Disappointing management:
Managers in Personio usually didn’t meet expectations. C-level mangers can be considered as “Project managers”. They seldom have business knowledge or customer knowledge and all you can get from them is pressure and very generic push towards dates. Senior leaders will not provide any priorities, guidance, domain expertise, customer insights or added value, instead, they will delay process and progress as you need to ‘explain’ and ‘sell’ initiatives to people who lack basic IT or engineering understanding.
Leaders will have comments like “ I don’t understand, please explain it to me like I am a five years old” on basic concepts.
Opaque goals that ever change and can never be met:
In Personio, goals are opaque and ever changing. The company has un-measureable goals. These makes feedbacks and evaluation process super subjective.
Your goals will be unmeasurable and will continuously change as leadership changes their minds constantly.
Culture:
You can expect your feedbacks to be non-actionable and to contain inaccuracies. You can expect your peers to not to be accurate with status, data and commitments.
There are a lot of ‘misunderstandings’ in Personio - so you need to “lawyer up” and document anything you agree on with everyone.
This is a toxic work environment where everyone is busy covering their own instead of building trust and a system that scales.
Fear
Everyone in Personio is afraid, The culture, the way goals are set and endless, random layoffs combined with erratic, panicky management creates a toxic atmosphere of fear.
Your engineers will show aversion to fixing bugs, contributing to system stability or long term initiatives as they are afraid.
Focus will be on shipping a checkbox or a naively implemented UI feature that can be ‘shown off’ in a simple enough way.
Engineers are too afraid to take risks, do something complex or experiment - this seriously impacts the ability to deliver on complex features in a scalable and performant way.
Layoffs and terminations:
In Personio, people are let go often. Your colleagues will simply ‘disappear’ one day - as Personio cuts all access 15 mins after a surprise termination call.
This further deepens the atmosphere of fear - people are more focused on keeping their jobs then on creating a good product.
Summary:
Personio seems great and shiny from the outside. The Inside story is very different.
I recommend avoiding this toxic company - it is easy to see the employee churn and feedbacks over time to understand this is not a good place to work.
