Avoid Personio if you don't enjoy corporate politics! - Anonymous employee Personio Employee Review

1.0
23 Apr 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Partnerships with some apps like Travel perks . Office locations.

Cons

Personio has a pleasant facade when approaching candidates. All its interesting social media posts, bright offices, and presentation of a so-called people centred culture. Unfortunately the reality couldn't be further from the image they have been trying to sell. The major downfall of joining Personio would be dealing with dysfunctional leadership in the Product, Design and Engineering team. The toxicity in the leadership mentality has caused a “culty” culture where people are constantly seeking for shortcuts to get promoted to a leadership role instead of focusing on real growth and impact on the product. People managers or “wanna be managers” get the titles very easily and this lack of maturity causes chaos and waste of money. The bar when it comes to the quality of work around the product is very low and there is no space or mindset for innovation and appreciation of hard skills. It is so sad to see how much domain and tribe leaders waste on unthoughtful decisions including hiring external agencies, starting initiatives without feeling accountable for the results,...And the experts inside the teams who are the people who should have the freedom to do trial and error can not experiment and often feel limited. Not to mention that some middle managers are not hands on or even have the skills to raise the quality bar. Personio is NOT A REMOTE FRIENDLY company. They hire remote/hybrid/on-site but there isn’t a proper definition for the “ways of working”. A manager working in an office without having his team in the same office is not “on-site”! So many paradoxes when it comes to what they want to show vs the actions. Managers constantly traveling between countries contradicts the environmental consciousness in the company's PR posts. Having the majority of employees as Germans or Spanish speakers are not also signs of diversity.

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Personio Response
3y
Hi, thank you for taking the time to provide this feedback. Of course, I’m sad to hear this is how you’re feeling. We want our Personios to have a positive experience working here, so this is disappointing to read, particularly your thoughts on culture change and leadership. If you feel comfortable, we’d encourage you to have a confidential chat with your team lead or manager about your concerns, as feedback is how we grow and improve. Or a trusted member of the People team would be happy to have a conversation. As you know, Personio is currently experiencing a period of intense growth. Our teams and our product offering are expanding at speed, and while this is exciting, change can certainly be difficult. Within our Product & Technology team in particular, we are focused on using this period to learn, grow, and create a green field state for our product. This focus stems from our new product strategy, which prioritizes an increased product quality and overall speed of shipping new features to our customers. All of this is part of raising the bar at Personio, as we continue to work hard to deliver the best product we can for our customers And we can’t meet our goals without diverse and talented people. That means new leaders coming in who have the experience to help us scale; new team members, so we have more capacity to build; and a big focus on empowering and investing in our existing Personios by supporting their development and promotion. It also means iterating on our ways of working, and enabling our teams to hire amazing people who are based in different markets and working in teams that are often distributed or fully remote Because of this, sometimes collaboration is needed in person, which can mean travel. But our focus on becoming a greener organization, brand, and product means we don’t take these decisions to travel lightly. We’re proud of the work we’ve done already, but we know there’s always room to improve! We have more detail on our travel policy and approach to sustainability on Confluence and would be open to further feedback on this. Overall, scaling teams is challenging and means a lot of change and some growing pains along the way. Like all start-ups, we’re learning as we go, and we haven’t always got it right. Which is why we value feedback so much. Thank you again for this review. Please feel free to Slack me and we can have a confidential chat. - Cassandra, Head of People Experience

Explore other reviews about Personio

5.0
14 Oct 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

My coworkers are wonderful, I feel energized coming to work everyday

Cons

The company has had a lot of churn at Director+ levels, not a clear vision across the company

1.0
30 Oct 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart collaborative colleagues at the lower IC levels.

Cons

Personio is a dying company. The over-complexity of the company's technical systems is comical. Every attempt to simplify seems to lead to more complexity as things get half migrated and left to rot. Engineering leadership seems clueless and unable to present a clear plan-of-action to get things on track. Principal engineers force engineering time to be spent on silly projects that don't move the needle long-term. There is an overall aversion to taking the time to learn deeply about systems being used. Personio feels like a combination of all of the negatives of both a startup and a mature tech company, with none of the positives. The tech is half assed and duct taped together, but still somehow everything moves at a glacial pace. There is a mass shared delusion at the company that an IPO is in reach. No investor is going to buy this company's junk shares on the open market.

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