Handshake API
No general public REST API. A read-only, institution-scoped EDU API exists in beta for Career Services partners, granted through a Relationship Manager. Employers get an XML job feed capped at 5,000 jobs; there is no OAuth, sandbox, webhook, or SDK surface anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Handshake scores D on Supergood's API Report Card. No general public REST API. A read-only, institution-scoped EDU API exists in beta for Career Services partners, granted through a Relationship Manager. Employers get an XML job feed capped at 5,000 jobs; there is no OAuth, sandbox, webhook, or SDK surface anywhere.
Without a usable official API, teams fall back on manual exports, file drops, or one-off vendor integrations. The other option is an unofficial API layer like Supergood that automates the authenticated web app directly. Site terms may apply to any integration approach, and how they apply is a determination each team makes for itself.
Handshake is the dominant U.S. early-career and college recruiting network, founded in 2014 at Michigan Technological University by Garrett Lord (CEO), Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski as a unified national alternative to the patchwork of campus-by-campus career-services job boards (Symplicity CSM, NACElink, Purple Briefcase, and assorted homegrown systems).
Vertical: Enterprise / HR / ERP, specifically the early-career / campus-recruiting slice (Sanity vertical: Enterprise/HR/ERP; Airtable bucket: misc). Student account creation and verification via university SSO (Okta, Shibboleth, Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra). Job and internship search, filtering, and AI-mediated job matching for students.
Near-universal in U.S. four-year college campus recruiting, 1,600+ universities and 18M+ students/alumni gives Handshake an effective monopoly on the student side of the early-career funnel in the U.S., comparable to LinkedIn's grip on the experienced-hire side.
Students / Alumni: name, university, major(s), GPA, expected / actual graduation date, work authorization, demographic / EEO responses, resume(s), cover letters, profile completeness, engagement signals.
Founded 2014 in Houghton, Michigan; headquartered in San Francisco; ~11-12 years old as of 2026.
Supergood's grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? Supergood checks six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and rolls them into a letter grade. Supergood re-verifies grades, and they only move on evidence.
Not that we could find. As of August 2026 there is no official Handshake MCP server in any public registry, and no maintained community server we're aware of. We re-verify this periodically — report an inaccuracy below if we missed one.
Not natively. Handshake doesn't publish an MCP server, so MCP clients like Claude, Cursor, and Codex have nothing to connect to out of the box. If that changes, this page will reflect it.