Personio Review: Is the Robust HR Platform the Right Choice for You?

As an all-in-one HR software that covers everything from recruitment to offboarding, Personio boasts of being a good fit for companies with 10–2,000 employees.

In this article, we’ll break down Personio’s core features, integrations, and pricing options to help you assess whether this platform would fit the people operations needs of your organization.

We’ll also introduce an ATS specifically designed for SMBs that could be the alternative you need to support your hiring efforts if you decide against investing in the full Personio software package.

Source: Personio

Personio Features: What Does Personio Do?

Personio is like a control center for your HR processes—it helps you manage your workforce, automate workflows, and handle payrolls more efficiently.

The platform lets you streamline onboarding and offboarding, track time, and safely store all employee data in one place. With 360-degree feedback, you can optimize performance reviews and track your employees’ development.

You can take control over your payroll processes with Personio’s payroll options—store and track relevant data within the platform, allow employees to update their info, and connect with major payroll apps.

The Personio dashboard doubles as an ATS, but there’s a catch—the Recruiting App is an extra feature that you can opt for in addition to the Core plan. The same goes for Personio Posting Bundles, which let you manage job postings and promote them on hundreds of job boards.

In other words, you’ll need to pay additionally for the complementary app to manage your recruitment process with Personio. If you choose to do so, keep in mind that Personio is a comprehensive HR solution that lacks the simplicity of ATS tools dedicated to streamlining application management.

Source: Personio

Personio also allows you to sign documents online with eIDAS-compliant electronic signatures, which speeds up hiring and many other internal processes. It’s worth noting that e-signature features are limited if you opt for the lowest-priced plan.

With Personio, you can create absence policies and manage employee absences by having your team request time off approvals through the platform. The software then provides you with a detailed insight into the absence statistics, allowing you to plan ahead and spot potential red flags with the platform’s clean calendar overview.

If you’re hiring new employees or encouraging existing employees to broaden their skill sets, you’ll appreciate Personio’s training features. You can publish courses, enroll your employees, and centralize attendance tracking to keep an eye on the progress.

Personio Recruiting Features

Personio lets you create job ads and post them on 600+ job boards across Europe. You can categorize your candidates depending on the stage of the process they’re in and assign specific HR managers to check out their applications.

After you’ve shortlisted the best candidates, you can use smart interview scheduling options to ask relevant questions, decide who fits the role(s) you’re hiring for, and send an offer or an automated rejection message.

If you want to customize the hiring process and align it with your brand, you can tailor the Personio career page and integrate it with your website.

Personio Reviews

Reading about a platform’s features is important, but there’s hardly a better way to find out how they work in practice than going through honest user reviews. Let’s see what users have to say about Personio on websites like G2 and Capterra.

Some users appreciate that Personio keeps all vital info in one place, while others praise it for excellent customer service, saying the team is responsive and always ready to help.

There’s no denying that Personio is a comprehensive HR platform with dozens of helpful features. However, it’s not perfect, and numerous user reviews point out its potential flaws.

Having dozens of features in a single platform can be a double-edged sword. Some users complained that the platform is buggy and can be slow to load. Numerous users mention that getting around Personio and finding a specific feature can be challenging because of the sheer number of options.

The lack of flexibility is also among potential downsides—users complained that making changes within the platform is not very intuitive, which can be an issue for businesses requiring specific configurations.

Personio Integrations

Personio supports 150+ integrations. The most popular ones include:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Zapier
• WorkMotion
• DATEV
• Google Calendar
• Circula
• Greenhouse
• Culture Amp
• AccessOwl
• askDANTE
• Avokaado
• aTurnos
• Ashby

Personio Pricing

Personio offers a free 14-day trial, with no credit card, setup, or cancellation required. After the trial, you can opt for a plan—Core or Core Pro.

As Personio cost details aren’t listed on the website, you’ll need to book a demo to get a quote. The cost will depend on the size of your company and the Apps you decide to add to the chosen package (note that the price of the individual apps is also not disclosed).

Here’s an overview of the options you get in each plan:

You can extend Personio’s functionality with the following Apps:

1. Personio Recruiting
2. Personio Posting Bundles
3. Performance & Development
4. Compensation
5. Conversations
6. Whistleblowing
7. Surveys

Personio Customers

Personio targets small, medium, and large businesses with up to 2,000 employees. Since the company’s based in Munich, Germany, and has offices in six other European cities, it’s no surprise that most customers come from Europe. The company also has a New York-based office.

Personio’s user interface is available in English, German, French, Dutch, and Spanish.

The platform has over 10,000 customers, including:

• LUSH
• Core
• Emma
• Jacquemus
• Premier Inn
• Minor Figures
• Spendesk
• Stonewall
• Mindful Chef
• SimplyCook
• Mentimeter
• Statista
• Chupi
• WeDo
• Rocycle
• Bluewave
• Cyted

Personio Alternatives

Do you feel Personio doesn’t offer precisely what you’re looking for, or it’s just too expensive and complex for your needs? The good news is that there are plenty of other ATS and HR software solutions you can choose from. Check out our reviews to see what they offer:

Workello as an Ideal Personio Alternative

An all-in-one HR product like Personio offers a lot, but it can be overwhelming for teams with immediate hiring needs. In such cases, a dedicated ATS like Workello is a simpler and more cost-effective solution.

Source: Workello

Workello saves you time, money, and energy by automating the entire hiring process. It allows you to establish your own hiring funnel and use it to track candidates and move them through different hiring stages—all from a one-page dashboard. Workello assists in all phases of recruiting, providing job description templates, automated emails, interview scheduling tools, and hiring analytics.

While Personio and many other HR and ATS solutions boast similar features, they also come with numerous functionalities that may not be useful for managing smaller teams. If you’re looking for a straightforward and easy-to-use candidate management tool with robust recruitment features—including pre-hire assessments—look no further than Workello.

Through our extensive experience with scaling teams, we found that the traditional review resumes-interview-test approach is inefficient because companies consistently lose time and money on candidates who don’t end up being the right fit for the role—and researchers agree. That is why Workello lets you assess candidates before they reach the interview stage, minimizing the risk of hiring the wrong people and making it perfect for high-level recruiting.

Source: Workello

Our findings also show that the pre-hire assessment process is valuable for the applicants, too—they know what to expect from the get-go and, as a result, aren’t overwhelmed by the complicated application, testing, and hiring procedures.

Workello Pricing

Workello has transparent pricing options and doesn’t lock any of its features behind more expensive plans. Workello pricing plans are as follows:

1. Free Forever
2. Start: $99/month (billed quarterly)
3. Grow: $49/month (billed annually)
4. Scale: $124/month (billed annually)

Workello comes pre-optimized and is intuitive and easy to use. Even if you have no experience with an ATS and you’re going through your first major hiring cycle, you will take no time getting started with Workello.

Personio vs. Workello: Features Comparison

Check out how Personio and Workello compare:

Is Personio the Right Option for You?

Personio is an all-encompassing HR tool that can help you with all aspects of managing your team, from hiring new people to tracking your employees’ days off. However, it may have an unnecessarily steep learning curve for teams with strictly hiring needs due to its sheer variety of features.

On the other hand, Workello is an easy-to-use, standalone ATS that automates every step of the recruitment process, allowing you to focus on your hiring activities, test the best applicants in the early stages of the process, and quickly snatch the top 1% of the candidates.