Ship product. Let HR run itself.
Product companies grow in bursts: ten engineers in a quarter, a second entity for the US customers, a hybrid policy nobody wrote down. ZekoHR gives the people side the same discipline you give the codebase, free for a year.
Up to 50 employees free for 12 months. No card, no sales call.
What breaks between seed and Series B
Hiring outruns the process
Interviews happen on calendar invites, feedback lands in chat, and the offer letter is last quarter's file with a new name. ZekoHR's Recruitment module gives you a Kanban pipeline, scorecards the panel fills in before the debrief, and offers with approvals.
Hybrid leave is a group chat
Who is remote, who is on leave and who is at the offsite lives in three different threads. Leave types, holiday calendars and a team calendar sit on one record, and managers approve from the request itself.
Payroll grew up in a spreadsheet
Salary structures with variable pay, reimbursements and the odd arrears line are fine at 15 people and dangerous at 60. Payroll runs with pre-flight checks, effective-dated salaries and published PDF payslips.
Built like the tools you already use
One record per person feeds leave, payroll, documents and the feed. Roles are enforced per permission. Your subdomain, your brand colour, light and dark mode. Nothing to install on anyone's laptop.
- Structured hiring: pipeline, scorecards, offers, pre-joining, referrals
- Leave and hybrid-friendly holiday calendars per company
- Payroll with pre-flight checks, salary structures and TDS declarations
- Social feed with kudos tied to your values, polls and celebrations
Illustration of a hiring pipeline board with stages and scorecards.
A typical first quarter on ZekoHR
Week one: invite the team
Import people from a CSV or invite them one by one. Departments, designations, leave types and the Indian holiday list are pre-seeded; rename what you like.
Month one: move hiring in
Open the roles you are already filling, set your stages, add the panel. Candidates hear from you at every step and feedback is in before the debrief.
Month three: run payroll in-house
Assign salary structures, collect TDS declarations, run the first draft with pre-flight checks, and publish payslips to every portal.
When ZekoHR is not the right choice
You need performance reviews inside the HRMS
ZekoHR has no performance management module today: no goals, review cycles or 360 feedback. Keep your current tool for that, or use the 1:1 notes and letters for the record.
You want HR data piped into internal tools now
The product is API-first in design, but self-serve API keys and a webhook console are not shipped yet. If that is a day-one requirement, say so before you commit.
You run payroll outside India
Payroll, tax declarations and payslips are built for Indian entities. A US or UK subsidiary can keep its records here, but its payroll runs elsewhere.
Before you decide
Common questions
Can we run the Indian entity and a US subsidiary together?
Both can live under one org with separate companies, holidays and policies. Indian payroll runs here; the US entity keeps its records and runs payroll in a US tool.
Does ZekoHR handle ESOPs?
No. Salary structures handle fixed and variable pay, reimbursements and one-off lines; ESOP grants and vesting belong in a cap-table tool. Keep the grant letter on the employee record so it is not lost.
Can engineers approve leave from their phone?
Yes. The portal is mobile-first and runs in the phone browser at your subdomain, with nothing to install. Approvals show the balance on the request itself.
How does onboarding a remote hire work?
An onboarding checklist per hire with document requests, a policy acknowledgement trail and an asset record for the laptop, all visible to HR as it fills up.