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Case Study
January 13, 2025

How Personio reduced import failure rates by 5x with OneSchema

Learn how Personio redesigned their data migration and onboarding process with OneSchema and reduced their import failure rates by 5x.

Sol Chen
Sol is the Chief of Staff at OneSchema.
Overhauling the onboarding flow and integrating OneSchema has helped us save roughly 30 to 50 percent of the hours that our implementation team is spending on small customers.
Nick Singh
Head of Product at Personio
Our implementation managers were spending hours and hours a week on fixing the same repeating issues, which became a bottleneck for scaling up our customer base.
Nick Singh
Head of Product at Personio
One of the biggest areas of impact is when first time customers experience the product. The user-friendly prompts around column matching and 1-click autofixer let errors be corrected within seconds instead of days, without even leaving the product. It gave customers agency instead of having to wait for the Personio implementation team to resolve their issue.
Nick Singh
Head of Product at Personio
The impromptu editor is a great feature because people don't have to escalate issues to our implementation team - it just highlights specific areas for them that need more attention, and they can easily click one button to fix the values. We've heard really good feedback both internally as well as from our customers.
Nick Singh
Head of Product at Personio
Overhauling the onboarding flow and integrating OneSchema has helped us save roughly 30 to 50 percent of the hours that our implementation team is spending on small customers. And OneSchema’s importer along with the entire overhaul redesign were the biggest contributors to getting there. We’ve also seen really great improvements in our CSAT scores.
Nick Singh
Head of Product at Personio
Onboard CSVs 10x faster
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SUMMARY

Learn how Personio redesigned their data migration and onboarding process with OneSchema and reduced their import failure rates by 5x.

{{quote-1}}

With the 2x improvement in onboarding efficiency, Personio has been able to reallocate their implementation team’s time to work on higher value opportunity areas, such as scaling revenue with more customers or moving upmarket in strategic accounts.

{{blog-content-cta}}

CHALLENGE

Personio is an all-in-one HR software solution that helps small and mid-sized organizations empower their employees to be more successful. With a tagline of “Unlock the Power of Your People,” Personio offers a suite of products that includes time tracking, performance & development modules, and workforce planning.

Many of Personio’s customers start with the company’s core human resource offerings before expanding into other applications to manage their workforce. In fact, that’s a common pattern when companies look for HR software. As a company matures and grows into new needs, it will often consolidate its vendors into a couple of core platforms. 

This also creates a problem. Given that a company usually works with a handful to dozens of different vendors, they end up having lots of fragmented data that needs to be brought together. Historically, most HR companies solved that by giving customers a template to input their data. 

This came with two problems. First, each customer would have their unique flavor of attributes, which could be 50 to 100 distinct fields per employee. Filling out the template for all those employees was a painful process. And second, when the customers went to upload their carefully filled template, the uploading system might return back an error along the lines of, “Hey, this cell was empty. This location wasn't correctly entered. You misspelled this office.” The customer would then have to redownload the template, correct different fields, and upload it again and again until all the errors could be resolved.

For Nick Singh, Head of Product at Personio, he saw firsthand that this flow resulted in customers frequently giving up on switching HR platforms because they felt that “whatever I'm doing is way easier and less painful than finishing the migration process.” 

To rise above the industry standard and create a seamless data migration process, Personio hired a team of implementation managers who were dedicated to guiding customers through the onboarding journey. This ended up being both costly for Personio, and also did not solve the core issue. While customers appreciated the assistance, if something broke after the kickoff call, they were forced to book another live call and re-engage with Personio’s team to fix the problem. Moreover, Personio customers would have to schedule a time with the Personio team to ensure that their data was ingested correctly. Both parties were investing substantial time going back-and-forth to ensure a successful onboarding.

{{quote-2}}

Personio needed a solution that both improved the onboarding efficiency for their implementation managers and put less burden on their customers. To do this, they tackled the key pain point: the customer had no way to easily correct their own data. 

WHY ONESCHEMA?

