Personio eyes more jobs for Dublin as it raises further $270m

Personio, a HR tech company with its headquarters in Munich, could create considerably more than the 500 or so jobs already envisaged at its Dublin operation, co-founder and chief executive Hanno Renner has said.

Speaking as the company completed a new $270 million funding round that values it at $6.3 billion, Mr Renner said Dublin was central to Personio’s plans to become one of the largest software companies in the world.

Personio, founded in 2015, has developed an all-in-one HR software platform for small and medium-sized companies with 10-2,000 employees that covers a wide range of tasks, including recruitment, payroll and performance reviews. Its Irish operation is led by Geraldine McCarthy, who also serves as the company’s chief revenue officer.

Personio, which has just launched into a new software category with its recently released People Workflow Automation product, established operations in Dublin in April 2020. Early last year it announced plans to expand its international business and software engineering hub with 140 additional roles. Personio has since said it expects to have more than 500 employees locally.

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Engineering hub

By year-end, at least 100 of Personio’s Dublin workforce will be engineers. Mr Renner said he hadn’t expected the company would end up building products from here.

"We started with the aim of establishing Dublin as our European go-to market for everything outside of Germany and Spain and that has worked really well. But I didn't anticipate that it would become such an important product and engineering location as well," Mr Renner said.

“We’ve been able to hire an immense amount of talent and despite only really starting to make the first hires in Dublin last August, we’re now up to about 130 people overall, and the office we are in has space for 250 but we’re growing so quickly we are looking for bigger premises. There is availability of great talent in Dublin, and we’ve found people who not only have experience in software but who are also a really great fit culturally.”

Personio has increased the number of international customers, and Mr Renner said that at the rate the company was expanding, even more jobs could be created in Dublin in the coming years.

“We now have 5,000 customers, but there are 1.7 million organisations with 10-2,000 employees and we’re not even at 0.3 per cent of the entire market we are targeting,” he said. “This means there’s so much growth still ahead of us, and we believe that by serving these customers, we can build one of the largest software companies in the world.”

Mr Renner noted the recent appointment of Spotify chief human resources officer Katarina Berg to Personio's board. Ms Berg led Spotify's strategy during the transition from a start-up with about 1,000 employees to a global category leader with 7,000 people.