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Connector · Career services and early-career recruiting platform

Handshake MCP Server & Agent Skill

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ibl.ai publishes a free Handshake agent skill: a SKILL.md that teaches an AI agent to read and write Handshake data and expose it as an MCP tool. Download it, connect your own Handshake credentials, and run the agent on ibl.ai Agentic OS, where you own all the code and the data.

Handshake is a career network connecting students, employers and university career centers. It holds student profiles, jobs and postings, applications, appointments, career fairs, events, employer contacts and first-destination survey responses.

What is the Handshake API, and what can an agent read from it?

The EDU API exposes a school's Handshake data as tables such as Students, Applications, Appointments, Career fairs, Jobs, Employers and First destination responses. The Importer loads CSV student data via S3.

  • API: Handshake EDU API and Importer (Mixed)
  • Access: Issued by your administrator
  • Authentication: AWS access key and secret (Importer S3 upload)

Handshake grants API access only to Career Services partner schools, on request through the school's Handshake Relationship Manager, and offers it 'as-is'. Importer access and AWS credentials come from Handshake Support.

EDU API authentication is documented only behind the login-gated developers.joinhandshake.com. For the Importer, Support issues AWS credentials and a school-specific, write-only S3 path in us-east-1.

What can an agent read from Handshake?

  • Students — Students table (name, major and similar); student_id links to applications, appointments and attendance.
  • Applications — Student applications to jobs: job_id, employer_id, status, withdrawn, created_at, updated_at.
  • Appointments — Career center appointments: student_id, check-in, start and end time, type, staff member, notes.
  • Career fairs and attendance — Career fairs, sessions, student attendance and employer engagement records.
  • Jobs, postings and employers — Jobs, postings, employers, industries and employer labels for the institution.
  • First destination responses — Outcomes survey responses linked to first_destination_survey_id.

What can an agent write to Handshake?

  • Student records (Importer) — Upload a UTF-8 CSV to the school's S3 folder; the Importer creates or updates students. Handshake states an import cannot be deleted. Confirm with the user first.

Student profiles, appointments, applications and outcomes data a school shares are FERPA-protected education records.

How do I connect Handshake to an AI agent over MCP?

As of October 2026 we found no MCP server published by Handshake itself.

The practical path is to host a small MCP server that wraps the Handshake EDU API and Importer, or to give the agent the calls directly with the SKILL.md below.

On ibl.ai an MCP connection is three records, and a working integration always needs all three:

  1. Register the server — POST …/mcp-servers/ with its URL, a transport (sse, websocket or streamable_http) and an auth_type of none, token or oauth2.
  2. Create a connection that holds the credential, scoped to the whole organization (platform), to a single agent, or to each user (user).
  3. Enable it on the agent — mcp-tool in tool_slugs and the server id in mcp_servers. Both lists are replaced, not merged, so read the settings first.

For an API key or a service credential, one token connection at platform scope serves the whole organization; scope a connection to a single agent when that agent needs narrower access than the rest.

The field reference is in MCP server connections, and the /iblai-api-agent-mcp skill runs all three steps from a coding agent.

What does the Handshake agent skill do?

The Handshake skill is one SKILL.md file named iblai-connect-handshake. It gives an agent the auth conventions, what to read, which writes need a person's confirmation, the ibl.ai MCP wiring, example prompts and guardrails.

Download the Handshake SKILL.md

Save it as .claude/skills/iblai-connect-handshake/SKILL.md, or in your agent's skills folder. The ibl.ai platform skills it calls come from one install:

$ npx skills add iblai/vibe --all

This connector skill is a starting point maintained on ibl.ai, not part of the iblai/vibe repository.

It was checked against Handshake's documentation on October 20, 2026. Test it against your own Handshake setup before you rely on it.

What can I ask a Handshake agent to do?

  • “How many seniors had a career center appointment this semester?”
  • “List students who checked in at the fall career fair but have not applied to any job.”
  • “Summarize first-destination survey outcomes by major for last year's graduates.”
  • “Show which employers engaged most with our fall events.”

How do I run a Handshake agent on ibl.ai?

Agentic OS is where the agent runs on ibl.ai: it holds the Handshake MCP connection, the model the agent uses, its instructions and its conversation history.

On ibl.ai you own all the code and the data, run it model-agnostic across any LLM, and pay with no per-seat pricing — so you can deploy anywhere, from your own cloud to a fully air-gapped network.

Which ibl.ai agents work with Handshake data?

Which ibl.ai platform skills does a Handshake agent use?

What else should I know before connecting Handshake to an AI agent?

Is there an official Handshake MCP server?

Not that we found as of October 20, 2026: Handshake documents the Handshake EDU API and Importer, not an MCP server of its own.

The SKILL.md on this page gives an agent the integration directly, and any MCP server you host can be registered on ibl.ai.

Who can get Handshake API credentials?

Handshake grants API access only to Career Services partner schools, on request through the school's Handshake Relationship Manager, and offers it 'as-is'. Importer access and AWS credentials come from Handshake Support.

Does Handshake data leave my infrastructure when an ibl.ai agent uses it?

On ibl.ai, you own all the code and the data. Self-hosted in your cloud or data center, the agent, its MCP connections and its conversation logs stay inside your perimeter.

Because the platform is model-agnostic, you can point the agent at a model you host, so Handshake records need not reach a third-party model provider.

Is the Handshake agent skill free to use?

Yes. The SKILL.md is a free download with no sign-up. It assumes you already have Handshake credentials, and your agreement with Handshake still governs how you use its API.

Which other data sources can an AI agent connect to alongside Handshake?

Which other Higher Education systems have a connector?

Every connector, grouped by sector, is on the connectors hub.