MCP servers for recruiting, and the seat none of them supplies
LinkedIn Recruiter is a separate product with its own seat, and a server cannot conjure one. 1 of the 13 servers in this directory reaches Recruiter at all, its Recruiter tools are search and messaging, and they run on a Recruiter seat that already exists on the connected account. Recruiter Lite is $170 a month, read from LinkedIn on 10 September 2026; Recruiter Corporate publishes no price. The other 11 servers here do the work either side of Recruiter — reading candidates, reading job postings, writing to people — and 4 of them do it with no LinkedIn account behind them at all.
- Seat price read from
- business.linkedin.com ↗
- Servers last read
Recruiter is a separate purchase, and the server assumes you already made it
Recruiter is not a tier of Premium and not an add-on to Sales Navigator — it is LinkedIn's own hiring product, sold per seat, with its own search, its own InMail allowance and its own interface. Every Recruiter tool in this directory drives that interface through a session signed in to an account that holds a seat. No server sells one, bundles one or works around one. So the first number in this decision is LinkedIn's, not the vendor's.
30 InMail credits, 20+ recruiting filters, search limited to your own network, and a single search stops at 1,000 results. One month on Recruiter Lite, once per account. Read from LinkedIn on 10 September 2026: what Recruiter Lite includes.
Quoted per seat on an annual contract by a LinkedIn representative. Reported figures cluster well above Recruiter Lite, but LinkedIn publishes none, so this site does not print one. What the seat carries: 150 InMail credits, the full LinkedIn network rather than your own, 40+ filters, ATS integration and shared pipelines. Sizing a quote is its own exercise: what a Recruiter Corporate quote turns on.
LinkedIn sells its own recruiting agent on top of Recruiter and publishes no price for it at any level — no list price, no per-credit price, no tier price. Sold as an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ only. Recruiter Lite cannot buy it. You must also be assigned the Hiring Assistant Permission. Read 20 September 2026: the Hiring Assistant credit tiers and what to ask on the call.
The server's record says a Recruiter seat on the connected account and does not distinguish Recruiter Lite from Recruiter Corporate. That matters, because Lite searches your own network rather than the whole one. Get it in writing from the vendor before buying a seat for an agent: what actually differs between Lite and Corporate.
US list prices in USD, excluding tax. LinkedIn bills in local currency in most markets and the converted figure is rarely a straight exchange-rate conversion, so treat this as the US baseline and confirm in your own billing page before committing to an annual term. The rest of the Recruiter pricing reference: Pricing overview, Recruiter Lite, Recruiter Corporate, Lite vs Corporate, Recruiter AI and vs Sales Navigator.
The sanctioned route into Recruiter is a signed agreement, not a portal application
LinkedIn does have recruiting APIs. They run between LinkedIn and applicant-tracking vendors, they are reached through a relationship manager and a signed agreement, and nothing on the self-serve permission list comes close. That is the reason this category is thin rather than neglected: a server cannot be built on a route it cannot enter. All four were read from LinkedIn's own documentation on 20 September 2026 and link the page they came from.
Recruiter System Connect, the integration that syncs an applicant tracking system with Recruiter, opens with this: "The use of these APIs is restricted to those developers approved by LinkedIn. Please reach out to your LinkedIn Relationship Manager or Business Development contact as you will need to meet certain criteria and sign an API agreement with data restrictions in order to use this integration." It covers ATS sync features — Rediscovered Candidates, the In-ATS Indicator, One-Click Export and InMail history retrieval — and requires a certification meeting. There is no portal application and no self-serve permission behind it. LinkedIn on Recruiter System Connect ↗
Nothing on the public access list lets an application search members or read an arbitrary member's profile. That single gap is what separates the official servers in this directory from every other one. LinkedIn on getting API access ↗
The page is titled "Restricted Uses of LinkedIn Marketing APIs and Data" and scopes itself to the Marketing API Platform, so this is a rule about that programme rather than about LinkedIn data in general. It says member data "shouldn't be used for advertising, sales, or recruiting use cases (including to identify sales or marketing prospects or prospective talent for hire, for lead creation, to enhance customer data in a CRM or marketing automation platform, to build an audience list, or for ad targeting purposes)", and lower down adds account-based marketing and sending mass messages. It also says member data "can't be exported, distributed, or otherwise transferred from your application (including to your customers)". Restricted Uses of LinkedIn Marketing APIs and Data ↗
It is restricted to approved partners, and the documentation states that "A message must be associated with a specific member action. Member actions do not include an automated or scheduled event." The member must be able to edit any prepared draft and take an affirmative action to send. The only message type is member-to-member; there is no InMail. The accurate statement is not that LinkedIn has no messaging API, but that the one it has is partner-gated and prohibits the thing an agent would do with it. LinkedIn’s Messages API documentation ↗
The restricted-use rule is scoped to the Marketing API Platform rather than to you, and it is here because it is the clearest statement LinkedIn publishes about recruiting use of its data. The rest of the platform ceiling — posting, rate limits, caching, robots.txt — is on the page about connecting LinkedIn to Claude.
