--- title: "What is a job API?" description: "**Canonical URL:** https://jobspipe.dev/answers/what-is-a-job-api" canonical: https://jobspipe.dev/answers/what-is-a-job-api last_updated: 2026-09-18 --- # What is a job API? > A job API is an interface that returns job postings as structured data. You send a query, such as a title, a location, a company or a date range, and get back records with fields like job title, employer, location, description, salary, posting date and apply link. Products use one to fill job boards, power sourcing and sales tools, and feed labour market analysis without collecting the postings themselves. **Canonical URL:** https://jobspipe.dev/answers/what-is-a-job-api **Topic:** Jobs API (https://jobspipe.dev/jobs-api) The term covers four different things, and mixing them up wastes time. A job board's partner API belongs to one board, usually requires approval, and often exists for posting jobs or tracking applications, not for reading listings in bulk. An applicant tracking system's customer API gives one employer access to its own account, including candidates and internal requisitions, and it never reaches another employer's data. Some applicant tracking systems also publish a public job board feed for each company, documented and keyless, which returns that company's open roles and nothing else. An aggregator API collects postings from many boards and career sites, removes duplicates and serves them in one schema. The first three answer questions about one board or one employer. Only the fourth answers a question such as which companies are hiring for a given skill. JobsPipe is the aggregator kind. POST /v1/jobs/search takes filters such as job_title_or, company_name_or, skills_or, description_or, job_country_code_or and posted_at_gte, and returns normalized records from the collected boards, among them LinkedIn, Indeed, Workday, Greenhouse, Workable, Lever and Ashby. Each record carries discovered_at, last_seen_at and status, so you can tell a live posting from one that has closed. A ghost_score with the max_ghost_score filter screens out stale listings, and the sources field names the board each record came from. Webhooks and an MCP server deliver the same data to pipelines and AI agents. To choose, begin with the question you need answered. If it concerns your own hiring data, use your applicant tracking system's API. If it concerns a handful of known employers, their public feeds may be enough. If it spans employers, compare aggregators on source coverage, how often postings are checked again, whether closed jobs are marked, how duplicates are handled and what unit you pay for. The JobsPipe sandbox search endpoint needs no key, so you can inspect the record shape before signing up for the free tier. ## Related questions ### What is the difference between a job API and a data API? A data API is any interface built to return records, whether the subject is weather, prices or statistics. A job API is a data API whose records are job postings, which adds its own problems: the same role appears on several boards, postings close without notice, and salaries and locations arrive as free text. A good job API handles those for you. ### Do job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed offer a public job API? Not for reading listings at scale. Large boards generally keep their APIs for approved partners and for tasks such as posting jobs or syncing applications. That is why products needing listings across boards tend to use an aggregator API, which collects the public postings and serves them in one schema. The related answers on LinkedIn and Indeed cover each case. ### What fields does a job API usually return? At minimum a title, the employer, a location, the description, a posting date and a link to apply. Better ones add parsed salary ranges, seniority, remote status, skills or technologies named in the text, and lifecycle fields. In JobsPipe those lifecycle fields are discovered_at, last_seen_at, status, closed_at and ghost_score, which let you judge how fresh a record is. ### How are job APIs priced? Models vary: by request, by record returned, by monthly subscription tier or by enterprise contract for bulk data. The unit matters more than the headline price, since a request that returns nothing still costs money under request pricing. JobsPipe charges one credit for each job returned and has a free tier. For any other vendor, check their pricing page. ## More answers - [What is a data API?](https://jobspipe.dev/answers/what-is-a-data-api) - [Is Google jobs API free?](https://jobspipe.dev/answers/is-google-jobs-api-free) - [Where to find API key?](https://jobspipe.dev/answers/where-to-find-your-api-key) Data behind these answers is published as shares only; every figure can be reproduced against the JobsPipe API (https://jobspipe.dev/jobs-api). --- AI agents: the full machine-readable index of this site is https://jobspipe.dev/llms.txt?src=md-twin - API quickstart, no-key sandbox (POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search), MCP server, pricing. Free key: https://jobspipe.dev/signup