This article provides a deep dive into document management in Personio. Firstly, it explains how to configure various document categories according to each company's needs. Furthermore, it provides an overview on how to create, manage and store the corresponding document templates in Settings, as well as managing them from the Employee's profile. 

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. Note that the lower the number in the “Sort order”, the higher the position it will have in the list.

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 or employee attributes predefined by Personio, they will be used when applying the template and automatically filled with the corresponding candidate or employee data. The placeholders are filled with the information that was previously saved in the candidate or employee 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 or employee'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.
• E-signature placeholders: You can create document templates and contracts that can be signed electronically. You just need to ensure that the process of requesting and obtaining signatures from multiple people works.

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.

Managing Document Templates in the Employee profile

Go to the employee profile you want to upload a document template to. To do this, open the Documents tab and click on Create new document

Select one of the document templates you have previously created.

Once you have selected the template you require, you'll see a list of variables (placeholders) and a preview of the document. If information is stored in the employee profile, it will also be displayed directly in the template.Fill out any other required placeholders.

If the previously created document template contains {}text blocks for selection{}, you can select one of the available alternatives for each block. For further information, please click here.

Lastly, select the required File Format and click on the Create  button at the end of the page.

The document is then generated under the relevant category. You have the following options:

• Click on the document name to have a preview displayed.
• Click on the small blue pencil icon to edit the document category, title, date or comments.
• Download the document.
• Delete the document.
• Additional information is displayed about the size and creation date of the file.

If you’d like specific stakeholders to have access to multi-upload ( such as finance for payroll documents) you can grant access rights in Settings > Employee Roles > Access Rights > Imports > Document import.

Further Information on Document Templates

In this video you can learn how to create and manage both employee documents and document templates. In addition to our how-to video, we also have a Help Center article on best practices with sample document templates for download.

Please note that Personio currently only supports templates created as Word or Open Office documents.

When creating custom document templates, you'll save a lot of time and effort by using placeholders, which will automatically be filled with the relevant employee data when templates are assigned to employees.

To create or upload a document template, first go to Settings > Documents > Templates and click on Add template.

Please note that only Google fonts can be displayed correctly in the document preview. When other fonts are used in a template, the preview may be distorted.