The best job posting API is the one whose source matches your product: paid data APIs for aggregated jobs with company and tech filters, publisher and community feeds for free or low-cost listings, and an applicant tracking system's public API for one employer's own careers page. Pick the source first, then compare fields, freshness and billing.
Pick the wrong kind of job API and you'll find out a fortnight into the build. The classic version: someone wires up an applicant tracking system's job board API for a niche job site, then discovers it only returns the postings of the one company whose board they queried. Greenhouse and Ashby both work this way by design. It's perfect for a careers page and useless for aggregation. That single mix-up is why this guide sorts by where the jobs come from before anything else.
Three kinds of job API, side by side
| Where the jobs come from | On this list | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| Paid data APIs that collect jobs from many sites | Fantastic.jobs, TheirStack, JobsPikr | Job boards, recruiting tools, labour-market research |
| Publisher and community feeds | Adzuna API, Careerjet API, Arbeitnow, Remotive, Jobicy | Sites that display job ads, remote and regional boards |
| An employer's own applicant tracking system | Greenhouse Job Board API, Ashby Job Postings API | A company's careers page or internal tools |
The middle row needs one more split. Adzuna and Careerjet issue API keys to publishers who show the job ads on their own sites, so you're joining a programme as much as calling an endpoint. Arbeitnow, Remotive and Jobicy are smaller public feeds with a narrower scope: two of them are remote-only, and one focuses on Germany and wider Europe.
Run this test before you write the integration
An hour spent on this saves a rewrite. Use a real search your users would run, with real values, not a sample query from the docs.
- Write down one target search, for example "backend developer, remote, Berlin time zone, salary shown", and the ten jobs you'd expect a good answer to contain.
- Call each candidate with that search and save the raw JSON, not just the count of results.
- Count how many returned jobs carry a salary, a company name you can match to a website, and a direct application link. Those three fields decide whether your product feels finished.
- Open five of the returned jobs on the employer's own site and check they're still live. Stale listings are the fastest way to lose a job seeker's trust.
- Read the terms page for display rules: attribution, branding and whether you may store results or must fetch them fresh each time.
- Work out what the test volume would cost at your launch traffic under each vendor's billing model, then double it for the first busy month.
Paid job data with filters and history
Fantastic.jobs
A small team's hosted API serving career-site and job-board listings, refreshed close to real time, for developers building job search products.
TheirStack
When the employer matters as much as the role, this API filters postings on more than 25 criteria spanning job, company and tech-stack data.
JobsPikr
Labour-market researchers can use its Job Search API for live postings or buy historical posting datasets for trend work.
Publisher, community and employer feeds
Adzuna API
Programmatic access to Adzuna's own job ads and employment data, with keys issued to publishers who display those ads.
Careerjet API
Each publisher site gets its own key on this programme, and results come back as JSON with location, salary and sort options.
Arbeitnow Job Board API
A free job search API worth a look if your audience is hiring or job hunting in Germany and across Europe.
Remotive Remote Jobs API
Remote roles only, served through a public API that includes category, salary and description fields on each listing.
Jobicy Jobs API
Remote-job listings you can take as an API, an MCP server or a plain RSS feed, depending on how you're building.
Greenhouse Job Board API
Companies on Greenhouse can pull their published jobs, offices and departments as JSON, and send applications back through it.
Ashby Job Postings API
Built for a single organisation on Ashby: it returns every job posting that's currently published, ready for a custom careers page.
Fields that make or break a job product
Three fields decide whether job seekers trust what they see, and you can only show what the API gives you.
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Salary. I'd treat pay as close to non-negotiable on a modern board, so check how often the salary field is filled in your test, not just whether it exists in the schema. A field that's present on one listing in ten won't carry a salary filter.
Company identity. If you want logos, company pages or "more jobs from this employer", you need a company name you can match reliably, ideally with a domain. Check in your test whether you get a domain or company ID alongside the name, because matching on a bare name string breaks the first time two firms share one.
A direct way to apply. A listing that bounces through two other boards before reaching the employer feels like spam. Some feeds tell you whether a job has a direct application URL, and that's worth filtering on.
If you're building a recruiting or sales tool rather than a board, add a fourth: tech stack. Knowing a company is hiring for a particular database or framework is a buying signal, and only some APIs expose it.
Do you make job data APIs or job feeds? Tool makers can ask to be considered for a featured place on this list.
How the bill is worked out
There's no single pricing model here, which makes comparing cost harder than it looks.
- Monthly plans: you pay a flat fee per month for an allowance of requests or results, usually with a trial first.
- Credits: you buy a block of credits and each job or company record you pull uses some up. Good for bursty research work, awkward for a live site with steady traffic.
- Per-job charges: at least one feed charges once per API key for each job that carries a direct application URL, so cost tracks the useful listings rather than every call.
- Publisher programmes and public feeds: the pages read for this guide don't state a fee for the publisher APIs, and two of the ten state a free plan.
Two of the ten offer a free trial and only three state any price at all on the pages checked, so I won't put figures side by side. Model the cost from your own test volumes instead. If you're also pulling search-result data to find jobs that aren't in any feed, our comparison of SERP APIs covers that bill separately.
Mistakes that cost developers a rebuild
- Treating an applicant tracking system's public API as a source of jobs from many employers.
- Storing listings forever when the terms expect you to refresh them, then showing roles that closed weeks ago.
- Scraping job sites yourself before checking whether a feed already covers them. If you do need to scrape, start with a dedicated web scraping API rather than a homemade crawler.
- Skimming the display and attribution terms on a publisher programme, then reworking your listing design after launch to meet them.
- Building filters around fields that are mostly empty in practice.
Which type to pick
Building a careers page for one company? Use that company's applicant tracking system API. It's the official source, it's always current, and it can accept applications too.
Launching a niche or regional job board on a small budget? Start with a publisher programme or a community feed that already covers your niche, and plan to add a paid source once you know which searches your users run. If you'd rather not build the board itself, our list of job board software covers ready-made platforms that handle the front end.
Building a recruiting, sales or research product where the employer and its tech matter? Go straight to a paid data API with company and tech filters. You'll pay more, and you'll stop fighting thin data on day one.
Studying hiring trends over time? You need historical datasets, not only a live search endpoint, so put that requirement at the top of your shortlist.
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