Manage employees, absences and documents, and read custom reports, through Personio's HR platform API.
Personio ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 16 actions, 2 health checks, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.
io.w6w.personioPersonio is an HR and talent management platform for SMBs and mid-market companies. This app covers its Personnel Data API: reading and writing employee records (including the attribute schema a given credential is allowed to see), reading absence balances, listing and creating day-unit time-offs and reading hourly absence periods, uploading documents to an employee’s profile, and reading the custom reports built in Personio’s Reports Builder.
Authentication mints its own bearer token from a Client ID and Client Secret via a POST to Personio’s /v1/auth endpoint — despite Personio’s own naming this is NOT a standard OAuth2 client_credentials grant (no grant_type, no Basic-auth header, a JSON body instead), and the resulting token is stable for 24 hours rather than single-use. A live health check tracks Personio’s own Statuspage, scoped to its ‘Public API’ component specifically; Personio publishes no rate-limit response headers on any endpoint, so quota headroom is a declared absence rather than a guess.
Out of scope for this pass: Attendances and Projects (the v1 endpoints are deprecated with no documented v2 replacement in Personio’s own OpenAPI sources), and the Recruiting API (a separate static token, a required company-id header, and no safe read-only probe to test it with).
Three routes to the same 16 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from Personio's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.
get-absence-balance Get an employee's absence balance per absence type — how much remains (`balance`) and how much is still free to plan after upcoming absences (`availableBalance`).
get-custom-report Read a custom report's rows by its id (from List Custom Reports).
list-absence-periods Absence periods for absence types with time unit "hours". For day-unit absences, use List Time-Offs instead.
list-custom-reports List metadata for the custom reports configured in Personio's Reports Builder — name, type, status, author. Use Get Custom Report to read a report's rows.
list-document-categories List the company's document categories. Returns the id Upload Document needs.
list-employee-attributes List every standard and custom employee attribute this connection can read or write, including the dynamic field ids (e.g. dynamic_1) other actions need.
list-employees List company employees, paginated. Filter by email or by an updated-since timestamp (which disables pagination — see the field hint).
list-time-off-types Absence types with time unit "days" or "hours" (e.g. Paid vacation, Home office). Returns the id Create Time-Off needs.
list-time-offs Absence periods for absence types with time unit "days". For hourly absence types, use List Absence Periods instead.
update-employee Update an existing employee's fields. The email address cannot be changed through this endpoint.
upload-document Upload a document to an employee's profile. Rate-limited to 60 requests per minute; max file size 30MB.
A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the
connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the
workflow spec, carrying Personio's real ids.
{
"manifestVersion": "2",
"name": "personio-example",
"steps": [
{
"id": "create-employee",
"uses": {
"app": "io.w6w.personio",
"action": "create-employee",
"connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
},
"with": {
"email": "<email>",
"firstName": "<firstName>",
"lastName": "<lastName>"
}
}
]
}create-employee create-time-off get-absence-balance get-custom-report get-employee +11 more actions available
Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An
app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the
address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account,
so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for Personio, then fill in
the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the
parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed
from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but
nothing in it is specific to Personio. The Workflow tab is where this app's
real ids are.
npm install @w6w/sdkyarn add @w6w/sdkpnpm add @w6w/sdkdeno add npm:@w6w/sdkimport { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";
// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();
const envelope = await client.run({
urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
action: "create-employee",
payload: {
email: "<value>",
firstName: "<value>",
lastName: "<value>",
// preferredName: "<value>",
// gender: "<value>",
// position: "<value>",
// subcompany: "<value>",
// department: "<value>",
// office: "<value>",
// hireDate: "<value>",
// weeklyWorkingHours: "<value>",
// status: "<value>",
// supervisorId: "<value>",
},
});
if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value); npm install -g @w6w/cli w6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action create-employee --payload '{"email":"<value>","firstName":"<value>","lastName":"<value>"}' Give an AI agent Personio — without giving it Personio's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.
One tool call{
"name": "w6w_invoke",
"arguments": {
"ref": "app:io.w6w.personio#create-employee",
"input": {
"email": "<email>",
"firstName": "<firstName>",
"lastName": "<lastName>"
}
}
}
Every tool names its target with a single ref. The
app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the
host resolves which of the caller's Personio connections to sign
with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.
The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.
Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.
Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.
Personio's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.
The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. Personio itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).
Personio declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.
Page-level status from status.personio.de, plus the 'Public API' component specifically (the component that covers api.personio.de).