Only 1 of the 13 has Recruiter tools, and they are search and messaging
Everything below is from the project's own repository and documentation, read on 20 September 2026. Read the Recruiter line before the tool count: a directory entry that says “supports Recruiter” is describing four tools out of a much larger surface, and the four do not include projects, pipelines, applicant review or an ATS.
gtm-api/linkedin-mcp
Four tools, search and messaging oriented: Recruiter people search, parameter lookup, message send and latest messages. Recent commits add contract-identifier filters to conversation and activity-log search. A Recruiter seat on the connected account is required.
A hosted service whose meta-tools expose more than 160 LinkedIn actions, discovered at runtime, including Sales Navigator and Recruiter messaging. The ones that write reach a real account, behind a server-side preview-then-confirm gate.
A gtm-api account plus a LinkedIn account connected inside the vendor dashboard. You never paste a LinkedIn cookie or password into the MCP client. The MCP credential is either the OAuth consent flow, where there is no key to paste, or a vendor API key sent as a bearer header or read from an environment variable. One mode per connection: with a key attached, the OAuth flow never starts. The connected LinkedIn account is opened in a vendor-run anti-detect cloud browser with a dedicated proxy, which is why this is filed as a browser server.
Three meta-tools. The 160-plus LinkedIn actions are discovered at runtime and invoked through the third one; the action names are not enumerated anywhere in the docs, and the bundled agent skill says never to guess one. A tool-name allowlist therefore does not bound what this server can do, which is worth knowing before an agent runs against it unattended.
Six dedicated tools rather than reused generic ones: Sales Navigator people search, company search, parameter lookup, message send, latest messages and attachment download. A Sales Navigator seat on the connected account is required; the server does not supply one.
Free plan: $0 forever, one connected account, one user, no card, with a relaxed sync cadence and capped daily activity. Paid: $39 per connected account per month for one to four accounts; five accounts is $150 a month. A dedicated mobile proxy is $15 per account per month on top. Unlimited API calls, no per-action fees. The README claims volume pricing "from $10/account at scale"; the public pricing page's visible tiers start at $39 and no $10 figure is displayed. Read 20 September 2026.
| Write action | What it does when it runs |
|---|---|
send_linkedin_connection_request | Sends a connection request. Explicitly not idempotent: a second send while one is pending returns 409. |
withdraw_linkedin_connection_request | Withdraws a pending request. |
accept_linkedin_connection_invitation | Accepts an incoming invitation. |
ignore_linkedin_connection_invitation | Ignores an incoming invitation. |
send_linkedin_message | Sends a message as the connected account. |
send_linkedin_voice_message | Sends a voice message as the connected account. |
send_linkedin_inmail | Sends an InMail, which spends the account's own credits. |
send_linkedin_sales_nav_message | Sends a message through Sales Navigator. Requires a seat on the connected account. |
send_linkedin_recruiter_message | Sends a message through Recruiter. Requires a seat on the connected account. |
react_linkedin_message | Reacts to a message in a thread. |
delete_linkedin_message_on_linkedin | Deletes a message on LinkedIn, not only in the vendor mirror. |
Those are the 11 write actions a hiring workflow reaches for, selected from this server's 19 by name rather than by hand. The other 8 publish, comment, react or open a group conversation. Every one of them produces activity under the connected account's name, and the InMail send spends that account's own credits rather than any supplied by the vendor.
How the project says to install it
claude mcp add --transport http gtm-api https://mcp.gtm-api.com/mcpWith a key instead of the OAuth consent flow, append: --header "Authorization: Bearer gtm_live_..."
The config block it publishes
{
"mcpServers": {
"gtm-api": {
"url": "https://mcp.gtm-api.com/mcp"
}
}
}Copied unedited from the gtm-api/linkedin-mcp repository ↗, read 20 September 2026. One thing the block does not carry: Claude Code's documentation says an entry with a url and no type is reported as a configuration error, which is why the project also publishes the command above — it sets the transport for you. Claude Code's MCP documentation ↗ The four client config shapes, each from its vendor's own page, are on the directory.
The full record — every read action, all 19 writes, the security notes, the caveats and the alternatives — is on the gtm-api/linkedin-mcp profile.
