Personio MCP

What this MCP does

Search and explore the AlphaPet Personio employee directory from your AI agent. Data is cached nightly from a Personio custom report — read-only, active internal employees only. Two tools:

Tool	What it does
`search_employees`	Find employees by `first_name`, `last_name`, `email`, `position`, `department`, `team`, `office`, `sub_company`, `seniority_level`, `status`, `employment_type`, or `cost_centers`. All optional, case-insensitive substring match, combined with AND.
`describe_filters`	Discover valid filter values (with counts) for every categorical field. Call this before filtering to avoid typos — e.g. office is `München`, not `Munich`.

Setup

The Personio MCP is hosted behind AlphaPet's MetaMCP gateway. Once connected, your AI agent (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, …) can query the directory through it.

Request a MetaMCP access key

Open the AccessOwl Slack app and request access to MetaMCP. The same key unlocks all gateway-hosted MCPs — Looker, Perplexity, Team Marketplace and Personio — so you only need to request it once.

Add the server to your MCP client

Pick your client below and replace YOUR_API_TOKEN_FOR_METAMCP with the key from step 1.

Cursor global config: ~/.cursor/mcp.json

Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\mcp.json · Windsurf: ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.codeium\windsurf\mcp_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "personio": {
      "url": "https://metamcp-server.swarm.ci.alpha.pet/metamcp/personio/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN_FOR_METAMCP"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor and Windsurf support Streamable HTTP natively — no bridge client needed. After editing the file, fully restart the IDE.

Run this in your terminal to register the server globally (macOS / Linux / Windows):

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user personio https://metamcp-server.swarm.ci.alpha.pet/metamcp/personio/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN_FOR_METAMCP"

--scope user makes the server available across all your Claude Code projects. --transport http tells Claude Code to speak Streamable HTTP directly — no mcp-remote bridge needed. On Windows, the command works in CMD and PowerShell; wrap the URL in quotes if your shell complains.

Cowork (Claude Code VS Code extension) uses the same registration as the CLI.

Open the integrated terminal inside Cursor / VS Code and run the Claude Code CLI command above.
Reload the window (Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window; on macOS Cmd+Shift+P) so Cowork picks up the new server.
In the Cowork chat panel type /mcp — the server should appear as connected. Use the same dialog to disable or reconnect later.

Cowork shares the same ~/.claude/ config directory as the CLI (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.claude\), so registering once covers both.

Get started

Restart your client and try:

"Show me all colleagues in the Munich office"
"Which cost centers exist? Show me the five biggest."
"Who works in the Finance team at senior level?"

Something not working? The MCP server is open source — ping #ai-tools on Slack or open an issue in the repo.