You’re Not Hidden Behind Your ERP

There’s a quiet belief, widespread among HR leadership, and it’s going to cost you dearly. It fits in one sentence: my job is protected, because my data and my processes live inside a big locked-down piece of software — my ERP, my HRIS, my ATS. A fortress. Nobody touches it without the vendor.

That fortress has just lost its walls. And the culprit has a three-letter name: MCP.

What an MCP is, without the jargon

Think back to when every device had its own charger. One cable per brand, a drawer full of useless wires. Then USB-C came along, one single plug, and everything connected to everything.

MCP is the USB-C of artificial intelligence. A single standard that lets you connect a piece of software, through its technical interface, directly to an AI. In plain terms, you plug your system into a large language model, and the AI can now read, write and act inside that system, in everyday language, simply because you asked.

This is no lab promise. In eighteen months, MCP became the standard for the entire industry. Launched by Anthropic in late 2024, it was adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and AWS, then handed over to an independent foundation so that no one would own it. The development kit went from one hundred thousand downloads a month to ninety-seven million. When tech’s fiercest rivals all adopt the same plug in under two years, that’s not a fad. It’s a tipping point.

What it changes, as told by my weekend

Let me give you an example I just lived through, one you’ll be able to verify by the time you read these lines.

I work on Jarvi, my candidate management software. Jarvi just released its MCP. In half a day — a single one — I started cleaning a database of more than twenty thousand contacts. Putting phone numbers back into the right format. Overhauling the entire naming scheme. Bringing order to chaos accumulated over years.

Ask yourself, if you’re in the business. Who in recruiting can brag about having a truly clean database? In twenty years, I never managed it. Not once. Now it’s happening, and for the first time in my career I’m going to have a clean candidate database, GDPR-compliant, partly self-cleaning, and working. By the time this article comes out, it will be done.

The wall becomes a door

That’s why your fortress has changed in nature. Yesterday, your software locked you inside its features. If the vendor hadn’t planned a feature, it didn’t exist, period. You waited for the next release, sometimes for years.

With an MCP, that wall becomes a door. Any process in your company, the moment you can state it clearly, you can automate directly inside the system. And even if your software never planned for this or that feature, you can add it on top. The tool’s capability is no longer decided by the vendor alone. It’s decided by whoever can articulate what they want.

There’s good news in there, and a threat. The good news: you can finally make your systems do what you’d been dreaming of. The threat: someone else will do it in your place if you don’t.

Where this becomes my job

And this is where I start pushing further. I now work directly with ATS vendors — the recruiting software makers — to see how far we can go. Improving metrics, building dashboards the software can’t produce natively, connecting the data to external AIs. Because we now have access to the data, and by adding a recruiter’s knowledge of the craft, we should pull off things an ATS, by its very nature, can’t do.

I don’t know yet whether it deserves to be called a skill. But one thing is certain: tackling problems that were strictly impossible yesterday, as long as the vendor hadn’t shipped them, doesn’t scare me. Quite the opposite.

The realm of the possible just blew wide open. Enormously. The only question left is who’s going to rush in. Your software vendor. An outside contractor. Or you.