Employment is a complex yet consequential function for UK small businesses. The right software can relieve that complexity. But there has been no way for business owners to go to the next level and eliminate the burden entirely – until now.
HeroForce fills a crucial gap in the UK’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 £75BN 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. The UK’s “complexity tax” – the cost of navigating an increasingly demanding legislative landscape – has led to significant operational and financial strain across businesses of all sizes. Employment Hero’s survey of 1,047 business owners and senior leaders found that 84% expect to make changes to manage the risks of upcoming legislation, while 78% agree it will have a financial impact on their business. In response, 30% say they may raise prices to absorb the additional cost burden, while 29% are reviewing salaries and benefits.
The pressure of managing compliance keeps employers up at night – and the numbers bear that out. UK SMEs collectively spend £36 billion and 379 million hours a year just dealing with red tape, according to the Federation of Small Businesses. Only one in ten say it is easy to resolve concerns with regulators. For the vast majority of small business owners, that burden lands squarely on their own desk.
HeroForce allows owners to offload the most difficult parts of employment and instead focus on the functions that are key to growth.
HeroForce Is The Power Grid For Employment
Many sectors have been disrupted in recent decades. Receiving online payments was a convoluted process until Stripe simplified it – collapsing what once required specialist teams and months of integration into something any business could set up in an afternoon. A critical function that demanded enormous overhead became something you could simply 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. 150 years’ 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.”
It has also become too expensive, many would argue. Kevin Fitzgerald, UK Managing Director at Employment Hero, said:
“The Employment Rights Act was designed to deliver more security for workers. But our data suggests it could have the opposite effect for a significant number of people. Businesses may rationally respond to added complexity by shifting toward contractor and temporary employment models, but that shift could come at a cost to workers who end up outside the system entirely. The conversation so far has focused on what the reforms mean for businesses. We think it’s time to ask what they mean for the people they were supposed to help.”
A New Concept Sees 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, pension auto-enrolment, 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 sits an intelligence layer called Hero AI. Rather than a generic language model, it’s an agentic system grounded in regulatory integrations and live government data. It’s designed to handle core employment workflows end-to-end – providing policy-aware HR guidance and streamlining hiring through capabilities like AI-powered candidate screening and interviews, through the Recruitment Agent, for example – while continuing to evolve how compliance and payroll processes are managed in real time.
Hero AI technology reviews more than 600,000 job applications monthly. It’s already transformed recruiting at Legal practice management platform, Smokeball, replacing traditional resume‑trawling with AI‑assisted candidate matching and screening, empowering managers to rank applicants against defined criteria and quickly identify top talent. This approach has given El Jannah consistent hiring workflows, enabled faster shortlisting and saved an estimated $500,000.
A New System But Same Rights For Workers
The most common question about this structure is what it means for employees. In the UK, the Employer of Record model operates within the framework of established employment law. Workers engaged through HeroForce retain full statutory rights – including protections under the Employment Rights Act, Working Time Regulations, and Equality Act 2010.
“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, National Insurance details, workplace pension 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 the millions of UK workers 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% of the working week often lost to admin, owners can reinvest in growth.
The relationship between compliance burden and employment structure is already playing out in the UK. According to Employment Hero’s March 2026 Jobs Report – based on data from 4,647 businesses and 125,932 employees – full-time employment across UK SMEs is up 14.6% year-on-year, while part-time and casual roles are contracting, falling 0.5% month-on-month. Rather than a straightforward hiring boom, this structural shift reflects rational cost management: faced with rising National Insurance contributions, a higher National Living Wage and the incoming Employment Rights Act obligations, flexible arrangements have become harder for SMEs to justify.
The result is a jobs market growing in a shape that increasingly locks out the workers who depend on flexible work most – older workers, parents, and carers. HeroForce provides the infrastructure to bridge this gap, offering a scalable path back to secure, sustainable 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.”
What HeroForce Manages
- Employer of Record: Acts as the legal employer to manage all liabilities.
- Employment law compliance: Automates compliance with UK employment obligations.
- Managed payroll: Handles end-to-end pay runs, PAYE, National Insurance and auto-enrolment pension contributions.
- AI recruitment: Automates candidate screening and matching via Hero AI.
- Global hiring: Employs talent in 180+ countries without local entities.
- Contract management: Issues and stores compliant employment documentation.
- Risk mitigation: Manages employment liability and regulatory reporting.
Find out how your business can remove complexity and make room for growth with HeroForce.