The same question asked of all 13, including the ones that answer no
A category page that printed only the servers with a Recruiter tool would be one row long and would tell you nothing about the ones you will actually end up using. This is the Recruiter line from every record in the directory, in the words of the record. Several of them say the job tools are candidate-side — public job search, job detail lookups, your own saved jobs — and that distinction is the one most tool lists blur.
| Server | Its hiring surface, in its own record |
|---|---|
| Subio Scrape | Not supported. No Recruiter support, for the same reason: Recruiter is behind a login. |
| Bright Data MCP (LinkedIn tools) | Not supported. The job tool reads public job-posting pages. There is no access to Recruiter seats, projects, applicant pipelines or InMail. |
| Anysite MCP Server | Not supported. No LinkedIn Recruiter endpoints exist in the API reference. The only recruiting-adjacent sources are unrelated applicant tracking systems. |
| Insaight | Not supported. No Recruiter, Recruiter Lite or applicant-tracking surface. |
| LinkedIn Ads MCP Server | Not supported. No LinkedIn Recruiter functionality. |
| eliasbiondo/linkedin-mcp-server | Not supported. No Recruiter, Talent or hiring-seat code path exists anywhere in the source. |
| stickerdaniel/linkedin-mcp-server | Not supported. The job tools are candidate-side: job search, job details and your own saved jobs. They read public postings, not a Recruiter seat. |
| La Growth Machine MCP | Not supported. No Recruiter tool, no Recruiter seat integration, no InMail tool. Recruiter appears twice in the repository, both times in passing. |
| Linked API MCP | Not supported. Nothing in the registered tools touches Recruiter or Recruiter Lite — the word does not appear in the source. The README markets a recruitment use case, but that is served by the ordinary search, fetch and message tools. |
| gtm-api/linkedin-mcp | Partial. Four tools, search and messaging oriented: Recruiter people search, parameter lookup, message send and latest messages. Recent commits add contract-identifier filters to conversation and activity-log search. A Recruiter seat on the connected account is required. |
| LinkedGrow | Not supported. No mention of LinkedIn Recruiter anywhere in the README, the MCP docs, the route source or the hosted site. |
| southleft/linkedin-mcp | Not supported. Not supported. Neither Recruiter nor InMail appears in the README. The job tools are limited to public job search and job detail lookups, over the browser-session path. |
| linkedincli | Not supported. No Recruiter tools, no project or pipeline management, no candidate sourcing beyond ordinary people search. |
One record in the directory does no part of a recruiter's job and is left out of the groups below: LinkedIn Ads MCP Server, which runs on LinkedIn's Marketing API and reports on ad campaigns. The rule for inclusion is stated rather than editorial: a server is here if it reads people or companies, writes to people, or reaches Recruiter.
The sanctioned route contributes nothing to this page, and that is the finding rather than an omission
12 servers do some part of a recruiter's work, and they sit in 4 of the 5 authentication classes. The empty one is LinkedIn's own OAuth. What each class is, and the ceiling it carries for anybody, is argued on the directory; what it is worth for filling a role is below.
Sees a candidate the way a signed-out visitor sees them — a name, a headline, the current role — and only for as long as LinkedIn keeps serving a client with no session. Enough to turn profile URLs you already hold into a table, and not enough to find anybody you have not already found.
The same public pages, fetched by somebody else at volume and billed per record. The bill arrives whether or not the candidate was a fit, and it still does not buy the open-to-work signal, the shared connections or any way to make contact.
Bright Data MCP (LinkedIn tools), Anysite MCP Server, Insaight
Nothing, and not for want of anyone building it. The restricted-use page for the one LinkedIn API programme a developer can actually reach names prospective talent for hire as an excluded purpose.
The one server holding a LinkedIn developer app, LinkedIn Ads MCP Server, runs on that programme and reports on ad campaigns.
Reaches whatever your seat reaches, Recruiter included, by driving a signed-in browser as you. Every profile view and every message is recorded against the member account the seat is assigned to, which is the class where a mistake costs the seat rather than a bill.
eliasbiondo/linkedin-mcp-server, stickerdaniel/linkedin-mcp-server, La Growth Machine MCP, Linked API MCP, gtm-api/linkedin-mcp (Recruiter tools), LinkedGrow
The same reach without the browser. The session string it replays is full access to the account it was taken from, and it lives wherever you put it — a config file, an environment variable, a hosted vendor’s database.
7 of these 12 can act on LinkedIn as you and 5 cannot. That split, not the tool count, is what decides whether a mistake costs money or costs the account the Recruiter seat is attached to.
