Personio reviews

- I decided to write this review after I saw many forced positive reviews and blaming attitudes with phrases like "it is not for everyone". While 12+ hours working days, getting messages at 10 pm or on vacation days are worth mentioning, I will share something else. - At some point, Personio decided to restructure its product organisation. While it is 100% understandable for a company to hire senior talent from big tech, they did this at the cost of the culture, created an uncertain environment, and treated people as resources with an expiry date. - It started with high-performing senior people leaving unexpectedly. While the official message is always something like "they decided to embark on a new adventure", everybody knew they were either getting fired or blindsided by a random performance review and forced to leave. - It got worse with middle managers who feared for their lives and passed on all the pressure and stress from above. Instead of getting clear guidance, all you got was pressure, anxiety, and hearing the opposite of what you heard the week before. - The cherry on top is if you are dealing with a manager who gets extremely insecure because you questioned his approach and starts threatening to "replace you" and gaslighting you. Since no one asks for your feedback about your manager, there is not much way for you to get help. - When I approached an HR/People partner on the verge of burnout, they thought "This was a great learning opportunity for me". I was the 4th direct report that left them. Here is an interesting HR KPI for you: Turnover per manager. - I definitely did not have what it takes to navigate this environment and protect my health at the same time. - If you also have unreasonable expectations such as believing what your manager is telling you or not getting fired after getting only positive feedback from a 360-degree performance review, without a single improvement point, it might not be a place for you.

To strive at Personio it's not enough to be good at your job, what's most important is that your manager trust you and is an amazing sales man. Sadly in many job categories, like for example Software Engineering, managers aren't necessarily good at salesmanship. As the manager isn't responsible for the performance rating, it will thus be very difficult to get good ratings under managers like this. Personio has a very harsh performance rating system which will not evaluate how much impact your team had, but instead how you perform compared to your direct peers. That means, if you are in a team full of the brightest most amazing team members - you are lost unless you are the best in that team. I've seen multiple cases over the years of great employees who have gotten a mediocre performance rating, simply because they had a peer in their team pushing 70 hours a week. Personio doesn't support caretakers because of the aforementioned performance rating. If you have children or elderly to take care of and can't work overtime constantly. You can be sure this will be ignored in your performance metric. Sad reality.