First-party app
Personio Personio

Personio

Manage employees, absences and documents, and read custom reports, through Personio's HR platform API.

stable Human Resources

About

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.

App id
io.w6w.personio
Version
0.1.1
Author
w6w
Licence
MIT
Categories
Human Resources

Overview

Personio 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).

Build with Personio

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.

Create Employee

create-employee

Create a new employee.

Create Time-Off

create-time-off

Create a day-unit absence period for an employee.

Delete Time-Off

delete-time-off

Delete a day-unit absence period by its id.

Get Absence Balance

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

get-custom-report

Read a custom report's rows by its id (from List Custom Reports).

Get Employee

get-employee

Get a single employee by their Personio numeric id.

Get Time-Off

get-time-off

Get a single day-unit absence period by its id.

List Absence Periods

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-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-document-categories

List the company's document categories. Returns the id Upload Document needs.

List Employee Attributes

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-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

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

list-time-offs

Absence periods for absence types with time unit "days". For hourly absence types, use List Absence Periods instead.

Update Employee

update-employee

Update an existing employee's fields. The email address cannot be changed through this endpoint.

Upload Document

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>"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Here are some of the things you can do

  • Create Employee

    perform
    create-employee
  • Create Time-Off

    perform
    create-time-off
  • Get Absence Balance

    read
    get-absence-balance
  • Get Custom Report

    read
    get-custom-report
  • Get Employee

    read
    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.

Install
npm install @w6w/sdk
yarn add @w6w/sdk
pnpm add @w6w/sdk
deno add npm:@w6w/sdk
Code
import { 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);
Install the CLI
npm install -g @w6w/cli
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.

What the agent gets

Credentials it can't read

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.

A tool surface scoped to the caller

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.

A durable workflow in one call

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.

Health-aware discovery

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).

Request MCP access

Health checks

Personio declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.

service

Personio platform status

Page-level status from status.personio.de, plus the 'Public API' component specifically (the component that covers api.personio.de).

quota

API quota headroom