Four credentials, and the Recruiter tools exist on only one of them
The 4 columns are chosen by a rule rather than by preference: one server per authentication class present on this page, taking the one with a Recruiter surface where the class has one and the most-starred otherwise, read on 20 September 2026. Read the boxed column and the leftmost one together. One reaches Recruiter and writes to candidates from your account; the other reaches nothing behind a login and cannot get an account restricted, because there is no account to restrict.
| Subio ScrapeNo account — 35★ | Bright Data MCP (LinkedIn tools)Vendor API key — 2,655★ | gtm-api/linkedin-mcpBrowser session — 90★ | linkedincliSession cookie — 57★ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it hands LinkedIn | No account | Vendor API key | Browser session | Session cookie |
| Reaches the Recruiter product | No | No | Partial | No |
| Needs a Recruiter seat you already hold | No Recruiter surface | No Recruiter surface | Yes, your own | No Recruiter surface |
| Sales Navigator | No | No | Yes | No |
| Your LinkedIn account is behind it | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Writes to LinkedIn | Read only | Read only | 19 actions | 17 actions |
| Account exposure | Low | Low | High | High |
| Tools registered | 7 | 69 | 3 meta-tools | 43 |
| Where it runs | Self-hosted | Either | Hosted by the vendor | Self-hosted |
| Setup | Easy | Easy | Easy | Moderate |
| Maintenance | Active | Active | Active | Active |
Star counts and commit dates were read from the GitHub API on 20 September 2026 and are the figures here that age by the hour. Full records, with every tool, every write action and the project's own config block, are on Subio Scrape, Bright Data MCP (LinkedIn tools), gtm-api/linkedin-mcp and linkedincli.
The allowances are the plan's, and an agent spends them faster than a person does
These are member-side and seat-side ceilings. They hold whether the message was typed or generated, they are not lifted by any server in this directory, and the first three are the ones a sourcing agent runs into within a week. Budget against them before wiring anything up.
Per seat, per month, and the one server with an InMail tool spends those credits rather than supplying any. how InMail credits accrue, expire and come back.
Unused credits expire. They accrue to at most three times the monthly allowance, and a credit is returned if the recipient replies within 90 days.
Applies on every plan including Recruiter Corporate. LinkedIn adjusts it per account based on acceptance rate, so a low-acceptance account gets less, never more.
Both Recruiter tiers stop a single search at 1,000 results, paginated. It is a limit of the product rather than of the client, so a server paging through it hits exactly the same wall you do. every LinkedIn ceiling, with the date each was checked.
Allowances from LinkedIn's published plan pages, read on 10 September 2026. An agent working a shortlist overnight can empty a month of InMail before anyone reads the first reply, and a credit spent on a candidate who does not answer within 90 days is not returned. Sizing that is arithmetic rather than judgement: the plan limits calculator takes a plan and gives back what a week of it looks like.
A restriction lands on the member account the Recruiter seat is attached to
This is the record rather than a warning or a recommendation. It matters more on this page than anywhere else in the directory, because the account behind a recruiting workflow is usually the account carrying a paid seat, a pipeline and a year of candidate conversations.
“Use bots or other unauthorized automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages, create, comment on, like, share, or re-share posts, or otherwise drive inauthentic engagement.” There is no exception for an agent acting at a member's direction. Section 8.2 of the User Agreement ↗
A Recruiter seat is assigned to a member, and LinkedIn's prohibited-software page says members who use automated tools risk having their accounts restricted or shut down. The software is not what gets acted on. LinkedIn's prohibited-software page ↗
A headline, an About section and an inbound reply are all text a stranger wrote, arriving as a tool result to a model that also holds a send tool. That is the standing MCP risk, and it is sharper in sourcing than in research because the same session that reads a profile can message the person it belongs to. the attack classes, with an example from each server
A generated fit summary is a hiring decision with a paper trail, and the paper trail is whatever the model was given. The recruiting context files here split a role into what a profile can evidence and what it cannot, and keep protected characteristics and their proxies out of the criteria: the recruiting prompts and context files.
We found no LinkedIn statement about AI agents acting on a member's behalf, in recruiting or anywhere else. That is an absence of evidence rather than a permission: the governing text remains Section 8.2 and the prohibited-software policy, both written in terms of bots, scripts and automated methods. This page describes what each route is and what it exposes. It does not recommend running any of them, and nothing on it certifies a tool as compliant, because nothing in LinkedIn's documents supports that word.
Most of the sourcing work is text work, and text work needs no server at all
A Boolean search you paste into Recruiter yourself, a role broken into evidenceable requirements, an outreach message written against a credit budget — none of that requires a tool holding your session. It requires the model to know what your plan allows, which is the one thing a prompt written elsewhere never carries.
