Hello September! It’s a new month and we’re back with lots of new HR and payroll features to share with you. Grab yourself a cuppa and take in all of the new features designed to make your world at work easier.

In our August product wrap up, you’ll learn about updates to our applicant tracking system (ATS), details about our recently launched Benefits in the UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia, updates to our Australian payroll product and lots more. Let’s get to it!

Looking at all the awesome features we released in August…

A new suite of employee benefits in the UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia

We’re excited to announce that we’ve launched Benefits in the UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia! Now your team can access exclusive discounts from Headspace and Banana Life – offers that have been hand-picked to help take your team to the next level.

We’re so excited to build out our Benefits offering with many more exclusive offers, so watch this space for more.

To get started, simply visit ‘Benefits’ > ‘My Benefits‘.

New reports available in our ATS

We’re continually developing our ATS so we can deliver more and more features for you each month. To kick off, we’ve added new reports for recruiters and hiring managers to access. Now, you’ll be able to see Candidate Flow and Time to Hire reports within the ATS.

The Candidate Flow reporting feature allows you to create a report on the number of candidates at each stage of your recruitment hiring process. Learn more about the Candidate Flow report here.

The Time to Hire reporting feature allows you to create a report on how long it takes your organisation to fill a position. In this report, you can see details such as the open date, time to fill and time to hire. Learn more about the Time to Hire reporting feature here.

You can use these features to download a CSV file of the data, enabling you to load the report into a CSV-supported program like Microsoft Excel.

We’ve added pre-screening questionnaires in our ATS

There’s two main challenges every hiring manager faces – hiring the right person for the job and finding enough time in the day to make sure the right people are brought into the recruitment process. With our pre-screening questionnaires, we hope to reduce these two challenges, giving time back to focus on what matters most.

Now, hiring managers have the opportunity to present questionnaires to candidates that pre-screen them for specific reasons, such as the right to work and experience. This functionality assists hiring managers to streamline their recruitment process, saving time.

Bringing work eligibility criteria earlier into the Australian recruitment process

We all know that the talent market is tough right now, and hiring the right people for your business can seem overwhelming. To ensure you’re bringing the right candidates through the pipeline who are eligible to work, we’ve moved the VEVO check into the ‘find work’ phase.

This means that applicants will be able to stand out of the crowd by verifying their work eligibility pre-hiring, saving employers time and effort by focusing on candidates that are already work eligible.

Updates to our Australian payroll product

In Employment Hero Payroll, you’ll find new updates including a search function available on the ‘Employee Details’ page, improvements to pro rata of hours within the pay run and changes to leave accrual journal calculations.

The employee search option within the ‘Employee Details’ page allows Admins to easily navigate between different employees to compare the settings in place. Using the search option allows you to easily move between any of the pages found within one employee’s navigation menu to another. This feature eliminates the need to spend unnecessary time running reports to compare data, update data or going back and forth using the main left navigation menu to change employee views.

We’ve also made some changes to the system calculation of pro rata’d hours in order to more accurately reflect hours worked by the majority of employees, i.e. those that work Monday-Friday. You can find more information on improvements to pro rata of hours here.

You’ll also notice changes to leave accrual journal calculations. Instead of journaling accruing leave by calculating its value on the day it is accrued, the system will project leave taken forward from the end of the pay run and subtract the leave accrual projected from the previous pay run. You can find more information on changes to leave accrual journal calculations here.

A range of enhancements for our Talent Pool

We’ve introduced a range of updates to the Talent Pool feature.

In the Talent Pool, you now have the ability to add and edit candidates’ details directly from the Talent Pool screen. This will improve a hiring manager’s ability to access details.

You’ll also see a prompt for recruiters to add disqualified candidates to the Talent Pool. This enables you to keep candidate information for future consideration, helping to provide increased efficiency when recruiting for future roles. You can read more about this feature here.

We’ve added a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central integration for Singapore customers

Customers can now select which journal batch folder they would like to post journals to (this is done on the integration page modal window).

We’ve also updated how we report tax codes on expenses. You can now attach the GST/VAT prod posting group information to the journal line. Read more about the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central integration here.

AW cap and CPF enhancements for Singapore

As part of our continuing commitment in regards to CPF calculations, we have strengthened the way the AW cap is calculated. The system will now follow the below logic when calculating the AW cap:

• The cap will be estimated at the start of the year
• The cap will be estimated upon termination
• The cap will be estimated within a December pay run
• Users still have the option to manually recalculate CPF within the pay run

In addition to more robust system calculations, we have also added a new ‘date obtained approval’ for permanent residents who wish to pay the full CPF as opposed to the reduced amounts during their first 2 years of obtaining residency. This means that CPF will be pro-rata’d when an employee becomes a permanent resident.

For more information on this feature, visit our helpdesk here.

Follow along every month for the latest and greatest product updates

We want our customers to get the most out of our platform. Whether it’s HR, payroll or benefits, you can expect to find new updates here – all designed to make your world at work easier. If you’d like to stay up to date with all of our content, you can visit our resource hub or follow us on LinkedIn.