One year ago we launched Employko with a simple premise: HR teams managing between 50 and 500 people in Bulgaria deserve a platform that speaks their language, understands their regulations, and does not require a three-month implementation project to get running. Twelve months later, we have learned more from our clients than from any amount of planning.
The compliance pressure was the strongest driver
We expected digital document management to be the main selling point. What we found is that compliance pressure — specifically the transition to the Electronic Employment Record from June 2025 and the eurozone wage recalculations from January 2026 — was the most urgent driver for companies to evaluate an HR system. "We need to get this in order" was the conversation that opened most doors.
The biggest friction is not the software — it is the data
Every implementation starts with the same challenge: the data that should be in the system is scattered across spreadsheets, old email threads, and filing cabinets. The value of Employko is not just the functionality — it is having a single, reliable source of truth for HR data. Getting there takes work, but the teams that go through it consistently say they would not go back.
Leave management is the first thing everyone wants
We prioritised documents and onboarding in our early feature work. What clients actually reached for first, in almost every case, was leave management. The pain of approving leave through messaging apps — with no visibility, no audit trail, and no way to see balances across the team — turned out to be more acute than we expected.
What the next year looks like
We are investing heavily in two areas: deeper integration with the ЕЕТЗ system to automate employment record submissions, and an expanded analytics layer that gives HR leaders the workforce data they need to make decisions rather than compile reports. Thank you to everyone who has been part of the first year.