Sourcing and candidate outreach sized to a finite credit allowance, with the role split into what a profile can evidence and what it cannot: the recruiting section of the AI toolkit.
Talent map, Boolean searches, an evidence-based shortlist and outreach that fits the month: the multi-step workflows.
10 third-party recruiting tools, sorted by the same question this directory sorts servers by: what each one reaches LinkedIn with.
The AI features on a Recruiter seat you may already be paying for, and the one sold on top of it: Recruiter AI and Hiring Assistant.
The questions people arrive with, answered directly
Is there a LinkedIn Recruiter MCP server?
Not one LinkedIn publishes, and only one of the 13 community servers reaches Recruiter at all. Its Recruiter surface is search and messaging — Recruiter people search, the parameter lookup behind it, a Recruiter message send and a list of your latest Recruiter messages — and it requires a Recruiter seat on the connected account. It does not supply the seat, and it does not reach projects, pipelines, applicant review or an applicant tracking system. Every other server in the directory has no Recruiter surface of any kind, which their own records say in the table on this page.
Can an MCP server source candidates from LinkedIn?
It can read people, which is most of sourcing, and 12 of the 13 servers here do some of it. What decides the answer is the credential. 4 of them hold no LinkedIn account at all: they read public profile, company and job pages through a data vendor or a signed-out request, so there is no seat and no member account involved. The rest drive your own signed-in session, which reaches what you can reach and carries the exposure that goes with it. Neither route is LinkedIn's own API, because no self-serve LinkedIn permission returns another member's profile.
Can an agent send InMail from my Recruiter seat?
One server registers an InMail send, and its own record says the action spends the account's own credits. That is the number to look at before the tool: Recruiter Lite includes 30 InMail credits a month and Recruiter Corporate 150, unused credits expire after 90 days, and no server adds any. It is also not a sanctioned send, because LinkedIn's own messaging API has no InMail message type at all — quoted in full further up this page. A server that sends InMail is driving your session.
Does LinkedIn have a recruiting API an agent could use instead?
It has Talent Solutions APIs, and they are not something a developer can apply for. Recruiter System Connect requires a LinkedIn Relationship Manager or Business Development contact, criteria to meet, a signed API agreement with data restrictions and a certification meeting. Separately, the Marketing API programme forbids using member data from it for recruiting — its restricted-use page names "prospective talent for hire" explicitly. So the sanctioned route into Recruiter exists, it runs between LinkedIn and applicant-tracking vendors, and it is not open to the person reading this.
Will automated sourcing get my Recruiter seat restricted?
Nobody can promise it will not, and what is different here is the stake rather than the rule. A Recruiter seat is assigned to a member account, so a restriction lands on the account the seat was bought for, together with the pipeline and the conversations in it. The clause and the enforcement note are quoted in LinkedIn's words further up this page. 4 of the servers here put no LinkedIn account behind them at all, and they are also the ones that cannot reach Recruiter.
What does a Recruiter seat cost, and does a server include one?
No server includes one. Recruiter Lite is $170 a month or $1,680 a year per seat, read from LinkedIn on 10 September 2026. Recruiter Corporate publishes no list price at all. Quoted per seat on an annual contract by a LinkedIn representative. Reported figures cluster well above Recruiter Lite, but LinkedIn publishes none, so this site does not print one. Hiring Assistant, the agent LinkedIn itself sells on top of Recruiter, has no published price at any level — not a list price, not a per-credit price, not a tier price.
Which servers can read a candidate profile without my LinkedIn account?
4 of them, and they divide into two arrangements. The no-credential route — 1 of the 4 — sees only what LinkedIn serves a visitor with no session, which is a shallow profile and a short run before the wall. The remaining 3 run on a third-party data vendor's API key, where the vendor's own infrastructure does the fetching and bills you per record or per month. Neither arrangement can be restricted, because neither uses an account of yours. The exposure does not vanish — it moves from your account to the vendor's relationship with LinkedIn.
Is there a free MCP server for recruiting?
Several are free to install, and on this page none of them is free to run, because the software is not the expensive part. The server that reaches Recruiter publishes a permanently free tier for a single connected account and still needs a Recruiter seat behind it: $170 a month for Lite, an unpublished figure for Corporate. The 4 servers with no LinkedIn account behind them are the only ones with no LinkedIn bill either, and they are the ones that cannot reach Recruiter. What each server itself charges is on its profile, in the vendor's own figure with the day it was read.
Price the seat first, then pick the server
1 of the 13 servers reaches Recruiter and it needs a seat you already hold. 4 of the 12 on this page need no LinkedIn account at all, and those are the ones that cannot get one restricted.