Personio knew pursuing a custom in-house build to create a smooth data migration process would take a substantial amount of resources and time. Given they had a stream of customers that needed immediate onboarding and other high-priority product roadmap items to prioritize, they began to evaluate different vendors who could solve their onboarding problem. 

As product managers, engineers, and designers, the Personio team placed a large emphasis on the design and the overall end user experience. The team understood the value of a frictionless user journey and had the following design principles:

  1. Users didn’t leave the Personio product. A good experience meant the ability to embed, design, and stylistically organize the user’s interactions.
  2. Native integration within Personio. Users shouldn’t have to feel like they’re being passed off to a different thing. Everything should flow natively in the product experience.
  3. Easy to use experience for customers to change/modify errors in the file. And the ability for Personio to validate and update customer input when necessary.

OneSchema’s native CSV Import product fit the bill perfectly.

The Personio team could implement OneSchema without worrying about their customers having to leave the product or being introduced to a feature that didn’t match Personio’s fonts, colors, or even illustrations. Now when a Personio customer came with various different Excel documents during onboarding, they could easily input the data without ever leaving the Personio system.

Another reason Personio decided on OneSchema was the ease to which users could select which tabs in a spreadsheet they want to operate from, and even do this across multiple different files that they want to collate and aggregate. The set of validations allowed them to easily plug in from their backend and just transfer them over to OneSchema. 

IMPACT

{{quote-3}}

With easy uploading and cell adjustments, customers were no longer bottlenecked on the implementation team to fix painful spreadsheet import errors. Instead of spending hours on the same issues, Personio’s implementation team now can use the extra efficiency to optimize on their original mission: ensuring customers have a seamless experience and are able to maximize the value they’re receiving from Personio’s platform.  

{{quote-5}}

Once Personio went live with OneSchema, they found additional positive externalities of having a better data ingestion process. Today, customers are now empowered to upload their data set or multiple data sets of their employees. Combined together, Personio now gets a more comprehensive look at their customers as well as opportunities to integrate across more functions. 

Because of OneSchema’s easy-to-use validation webhooks, it’s also become part of Personio’s demo pitch to other potential prospects. In the words of Nick Singh, “I've used this a lot in our demo videos. Imagine a data set having both Munich and Munchen. But Munchen isn’t a misspelling. It’s just a different language. So we don’t want to create a different office location for Munchen employees. What customers can do is highlight Munchen in red and click on it and a window gives them the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, assign to Munich, delete the office, or perform whatever set of actions they want to do to easily resolve the issue.’”

{{quote-4}}

With the 2x improvement in onboarding efficiency, Personio has been able to reallocate their implementation team’s time to work on higher value opportunity areas, such as scaling revenue with more customers or moving upmarket in strategic accounts.

{{blog-content-cta}}

SUMMARY

Learn how Personio redesigned their data migration and onboarding process with OneSchema and reduced their import failure rates by 5x.

{{quote-1}}

With the 2x improvement in onboarding efficiency, Personio has been able to reallocate their implementation team’s time to work on higher value opportunity areas, such as scaling revenue with more customers or moving upmarket in strategic accounts.

{{blog-content-cta}}

CHALLENGE

Personio is an all-in-one HR software solution that helps small and mid-sized organizations empower their employees to be more successful. With a tagline of “Unlock the Power of Your People,” Personio offers a suite of products that includes time tracking, performance & development modules, and workforce planning.

Many of Personio’s customers start with the company’s core human resource offerings before expanding into other applications to manage their workforce. In fact, that’s a common pattern when companies look for HR software. As a company matures and grows into new needs, it will often consolidate its vendors into a couple of core platforms. 

This also creates a problem. Given that a company usually works with a handful to dozens of different vendors, they end up having lots of fragmented data that needs to be brought together. Historically, most HR companies solved that by giving customers a template to input their data. 

