How Mobsta built an entire people function supported by Employment Hero
4x
faster to generate and send contracts than the previous process
3 → 1
holiday management systems replaced and consolidated
2 hours
saved cross-checking leave records every month
Company
Mobsta
Industry
Marketing/Advertising
Employees
50
Location
United Kingdom
Favourite Features
About the business
Mobsta is a media and advertising technology company that helps brands and agencies find and reach the right audiences using smart data and digital advertising. The business has been running for 15 years and currently has around 50 employees.
Emma, Head of People and Culture, joined a year ago as Mobsta’s Head of People and Culture. Mobsta’s culture was already strong. Building the right processes to match it was next on the list.
The challenge
Before Employment Hero, Mobsta managed people processes much more manually using a mix of spreadsheets, calendars and paperwork. This set-up had served this scaling business well, but was reaching the limits of what it could support as the company grew.
“We had annual leave recorded in different places. In the finance system, in an Outlook calendar and in departmental and team spreadsheets. We knew there were better methods out there to simplify the process and bring consistency.”
Emma had implemented an HR system before, at a company that didn’t adopt one until it hit 150 people. At Mobsta, she moved quickly. 50 people was the right moment, while implementation was straightforward and processes were still easy to shape.
The solution
Emma shortlisted Employment Hero and Personio after running her requirements through ChatGPT. After demos of both, Employment Hero won on user experience, breadth of features and confidence in UK employment law expertise.
“Employment Hero seemed way more user friendly. It did everything I wanted it to do and I’ve never had an issue getting a support response when I’ve had a question.”
A few things have made the biggest difference since going live:
Contracts, four times faster with Doc Studio
Employment Hero’s built-in document template editor, Doc Studio, has transformed how quickly Mobsta can get a new starter’s contract out. Emma builds a template once, with variables that pull directly from the employee record, and the document populates itself automatically. It’s sent digitally, signed digitally, and stored against the employee’s profile.
“I’d say it’s four times quicker to set up contracts through Employment Hero than before. I’m not entering information somewhere and then re-entering it in a contract; the information’s already in the system and being pulled across.”
Leave management, all in one place
Leave is now booked, approved and visible to everyone in one system. Employees see their own balance, managers see who’s off across the company, and payroll pulls the data automatically.
“Employment Hero has saved us a huge amount of time and improved our accuracy. Our teams used to have to cross-check everything manually. Now, everyone just enters the information once.”
Smooth onboarding and offboarding
Checklists now live inside Employment Hero, with tasks assigned to the right person and tracked automatically.
“The checklists are a nice, simple way to keep track. Tasks are clearly allocated and it’s a nice feeling when you check each item off and it disappears from the list.”
HeroForce: global employment, made simple
Mobsta also uses HeroForce, Employment Hero’s global Employer of Record service, giving them the option to employ team members internationally without setting up a local legal entity of their own. Having previously used a standalone EOR provider elsewhere, Emma has found HeroForce a noticeably smoother experience given it sits directly inside the platform she already uses every day.
“HeroForce is very slick and intuitive. We simply pull data across within Employment Hero and input the salary and variables. The contract is generated with compliant policies associated with that country’s employment law.”
The ROI
- 4x faster contract generation and signing, with documents auto-populated and stored automatically.
- Hours saved every month across teams as leave data flows directly into payroll.
- Three systems replaced by one for leave management, giving employees a live view of their balance and managers a company-wide calendar.
- Onboarding and offboarding checklists moved off spreadsheets, with tasks auto-assigned and tracked in real time.
- International employment made simple through HeroForce, without needing local legal expertise or a separate platform.
Why it matters
Emma’s situation is a familiar one. A senior HR professional joining a business with limited prior infrastructure, building out the team capabilities while also handling the day-to-day. The appeal of Employment Hero is that everything, contracts, leave, onboarding, payroll data and now global employment, lives in one place, and each part works in a way that makes sense without needing a manual.
“It’s so quick and efficient. And when there’s a lean People team, that really matters.”
Jump into Employment OS.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, and it’s built for exactly this scenario. Emma joined Mobsta as their senior HR professional and Employment Hero gave her a single platform to manage contracts, onboarding, leave, performance and payroll data from day one. For sole HR professionals and small people teams, having everything in one place is the difference between spending time on admin and spending time on the work that actually matters.
HeroForce is Employment Hero’s Employer of Record (EOR) service, which allows businesses to employ people in other countries without setting up a local legal entity. Employment Hero handles local compliance, contracts and payroll in the destination country. Because it’s integrated directly into Employment Hero, existing employee records carry across. There’s no separate platform, no duplicate data entry and no need for your HR team to understand foreign employment law.
Yes. For small businesses that can’t afford to lose tenured employees with deep institutional knowledge, HeroForce removes what would otherwise be an insurmountable barrier to international employment.
For Mobsta, generating and sending employment contracts is four times faster than their previous process, which involved manually editing Word templates, coordinating signatures and filing documents separately. In Employment Hero, employee data already in the system populates the contract automatically. The document is sent digitally, signed digitally and stored against the employee’s record without any additional steps.
Employment Hero consolidates leave booking, approval, visibility and payroll reporting into a single system. Mobsta previously tracked holiday across separate places – their finance system, an Outlook calendar and team spreadsheets. Now employees book leave in one place, can see their live balance at any time, and managers have a single company-wide absence calendar. The data feeds directly into payroll, removing the manual cross-checking that previously took the finance team hours each month.
The best time to implement an HR system is before your headcount makes it overly complicated. Emma implemented Employment Hero at Mobsta when the business had around 50 people, deliberately, because she’d seen what happens when businesses wait until 150. Fewer people means less data to migrate, faster implementation, and habits that form around good processes from the start rather than having to undo bad ones later.
