A pragmatic dev's review of the newly launched Job Postings API on Product Hunt. 1.8M+ listings, 30+ ATS integrated. Is it actually worth your time?
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If you've ever tried building a job board side hustle, you know the absolute hell of scraping job sites. You write a perfect parser, and the next day they change their CSS classes, leaving you with broken scripts and a major headache. Enter Job Postings API—a hosted API offering over 1.8 million active and historical US job listings for free.
Let's see if this is a goldmine for indie hackers or just another rate-limited disappointment.
This API aggregates job listings from over 30 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) across 60,000+ companies.
Here are the quick specs:
The Product Hunt launch gained some traction, and the comment section got quite technical. Here are the main talking points:
User ansari_adin asked a crucial question: "Job postings have a short shelf life... What does the update frequency look like so I'm not surfacing stale data?"
The creator clarified that they sync daily, meaning any "active" job in the API is active as of that morning. If you only query active jobs, they should remain reasonably fresh.
One creative developer suggested using historical data to analyze how often a company reposts the same role. This is a brilliant way to gauge turnover rates—highly pragmatic, if a bit cynical!
User habibferdous raised a red flag about standardization: "30+ ATSs means 30+ ways to express job title, seniority... raw aggregation without opinionated normalization just moves the cleanup problem to the consumer."
The creator admitted that they only perform high-level normalization for now. Reconciling messy roles or company names is still left to the developer or an external LLM.
Devs who have been in the trenches validated the utility of this API. Usually, building a job board requires expensive proxies to bypass anti-scraping paywalls and constantly fixing selectors. Having a unified schema for 30+ ATSs is a massive time-saver for early-stage products.
If you're looking to quickly validate a job-board business or a market-analysis tool, this API is a massive win. The free tier limits are generous enough to build a solid MVP before you ever need to upgrade.
Just be prepared to write your own data cleaning layer, as the raw ATS inputs are still quite messy. But hey, don't look a gift horse (or a free API) in the mouth. Grab your API key before they decide to put it behind a paywall.
Source: Product Hunt