This came with two problems. First, each customer would have their unique flavor of attributes, which could be 50 to 100 distinct fields per employee. Filling out the template for all those employees was a painful process. And second, when the customers went to upload their carefully filled template, the uploading system might return back an error along the lines of, “Hey, this cell was empty. This location wasn't correctly entered. You misspelled this office.” The customer would then have to redownload the template, correct different fields, and upload it again and again until all the errors could be resolved.

For Nick Singh, Head of Product at Personio, he saw firsthand that this flow resulted in customers frequently giving up on switching HR platforms because they felt that “whatever I'm doing is way easier and less painful than finishing the migration process.” 

To rise above the industry standard and create a seamless data migration process, Personio hired a team of implementation managers who were dedicated to guiding customers through the onboarding journey. This ended up being both costly for Personio, and also did not solve the core issue. While customers appreciated the assistance, if something broke after the kickoff call, they were forced to book another live call and re-engage with Personio’s team to fix the problem. Moreover, Personio customers would have to schedule a time with the Personio team to ensure that their data was ingested correctly. Both parties were investing substantial time going back-and-forth to ensure a successful onboarding.

{{quote-2}}

Personio needed a solution that both improved the onboarding efficiency for their implementation managers and put less burden on their customers. To do this, they tackled the key pain point: the customer had no way to easily correct their own data. 

WHY ONESCHEMA?

Personio knew pursuing a custom in-house build to create a smooth data migration process would take a substantial amount of resources and time. Given they had a stream of customers that needed immediate onboarding and other high-priority product roadmap items to prioritize, they began to evaluate different vendors who could solve their onboarding problem. 

As product managers, engineers, and designers, the Personio team placed a large emphasis on the design and the overall end user experience. The team understood the value of a frictionless user journey and had the following design principles:

  1. Users didn’t leave the Personio product. A good experience meant the ability to embed, design, and stylistically organize the user’s interactions.
  2. Native integration within Personio. Users shouldn’t have to feel like they’re being passed off to a different thing. Everything should flow natively in the product experience.
  3. Easy to use experience for customers to change/modify errors in the file. And the ability for Personio to validate and update customer input when necessary.

OneSchema’s native CSV Import product fit the bill perfectly.

The Personio team could implement OneSchema without worrying about their customers having to leave the product or being introduced to a feature that didn’t match Personio’s fonts, colors, or even illustrations. Now when a Personio customer came with various different Excel documents during onboarding, they could easily input the data without ever leaving the Personio system.

Another reason Personio decided on OneSchema was the ease to which users could select which tabs in a spreadsheet they want to operate from, and even do this across multiple different files that they want to collate and aggregate. The set of validations allowed them to easily plug in from their backend and just transfer them over to OneSchema. 

IMPACT

{{quote-3}}

With easy uploading and cell adjustments, customers were no longer bottlenecked on the implementation team to fix painful spreadsheet import errors. Instead of spending hours on the same issues, Personio’s implementation team now can use the extra efficiency to optimize on their original mission: ensuring customers have a seamless experience and are able to maximize the value they’re receiving from Personio’s platform.  

{{quote-5}}

Once Personio went live with OneSchema, they found additional positive externalities of having a better data ingestion process. Today, customers are now empowered to upload their data set or multiple data sets of their employees. Combined together, Personio now gets a more comprehensive look at their customers as well as opportunities to integrate across more functions. 

Because of OneSchema’s easy-to-use validation webhooks, it’s also become part of Personio’s demo pitch to other potential prospects. In the words of Nick Singh, “I've used this a lot in our demo videos. Imagine a data set having both Munich and Munchen. But Munchen isn’t a misspelling. It’s just a different language. So we don’t want to create a different office location for Munchen employees. What customers can do is highlight Munchen in red and click on it and a window gives them the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, assign to Munich, delete the office, or perform whatever set of actions they want to do to easily resolve the issue.’”

{{quote-4}}

With the 2x improvement in onboarding efficiency, Personio has been able to reallocate their implementation team’s time to work on higher value opportunity areas, such as scaling revenue with more customers or moving upmarket in strategic accounts.

{{blog-content-cta}}

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