Connect your HR-stuff to Claude & ChatGPT with MCP
(Easier Than You Think)
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Happy Saturday,
I finally had the time to record a video! And this one is about MCPs.
We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, but this is the practical version of it - this is how you do it!
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!
The walkthrough (video transcription)
Can you connect your HR system, your employee engagement system, your ATS to Claude or to ChatGPT? Yes, potentially you can, and you do that through something called MCP. And the one who is going to explain all of this to you is me. I am Johannes Sundlo, and I help organizations, and especially leaders in HR, to understand what is going on in this world of AI, with a focus on how you actually do the stuff as well.
I am going to show you MCP connectors today. If you have no clue what an MCP connector is, I have a link below where I explain what an MCP connector is and how you utilize it. But today I am going to show you how you connect it to Claude and to ChatGPT. So let us jump right over.
Claude
This is Claude, the web version of Claude. I am going to show you how to add an MCP connector into Claude, and I am going to do that by showcasing a demo. So it is a demo MCP. You should be able to play around with it, because it is non-sensitive information. It is read only. It is from my blog and from Ethan Mollick’s Substack as well, so it is quite non-sensitive information. But this is how you do it.
You click customize, and then you are taken to this screen. On this screen, you click Connectors. Once here, you click on the little plus sign. You can either browse connectors, which are pre-made connectors that Claude has already provided you with and that you can easily connect to, for example Figma or Notion. If I wanted to connect to Figma or Notion, I could easily just click the plus sign, and then I am taken to a login site where I have to connect the two.
You can also search. So let us search, for example, for Workday. It is not available here. So if you want to connect something like Workday or something else, and you have an MCP server at your disposal, and you need an MCP server at your disposal to connect the two, then this is how you do it.
We close this one, we click on the plus sign, we add a custom connector, we write the name, “morning brief” for this one, and then I drop in the URL to my MCP server. In this case, I am good to go, because I do not have any authentication here, so you can just access this MCP server.
But if you are trying to connect Workday or your ATS or anything else, most likely they will ask for authentication, and you get that from your vendor or from your IT department. It is probably a good idea to include your IT department in this. If you are thinking about connecting an MCP server into your environment, it is always good to check with them, because this poses a security risk to some extent. If you let Claude, for example, write stuff back through your system, that could be a risk. In this case, we are only going to allow read. So we are only going to read stuff from the MCP server. That is less risky, so I am fine with this.
I am now going to add this MCP server, and then we are good to go. We can try it here by creating a new chat and saying, “Check my morning brief.” I think that is enough. We will see. But I think it will understand that, okay, I am going to see now if I have anything connected to morning brief. And yes, it spins up the MCP server immediately. Now it checks the latest text from Ethan Mollick in this instance, and it is most likely going to pull my stuff as well. We will see. Yes, my stuff is coming below Ethan, which is the right order, in all honesty.
So that was Claude. That is how you connect an MCP server into Claude.
ChatGPT
Let us jump over to ChatGPT and see the same thing here. What we do in ChatGPT is that we click Apps. We have the same experience here, where you have pre-installed apps that you can easily connect to. But that is not what we are going to do here either.
We are going to click on the settings bar in the top right corner. We scroll down to Advanced settings. We click Developer mode, and we enable that. They say this is an elevated risk, so once again, be a bit cautious and involve your IT department if that is something you want to do. Some IT departments have disabled this as well, so it might be that you do not see this. But if you are able to click on Developer mode, then what you see is that you have the option to create an app.
That is what we are going to do. We call it the morning brief again. Let us see, because I saw there was lingering stuff from my old demos here. But “create a morning brief,” we will say. Authentication, no authentication on this one, and I understand the risks. Then we create it.
Now ChatGPT has evaluated the MCP server, and it is good to go. But we also need to connect it. So we basically said, “Look at this MCP server and make sure everything is good and dandy.” Once that is done, we need to click Connect. And there we go, now we are connected.
Wrapping up
That is how you add MCP servers both to Claude and to ChatGPT. The benefit of this is, of course, that you can now start talking to your data. In this instance it is a bit silly, in all honesty. It is just the newsletters. But you understand the basics of it, and this is how you add an MCP server. So it is fairly simple, I would say. But always, of course, be cautious and involve your IT department when you add stuff like this.
That is it for today, and I will catch you in the next one.
New to MCP? Read the primer first: Connectors and MCP, explained for people who have never touched either.