Connect your AI Agents to SmartRecruiters in minutes

What is a SmartRecruiters MCP?

It's an MCP server that gives your agents direct access to recruiting data and operations in SmartRecruiters through a set of callable tools. Your agents can invoke these tools to search candidate records, retrieve job listings, track application status, update candidate profiles, and more.

SmartRecruiters offers an official MCP server, but you can also use one from a third-party platform, like Merge Agent Handler.

How can I use the SmartRecruiters MCP server?

The use cases naturally depend on the agent you've built, but here are a few common ones:

• Inbound candidate triage: When a new application comes in for a high-priority role, an agent pulls the candidate's details from SmartRecruiters, scores them against a defined criteria set, and posts a structured summary to a recruiter's Slack channel, so the team can prioritize review without manual screening

• Cross-system sourcing sync: When a candidate is identified through a sourcing tool like LinkedIn, an agent creates or updates their record in SmartRecruiters with enriched profile data, ensuring the ATS stays current without requiring the recruiter to manually enter information in two places

• Interview pipeline digest for hiring managers: On a recurring schedule, an agent queries SmartRecruiters for all active candidates across a hiring manager's open roles, compiles stage-by-stage progress, and delivers a concise update to their inbox, replacing ad-hoc status meetings

• Offer acceptance to HRIS handoff: When a candidate's application status reaches an offer-accepted stage in SmartRecruiters, an agent retrieves their full profile and triggers a new employee record creation in the connected HRIS, reducing the gap between hiring and onboarding setup

What are popular tools for SmartRecruiters' MCP server?

Here are some of the most commonly used tools:

• list_candidates: retrieves a filtered list of candidates across active jobs, including name, contact details, and current application stage. Useful for agents that need a pipeline overview before generating a recruiter report or routing follow-up actions

• get_candidate: fetches the complete profile for a single candidate, including application history, attached documents, and stage notes. Call this when an agent needs precise detail about one individual rather than a broad list pull

• create_candidate: adds a new candidate record to SmartRecruiters with profile data sourced from an external system. Good for workflows that automatically push sourced prospects from a sourcing tool or enrichment platform into the ATS

• update_candidate: modifies an existing candidate's record, such as adding contact information, updating tags, or attaching notes from an interview. Use this when an agent processes information from another tool and needs to keep SmartRecruiters as the system of record

• list_jobs: returns open and closed job listings with title, department, location, and status. Helpful when an agent needs to match inbound candidates to current openings or validate that a requisition is still active before taking a downstream action

• list_applications: pulls application records tied to a specific job or candidate, including submission date, current stage, and assigned recruiter. Call this when an agent needs to track pipeline volume or detect stalled applications that have had no stage movement

What makes Merge Agent Handler's SmartRecruiters MCP server better than alternative SmartRecruiters MCP servers?

Here is why Merge Agent Handler stands out from other ways to connect agents to SmartRecruiters:

• Enterprise-grade security and DLP: Merge Agent Handler includes built-in data loss prevention controls that let you block or redact sensitive fields before they reach an agent. For SmartRecruiters, this means you can prevent candidate personal identifiers, compensation expectations, or background check outcomes from being surfaced to agents that only need job and stage data

• Managed authentication and credentials: Merge stores and refreshes your SmartRecruiters credentials on your behalf. You never pass raw API keys or OAuth tokens directly to an agent, and token expiration doesn't silently break a running workflow

• Real-time observability and audit trail: Every SmartRecruiters tool call is logged with timestamp, tool name, input parameters, and response metadata. You can trace exactly which candidate records an agent read or modified without writing any custom logging code

• Tool Packs and controlled access: Tool Packs let you bundle specific SmartRecruiters tools alongside tools from other connectors into a single scoped MCP endpoint, purpose-built for one use case. A sourcing agent gets create_candidate and list_jobs. It never sees interview notes or offer details it has no reason to access.

How can I start using Merge Agent Handler's SmartRecruiters MCP server?

You can take the following steps (assuming you use Claude Code):

1. Create or log into your Merge Agent Handler account.

2. Install the Merge CLI by running pipx install merge-api, then run merge configure to link the CLI to your Merge account and merge login to authenticate your session.

3. Register the Agent Handler MCP server with Claude Code by running claude mcp add --transport http agent-handler https://ah-api.merge.dev/mcp, then open Claude Code and run /mcp to confirm agent-handler appears with a connected status.

4. Select agent-handler from the MCP list. This opens a browser window where you select which integrations to authenticate. Choose SmartRecruiters and complete the auth flow. Merge stores and manages the credentials going forward.

5. Open a Claude Code session and start querying SmartRecruiters data directly. The first time you use a SmartRecruiters tool, a Magic Link may appear to complete connector authentication.

If you want to connect Merge Agent Handler's SmartRecruiters MCP with internal or customer-facing agentic products, you can follow the steps in our docs.

Can employees use Merge Agent Handler to connect their AI tools to SmartRecruiters?

Yes, Agent Handler for Employees lets your employees connect Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible AI tools to SmartRecruiters without bypassing IT governance.

Instead of setting up direct connections with personal credentials that IT can't monitor or revoke, each employee authenticates through Agent Handler and gets individual credentials tied to their identity. A recruiter can ask their AI to look up a candidate, check where they are in the pipeline, or pull a list of open roles, all within the permissions IT has defined.

IT also provisions access by role or group via SCIM. A recruiter, for example, gets SmartRecruiters access to manage candidates and job listings, LinkedIn to source and enrich profiles, and Slack to coordinate interview scheduling with hiring teams; while a hiring manager gets SmartRecruiters access to review applicants and pipeline progress, Greenhouse to track cross-team requisitions, and Outlook to manage interview communications.

Every tool call an employee's AI makes to SmartRecruiters is also inspected against your DLP rules and logged to a searchable audit trail, giving security teams full visibility into what data was accessed and by whom.