HR compliance: the easiest part of everyone’s job.
Only joking!
We all know HR compliance is really important: it makes sure your employees trust you, helps you avoid fines and penalties, and builds up organisational resilience.
But, as Spiderman was once warned, with great power comes great responsibility – and that can feel pretty daunting. Particularly if you’re an HR generalist, feel rusty on your HR compliance training, or working without a dedicated compliance manager on your side.
Enter: this blog post. We’re going to simplify the essentials of HR compliance – what it is, the costs of getting it wrong, the most common challenges, and how you can keep on top of them – so you can stay focussed on the people part of your role.
After all, HR compliance is so much more than just a box-ticking exercise. But you’ve also got plenty of other things to be getting on with, right?
Right. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
What is HR compliance?
Let’s start simple: what is compliance in human resources?
In a nutshell, it means making sure your people practices - from hiring to exits, and everything in between - follow the rules and regulations that protect employees and businesses alike.
Keep on top of compliance, and you’re creating a fair, safe, and transparent workplace that meets both legal requirements and human needs.
HR compliance can look like:
- Verifying a new team member’s right to work
- Handling a flexible working request in a way that’s fair, documented, and in line with employment law
- Choosing which data to collect in a background check, and storing it properly
Simple. Next up, what are the costs of getting HR compliance wrong?
The costs of getting HR compliance wrong
HR compliance protects your business from legal issues, reputational damage, and penalties or disputes. It makes sure your workforce trusts you – and keeps activities consistent, too. The risks of non-compliance can be:
- Financial: penalties and tribunal costs can quickly reach eye-watering sums
- Legal: tribunal claims and data protection breaches under GDPR can have a serious financial and operational impact
- Reputational: if your employees, candidates, and the public have a negative perception of your business, you’ll struggle to retain, hire, and even generate new business
- Employee-related: employees might experience low morale – which leads to higher turnover and even potential action against you
- Operational: if everyone’s following a different process, you’re not being as efficient as you could be
Real-life examples of the impact of non-compliance
Want to know what these repercussions look like in real life? We’ve got you.
Take The Imperium Trust Company. It was recently fined a whopping £19,529 for breaching regulations under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
The reasons for this breach? Failing to carry out risk assessments, set up correct policies, controls, and procedures, set up training, conduct due diligence, or provide registration information. Ouch.
Here’s another example. The Pembrokeshire Mortgage Centre received a £2.4 million fine for giving unsuitable advice to clients to transfer out of defined benefit pension schemes. Simply put, this is a failure to treat customers fairly or manage conflicts of interest. Here, we can see the business didn’t comply with FCA conduct rules, and the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR), which holds key leaders accountable for conduct and compliance.
Now, while we’d hope you aren’t deliberately misleading clients, it can be easy to have something slip through the net – particularly when staying compliant comes with its own set of challenges.
5 common HR compliance challenges
So, why exactly is it so easy for businesses to slip up when it comes to compliance?
Generally speaking, HR compliance challenges tend to fall under 5 common areas:
1. Keeping up with legislation
Staying up-to-date with changing laws, including employment law and data privacy, is pretty much a full-time job. UK employment law is constantly changing – take the upcoming Employment Rights Bill, with no less than 28 major reforms, as an example.
You don’t need a law degree to know employment legislation is complicated. And when you’ve already got a million and one things on your plate, going through everything with a fine-toothed comb can be borderline impossible.
2. Onboarding and right-to-work checks
Again, complexity is a big issue here. Onboarding compliance involves a lot of legal, regulatory, and company-specific steps: collecting paperwork, verifying employment eligibility, and ensuring mandatory training, to name just a few.
These laws change frequently – the UK government’s 2025 updates include new acceptable documents and extending checks to gig and zero-hours workers, for example – and documents and records have to be stored for audit purposes.
The Home Office recently published results of a survey in which 80% of businesses answered at least one right-to-work compliance question incorrectly – showing just how tricky these are to keep on top of.
3. Background checks
For HR teams in finance, education, and other security-sensitive sectors, checks often need to meet specific screening standards – like BS7858, for example, which is designed for roles involving secure data or vulnerable people.
Checks as comprehensive as these are essential, but overly slow or unclear processes can frustrate candidates and harm your employer brand. The same goes for the employees you currently have. Ongoing monitoring or re-checking is common in regulated industries, and you want to keep this process fast and smooth to avoid taking away from their priorities (and, let’s be honest, getting in their bad books too).
4. Managing remote and global teams
This might come as a massive surprise, but each country comes with its own unique employment laws, tax jurisdictions, data privacy and security requirements, and contract conventions. And if you’re hiring across the globe, you’ve got to stay on top of all of them. No small feat.
And whether your team is spread across the world or all in the same country, if it’s remote-first you’ll need to manage regulations such as remote health and safety, and compliance training and engagement.
5. Documentation and record-keeping
To keep in line with legislation like the Digital Information and Smart Data Bill, HR teams need to keep a large volume of sensitive information secure and trackable to stay compliant. This means making sure everything is stored in line with ISO 27001 requirements: with a formal policy, consistently, and with regular risk assessments.
These records must be detailed and audit-ready, so your business can demonstrate compliance at the drop of a hat (or, you know, as close to a drop of a hat as you can get).
Why HR generalists need the right tools
Too much compliance, too little time. What’s an HR manager to do?
The key here is in the software you use. Two ways your tool can lighten the load are:
- Automation: a lot of compliance work – reading through documentation, tracking expiry dates, chasing paperwork – is time-consuming, but doesn’t need to be done by a human. Let automation pick up what it can to free yourself up.
- Centralised management: working with different documents, technologies, and systems wastes brain space. Centralised management lets you keep everything in one portal.
Both of these features give you more control of your time, and of your processes. And the more control you have over your compliance workload, the more easily you’ll be able to stay compliant. Simple.
Important note: it’s key to remember the tools you use have to be compliant themselves. If you need help, check out our no-BS guide to evaluating and implementing them here.
How to maintain HR compliance with technology
Want a real-world example? Here you go:
Take background checks. They’re not a simple or easy task, require a *lot* of admin (to the tune of 30 minutes plus per candidate), and can take weeks to turn around. And in competitive industries like finance, those weeks might just be long enough for a perfect candidate to look elsewhere.
This is exactly where a tool like Zinc comes in – think of it as a life jacket to stop you from drowning in a sea of background checking admin. Instead of manually tracking policy updates or right-to-work expiries, Zinc automates these alerts for you. This’ll keep your completion time to hours rather than weeks. A good experience for you, and your candidates too.
It also has everything you need for your background checking process, which means you don’t have to waste time switching between tools or wondering where exactly that key document was stored. Plus, it integrates with your HRIS or ATS to keep your workflows silky smooth.
So no, compliance isn’t the easiest part of the job – but with the right setup, it doesn’t have to be the hardest either.
Want to learn more about how Zinc lightens the load? Book a demo.
