which days TOIL accrues and set automatic expiry.
• Payroll: court order payments now process through the Telleroo integration in the pay run, default mileage rates were updated to the latest HMRC-approved rate, and managers and HR can be granted access to P45s, P60s and auto-enrolment letters.
• Gender Pay Equity widget in the Company Salary Overview report shows average pay benchmark gaps by job title.
• Kota Medical Insurance benefits can be set up automatically for Kota-connected organisations.
• Volunteers are now a distinct worker type, with payroll permanently excluded, and Hero Points are available across the UK.

Recruitment Agent: hiring on autopilot

Recruitment Agent had a huge year, and it’s working while you sleep.

• AI Hiring Criteria (April) lets hirers see and control how candidates are scored, including must-haves versus nice-to-haves.
• The AI Notetaker (June) transcribes and summarises Google Meet and Microsoft Teams interviews and delivers the notes to the candidate record.
• A free standalone Recruitment Agent (July) lets anyone sign up, create a job and send AI interview invitations with no sales call.
• Automated free AI video interviews (August) invite qualified candidates before a recruiter even opens their application.
• The new Recruitment Agent Hub (September) is a chat-based home base that builds job ads, sets criteria and surfaces salary and talent insights.

Around the agent, the ATS got Criteria Corp and Codility assessments, interview self-scheduling, reference check fraud detection, bulk CV upload (now up to 1,000 at once), Talent Pool CSV import and automated candidate communications with HeroFlow. UK hirers can order Zinc background checks without leaving the platform (more below).

“Being able to actually screen every single person without even needing to speak to someone, and get AI to ask the exact questions you wanted to ask, is a game changer. An absolute game changer for the whole entire hiring process.” – Gemma Lang, Practice Manager, Ready Health

Chat and the EH Work app

Our biggest launch for frontline and shift-based teams: Employment Hero Chat went live for clients in April, with 1:1 and group chats, file sharing, real-time notifications and full web and mobile sync, so important conversations can leave the WhatsApp groups.

Since then, Chat has gained public and private channels, voice notes, mobile search, dynamic audiences by group, location or work site, unread reminders, profiles that open without leaving the conversation and a Chat Engagement Report.

The EH Work app also got a streamlined Home dashboard (March), Forms with digital signatures and conditional logic, performance reviews on mobile, facial recognition clock-in for Hero Time Clock and timesheet attachments. Native mobile onboarding is now live in the UK, replacing the old web-based flow.

“I had to update our annual leave calendar and spreadsheet manually, send all invites, reminders and remaining balance calculations. It was exhausting. With Employment Hero, it’s all automated, saving me so much time.” – Ewa Mika, Workforce & HR Manager, Bailey & Jones

Doc Studio: one editor for every HR document

Contracts, offer letters, policies and letters of variation used to mean choosing between two editors and re-keying the same details every time. Doc Studio is now the single, modern editor for every HR document in Employment Hero, and in August it went live for all customers.

• One unified editor replaces the legacy Basic (PDF) and Advanced editors, so there’s no guessing which tool to use.
• Searchable variable library helps you find the right merge field in seconds.
• Smart clauses add or remove sections automatically based on employee details.
• Multiple signatories support internal approval (up to three signatories) before a document goes out, and recipient-only signatures cover documents that only the employee needs to sign.
• Rich media lets you add logos, photos and images straight into templates.
• Standalone documents let HR admins and managers write and send a one-off document from an employee’s profile, with no template required, on eligible plans.
• Policy templates are now available to more plans, so you can build reusable policies in the same editor.

Workflows, HR and compliance

• Workflows: edit live workflows in three clicks, trigger automations on certification expiry, personal detail changes and leave cancellations, preview workflow emails and monitor runs with the new run log.
• Unified workforce: add Volunteers as a recognised worker type, see employees, contractors and volunteers in one People List, and convert between worker types without losing history.
• Performance: scheduled and recurring review cycles, optional and role-restricted questions, 1:1 collaborators and a redesigned 9-Box Talent Grid.
• Leave: a Unified Team Calendar, sensitive leave privacy so managers can see only what they need, and tiered leave evidence requirements.
• Admin visibility: the Issues Summary Hub pulls payroll, leave, timesheet and compliance issues into one view, and the What’s New Hub shows what’s shipped and what’s coming.
• Security: SAML SSO for Payroll (Okta, Microsoft Entra or Google Workspace), passkeys for Payroll users on EH Work, mandatory 2FA on password recovery, identity verification for email changes and expiring 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, follow along in the Release notes.