Personio
Read Personio people, employment, attendance, absence, project, document, and employee-attribute data.
Verdict
Common use cases
- Check who's on leave this week
- Pull headcount by department or location
- Find employees hired in the last quarter
- List pending onboarding documents
- Summarize attendance for project billing
Integration
- Vendor
- Personio
- Category
- developer-tools
- Auth
- OAUTH2
- Tools
- 10
- Composio slug
personio
Tools
- List Absence Periods
Return v2 absence periods filtered by person, absence type, IDs, date-time bounds, or update time.
- List Absence Types
Return the v2 absence types configured for the company, including IDs, names, categories, and units.
- List Attendance Periods
Return v2 attendance periods filtered by people, projects, status, attribution dates, time bounds, or update time.
- List Document Categories
Return the legacy Personnel Data document categories and IDs used to classify or filter company documents.
- List Documents
Return v2 document metadata for one owner, optionally filtered by category and creation date; this does not download document contents.
- List Employee Attributes
Return the standard and custom employee attributes readable by the connected integration, including the keys accepted by list employee records.
- List Employee Records
Return legacy Personnel Data employee records with selectable standard or custom attributes and incremental-update filtering; use List Persons for ordinary v2 identity lookup.
- List Person Employments
Return employment records for one v2 person, including status, type, and working-hours details.
- List Persons
Return current v2 person summaries, optionally filtered by identity, status, or creation and update times; use employee records instead when custom Personnel Data attributes are needed.
- List Projects
Return v2 time-tracking projects filtered by IDs, names, codes, status, hierarchy, or top-level membership.
Setup
Setup guide
- 11. Open your Switchy workspace settings and navigate to the Integrations page. 2. Find Personio in the MCP catalog and click Connect. 3. You'll be redirected to Personio's OAuth consent screen—log in with an account that has API access enabled by your Personio admin. 4. Grant the requested scopes: read access to employees, absences, attendances, and documents. 5. Personio redirects you back to Switchy with a success message. 6. Open any Project, type '@Personio list employee attributes' in the chat, and confirm the AI returns your company's standard and custom fields. 7. If the test fails, check that your Personio admin has enabled API credentials and shared the necessary data sets with the integration.
What teammates see: by default, memories from Personio are scoped to the Project (PROJECT visibility) - you can mark any memory PRIVATE or share it ORG-wide.
Works well with
Top models
Compatibility data appears once enough Projects have used this MCP together with a given model.
How Switchy teams use it
Starter prompts
Weekly Absence Report
@Personio list all absence periods starting this week, grouped by absence type, and include each person's name and department.
New Hire Onboarding Status
@Personio list employees hired in the last 30 days, then check which document categories each person has submitted.
Headcount by Department
@Personio list all employee records with status and department, then summarize the headcount by department.
Attendance Summary for Billing
@Personio list attendance periods for the last two weeks, group by project, and calculate total hours per project.
Custom Field Audit
@Personio list all employee attributes, highlight custom fields, and show an example value for each.
Example outputs
Illustrative - representative of the model's voice and quality, not literal recordings.
@personio list all absence periods for employee ID 12345 in the last 30 days, grouped by absence type
Found 4 absence periods for employee 12345 in the past 30 days: 2 vacation periods (Dec 18-20 and Jan 2-5, both approved), 1 sick leave period (Dec 28, half-day, approved), and 1 pending parental leave request (Jan 15-Feb 12, awaiting manager approval). Vacation balance shows 8 days remaining for this employee in the current accrual period.
This example demonstrates read-only access to time-off data. The MCP requires OAuth scopes for absence:read. Results reflect your Personio account's configured absence types and approval workflows—custom categories (e.g., 'study leave') will appear if your organization uses them. No side effects; safe for reporting dashboards.
@personio fetch the employment history and current working hours for Sarah Chen, then draft a contract amendment if her FTE changed in the last 6 months
Sarah Chen (Person ID 67890) has two employment records: initial hire on March 1, 2023 at 0.8 FTE (32 hours/week), then an amendment effective September 1, 2024 increasing to 1.0 FTE (40 hours/week). Draft amendment: 'This modifies the Employment Agreement dated March 1, 2023. Effective September 1, 2024, Employee's schedule increases from 32 to 40 hours per week. All other terms remain in effect.' Note: verify local labor law requirements before finalizing.
This synthesis example pairs Personio's employment-record API with the AI's drafting capability. Useful for HR ops teams preparing paperwork. The MCP only reads data—it cannot write employment records or upload signed documents. You'll need employments:read scope and must handle the actual contract signature workflow outside Switchy.
