This article explains how you can configure various document categories that might be helpful for your company, and how to store the corresponding document templates. For example, this might include the categories "Work contracts", "References", or "Payroll". Using these templates saves you time and work by using placeholders to automatically import data that has already been entered.

Configuring a Document Category

You can create as many document categories as you like under Settings > Documents > Categories.

With any category selected, click on Edit to change the sequence in which the document categories are displayed.

System categories that have a lock function cannot be deleted or renamed.

The number to the right of a document category indicates how many documents are stored in this category in Personio.

Please note that the document categories for candidate documents are predefined by the system. Use Recruiting Roles to define access rights more specifically.

Creating Document Templates 

You need to create your template on your chosen word processing program first. Personio supports templates created in Microsoft Word(.docx/. dotx) or in OpenOffice (.dt/.ott). There are four different elements available here:

• Placeholders: If you use placeholders for all candidate attributes predefined by Personio, they will be used when applying the template and automatically filled with the corresponding candidate data. The placeholders are filled with the information that was previously saved in the candidate profile. You can also create user-defined placeholders which can later be replaced with free text. The user-defined attributes cannot yet be filled automatically during the application process.
• Gender variable: If your candidate's gender has been entered into Personio, you can set the software to make gender-specific (grammatical) adjustments in your document automatically.
• Date formatting: If your template contains a date, you can decide the format it is displayed in. For example, the date "20.11.2020" can be changed to "Friday, November 20 2020".
• Text Blocks for Selection: With the help of text blocks for selection you can store several text blocks as selection options in the template. When you create a contract proposal, you can take different contract conditions into account, for example.

This article provides an overview of document template best practices.

Adding Document Templates

Go to Settings > Documents in the Templates tab to upload individual document templates for a category, using Add Template. Next, enter a name for the template, then select the template language and a file in the correct format. Click on the Upload button to complete the process.

Please note that the language you select for a template impacts how dates will be formatted. Further information on date formatting is available here.

If you would like work contract templates to be automatically displayed in the Recruiting section when you Create a job offer, they need to be uploaded to the "Work Contracts" system category.

Once you have uploaded a template, you can display it using the Preview function, or you can get a copy by clicking the Download button.