Global
Argentina
Chile
Colombia
Mexico
Peru
United States
Superpower AI
When you source candidates on Get on Board, an MCP server is a doorway that lets the AI tool you already use — Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, or Cursor — work with an outside service directly, using your own account and permissions. Get on Board runs one at https://www.getonbrd.com/mcp, so those tools can search the Talent Database and read your open job postings without copy-pasting or custom code. This article is for recruiters; you don’t need to be a developer to understand or use it.
The problem an MCP server solves
Out of the box, tools like Claude or ChatGPT only know what you paste into the conversation. If you want them to work with real candidate data, you have two bad options: copy profiles into the chat by hand, or ask a developer to build a custom integration for every tool you use.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that removes both. A service like Get on Board publishes one MCP server, and any compatible tool can connect to it. Think of it as a standard doorway: the service decides which doors exist and who can open them, and the tool you use walks through them on your behalf.
Because it is an open protocol, you are not locked into one vendor’s agent. You bring whichever tool your team already works with, and it connects to the same server with the same rules.
What this looks like in a recruiter’s day
Once your tool is connected to Get on Board’s MCP server, you can write requests in plain language and it uses the server’s tools to answer. The current tools are:
whoami: confirms which Get on Board account and company you are connected as.search_talent: searches the Talent Database from a plain-text brief — “senior React developer in Colombia with advanced English”, written the way you’d say it.talent_profile: reads one candidate in depth — background, skills, tags, and quiz traits — so you can compare finalists without opening each profile.list_jobs: lists your company’s active hiring processes.job_details: pulls the full description and questionnaire of one of your job postings, so a search can start from the role you already published instead of a re-typed brief.
A concrete example: “Read my open Backend Engineer job and find 10 matching candidates in Chile or Peru; summarize the top 5.” Your tool calls list_jobs, then job_details, then search_talent, and hands you a shortlist with Get on Board profile links — one conversation instead of an afternoon of tabs.
What an MCP server does not let a tool do
The doorway is deliberately narrow. Through Get on Board’s MCP server, a connected tool can search and read — nothing else:
- It never receives contact data: no emails, phone numbers, CV files, or social links.
- It cannot unlock candidates, invite them to a process, or apply to jobs. Unlocking contact details stays in the Get on Board web app, where you spend credits with the usual confirmation flow.
- It only sees what your own account can see, for the one company you authorized, and every access can be revoked.
This is the key difference from the DIY stack of enrichment tools (Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo) that agentic workflows often chain together: those trade scraped contact data that the people involved never handed over. On Get on Board the professionals own their data — they opted in to be found — and the MCP server is built so that ownership survives the connection. What crosses the doorway is a search result and a profile summary, not a contact list. For the full capability rundown, see What is the Get on Board MCP Server?
How you connect (no developer needed)
Setup is one URL. You paste https://www.getonbrd.com/mcp into your tool’s connector or MCP settings, a browser window opens, you sign in to Get on Board, pick the company to authorize, and approve. No API keys, no tokens to copy, nothing to install. The connection expires after 2 hours, so re-authorizing during a long session is normal.
Step-by-step guides per tool:
MCP access is available to recruiter team members with accepted access to a company on Get on Board. It is not available on the professional side.
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