@personio show me all document categories available in our account, then list any onboarding documents uploaded for new hires in the past 14 days
Your Personio account has 8 document categories: Contracts, Certificates, Onboarding, Performance Reviews, Payroll, Benefits, Compliance, and Other. In the past 14 days, 3 onboarding documents were uploaded: 'Welcome Packet' for Jane Doe (Jan 8), 'Equipment Checklist' for Mike Torres (Jan 10), and 'Tax Forms W-4' for Jane Doe (Jan 12). Note: this returns metadata only—document contents are not retrieved.
Demonstrates the two-step pattern for document discovery: first fetch categories (a one-time setup query), then filter documents by category and date. The List Documents tool does not download file contents; you'll need Personio's UI or a separate download endpoint for that. Requires documents:read scope. Helpful for auditing new-hire paperwork completeness.
Use-case deep-dives
When Personio MCP speeds up new-hire document retrieval
A 12-person engineering team onboards two developers per quarter and needs to pull signed contracts, tax forms, and equipment checklists into Slack threads without opening the HR portal. The Personio MCP wins here because List Documents and List Document Categories let you query metadata by employee ID and category, then surface links in a shared channel. The OAuth2 flow keeps HR credentials out of individual dev machines. The trade-off: you still can't download document contents through the MCP, so if your workflow requires inline PDF previews or OCR, you'll hit the API boundary and need a separate integration. If your onboarding is mostly 'find the right form and share the link,' this MCP cuts the median lookup from three minutes to fifteen seconds.
Why Personio MCP works for small-team capacity planning
A 6-person product squad plans two-week sprints and needs real-time PTO data to avoid over-committing velocity. The Personio MCP handles this cleanly: List Absence Periods filtered by date range and List Absence Types give you approved time-off in one query, no manual spreadsheet sync. The 10-tool scope includes attendance periods, so you can cross-check actual hours if someone's working reduced schedules. The boundary: if your team is over 30 people or you're aggregating absence data across multiple squads, the per-person filtering gets tedious and you're better off pulling a nightly export into a BI tool. For a single squad doing weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, this MCP answers 'who's out next sprint' in under 20 seconds.
When Personio MCP closes the loop on employment verification
A 20-person startup with eight remote contractors in four countries needs to prove employment status and working-hours agreements during a Series A due-diligence audit. The Personio MCP's List Person Employments and List Employee Records tools let you query contract type, status, and hours without exporting a full HRIS dump or giving auditors direct portal access. OAuth2 means you can grant read-only scope to a finance lead who orchestrates the queries in a shared AI workspace, then revoke when the audit closes. The catch: if your auditors want historical change logs or need to verify document signatures, the MCP only surfaces current metadata—you'll still need to involve HR for the full paper trail. For fast, scoped verification of active employment terms, this MCP turns a two-day data-gathering sprint into a 90-minute session.
Frequently asked
What does the Personio MCP let me do in Switchy?
It pulls employee records, absence periods, attendance logs, and document metadata from your Personio account into Switchy's AI workspace. Your team can ask questions like "Who's out next week?" or "Show me the employment history for this person" without opening Personio. The MCP reads data only—it won't create employees or approve time-off requests.
Do I need admin access in Personio to connect the OAuth integration?
Yes. Personio's OAuth flow requires an account with API credential creation rights, which typically means an admin or super-admin role. During setup you'll grant read scopes for employees, absences, attendance, and documents. If your Personio admin has locked down API access, ask them to whitelist Switchy's redirect URI before you start.
Can the Personio MCP approve time-off requests or update employee details?
No. The ten tools exposed are all read-only—list absence periods, list employees, list documents. If you need to approve leave or change someone's job title, open Personio directly or use their native mobile app. Switchy surfaces the data your AI needs to answer questions; it doesn't replace Personio's workflow engine.
How does querying Personio through Switchy compare to using Personio's reporting UI?
Switchy's AI can answer ad-hoc questions in natural language without building a saved report or exporting a CSV. You skip the five-click drill-down to see who's on parental leave this quarter. The trade-off: you can't schedule recurring exports or apply Personio's pivot-table logic. Use Switchy for quick lookups, Personio's reports for compliance archives.
Who on my team should connect the Personio integration in Switchy?
Your HR lead or office manager—whoever already has admin rights in Personio and understands which employee attributes are sensitive. Once connected, any Switchy workspace member can query the data through AI, so review your workspace roster before you link payroll or performance records. You can revoke OAuth access in Personio's API settings anytime.