This article explains how to integrate your company calendar with the Personio Recruiting calendar. Personio's subcontractor, Cronofy, provides this calendar integration service. (If you’re using the setup experience, we recommend you follow the steps there instead.)

This integration enables you to schedule recruiting events directly in Personio. For example, it allows you to find a suitable time slot for all employees involved in the interview process. You can also use our smart scheduling feature. The integration creates an interview event in the employees’ calendars. Note that interview events appear in the calendar by default, and you can’t turn this off.

Personio supports integration with the following three calendars:

• Google Apps
• Microsoft Exchange (this includes all versions of 2010, 2013, and 2016)
• Microsoft Office 365 (this includes all versions of 2010, 2013, and 2016)

Before you start

To integrate your company calendar with Personio, you need the following roles:

• Personio Account Administrator: To opt in to Cronofy as a subcontractor and to grant the Company Calendar Administrator permissions for the calendar integration settings, you need an Administrator role.
• Company Calendar Administrator: To access the calendar integration settings and perform the setup, this person needs Edit permissions for the Time off > Team calendar settings section. You can select an existing role or create a new one for the Company Calendar Administrator. We explain this in more detail further on.

For more information about the compliance and security standards of the integration through Cronofy, see our frequently asked questions.

Requirements for synchronizing employees

One of the steps in this article involves synchronizing your employees' calendars. To successfully synchronize your employees, first make sure:

• Each employee has a company email address: You can only synchronize users with an email on your company’s domain (for example, @xy.com). External addresses like @hiringhelp.com won’t work.
• New employees already exist in your calendar application: If you add an employee to Personio before creating their calendar account, the sync won't work. Add them to your calendar first, then try again.
• Each employee has a unique email address: Each employee must have their own personal email address for the sync to work. Email addresses with shared mailboxes won't work.

Personio Administrator

Enable Cronofy

Personio's calendar integrates with the subcontractor Cronofy B.V. You need to enable Cronofy in Personio. Follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Account & support section, click Subscription & Billing.
3. Click the Data protection information tab.
4. In the list of subcontractors, ensure you opt in to Cronofy B.V.

Grant the Company Calendar Administrator permissions for calendar integration settings

Follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the People section, click Roles & permissions. 
3. Select the existing employee role assigned to your Company Calendar Administrator, or create a new role.
4. In the Permissions tab, click Time off.
5. Grant Edit permissions for Team calendar settings.

Company Calendar Administrator

Connect your company calendar

Once the Personio Administrator accepts Cronofy as a subcontractor, follow these steps to connect your company calendar:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Recruiting section, click Recruiting calendar.
3. Choose one of the following calendars to integrate with Personio:
   ▶︎ Google Calendar
   ▶︎ Office 365 (via Graph API)
   ▶︎ Microsoft Exchange
4. In the area Interview scheduling, you can activate the checkbox. Using this feature, the organizer of an interview can see the titles of private events in the calendars of interview participants. Learn more about what data Cronofy can access.
   ▶︎ Note: If you’d prefer to hide these details, Account Owners can contact Support to enable this setting. Once enabled, all event titles appear as “Busy”.
5. Apply your changes.

Synchronize employees and rooms

During the initial synchronization with the calendar provider, you authenticate all current users and meeting rooms. This process might take a few minutes. To check if you've successfully synchronized all employees and rooms, go to Integrations > Recruiting calendar.

If you see error messages for unsuccessful synchronization of employees, see the different errors and solutions in our troubleshoot the company calendar integration article.

Add new employees

To synchronize an individual employee or all employees again in Personio:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Recruiting section, click Recruiting calendar.
3. Open the menu to view all unsynchronized employees.
4. To synchronize an individual employee, click the loop icon to the right of the employee’s name.
5. To synchronize all employees, click Sync all employees at the top right of the list.
6. Apply your changes.

When you add new employees to your company domain, Personio automatically authenticates them. If any synchronization errors happen, you receive an error message.

There are five different synchronization statuses of employees:

1. Status: Authenticating
   ▶︎ Details: The authentication process has started.
   ▶︎ Tooltip displayed in the user interface: “This may take some time.” If the status doesn’t change, click “Sync all employees” to try syncing again.
2. Status: Pending
   ▶︎ Details: The authentication is pending
   ▶︎ Tooltip displayed in the user interface: “The employee's calendar is still syncing.” If the status doesn’t change, click "Sync all employees" to try syncing again.
3. Status: Authenticated
   ▶︎ Details: The employee is successfully authenticated and the employee's calendar is synchronized.
4. Status: Unavailable
   ▶︎ Details: The authentication was unsuccessful and the employee's calendar can’t be synchronized. If this error appears, take a look at our article on troubleshooting the company calendar integration.
   ▶︎ Tooltip displayed in the user interface: Cronofy displays a message, or “The employee's calendar could not be synced. Please try the troubleshooting article.”
5. Status: Error
   ▶︎ Details: An issue appears after a successful authentication. Only Account Owners can contact Support for this issue.
   ▶︎ Tooltip displayed in the user interface: “Something went wrong. Please contact customer support.”

Add new rooms

If you use Personio's Recruiting app, you can add meeting rooms for scheduling interviews. An information icon confirms that meeting rooms are successfully synchronized.

If you add new rooms under your company's domain, you need to synchronize them manually with Personio. To do this:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Recruiting section, click Recruiting calendar. 
3. Click Sync all rooms.

Next steps

Tip:
For more information and FAQs, read Cronofy's guide on connecting organization calendars.

Once you've integrated the Recruiting calendar, you can:

• Schedule interviews using the integrated calendar
• Use smart interview scheduling
• Set up videoconferencing for interviews

If you experience issues with integrating the Recruiting calendar, read our troubleshooting article. We also have a separate troubleshooting article for scheduling interviews.