# StepStone Jobs Scraper (`devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper`) Actor

Scrape job listings from StepStone, Germany's largest job board, by keyword and optional location. Get title, company, location, posting date, URL, salary, sponsorship flag, skills, and a snippet — deduplicated, ready for recruiter pipelines.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [DevilScrapes](https://apify.com/devilscrapes) (community)
- **Categories:** Jobs
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 50.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

Pay per event

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

<div align="center">
  <img src=".actor/icon.svg" width="160" alt="Devil Scrapes mark" />
</div>

## StepStone Jobs Scraper

**💰 $3.20 / 1 000 results**  ·  pay only for results  ·  no credit card to try

*The devil's in the data.* 😈

Scrape job listings from StepStone, Germany's largest job board, keyed by
keyword and an optional location. Get clean, deduplicated rows — title,
company, location, posting date, URL, salary if published, sponsorship
flag, skills, and a text snippet — ready for a recruiter pipeline or a
hiring-intent feed.

### 🎯 What this scrapes

StepStone lists thousands of German job postings across every industry,
25 to a page, with no bulk export. This Actor searches by keyword and
optional location, walks the result pages, and returns one row per job:
title, company, location, posting date, absolute URL, salary (when
published), sponsorship/highlight/anonymous flags, skills, and labels.

### 🔥 Features

- 🛡️ **We rotate browser fingerprints** so StepStone sees a real browser's
  TLS handshake, not a Python script.
- 🔁 **We retry with exponential backoff** on rate limits and server
  errors, honouring `Retry-After`.
- 🌐 **We route every request through Apify Proxy.**
- 🧊 **Run-wide deduplication.** The same job id never appears twice in
  your dataset, even across pages or across multiple keywords in one run.
- 🧾 **Multi-keyword batching in one run** — search several terms at once
  and every row is tagged with the keyword (and location) that found it.
- 💰 **You pay only for results that land.** No data → no charge (only
  the small `actor-start` warm-up fee).

### 💡 Use cases

- **Recruiters and staffing agencies** — pull every open role matching a
  skill or title across German employers.
- **Job boards and aggregators** — backfill DACH-region postings your
  existing sources miss.
- **Sales / BD teams** — new job openings are a public hiring-intent
  signal; a company opening five engineering roles just funded a team.
- **Market research** — track which titles, locations, and skills a
  sector is hiring for over time.

### ⚙️ How to use it

1. Set one or more `keywords` — the search terms to run.
2. Optionally set `location` — applied to every keyword in the run.
3. Set `maxResults` and `maxPagesPerKeyword` to bound how much you pull
   per run.
4. Run it, then export to JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull the dataset
   straight from the Apify API.

### 📥 Input

| Field | Type | Required | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| `keywords` | `array<string>` | yes | — | Search terms; one or more searches run per Actor call. |
| `location` | `string \| null` | no | `null` | Applied to every keyword in the run. |
| `maxResults` | `integer` | no | `100` | Hard cap on total rows emitted across all keywords (1-2000). |
| `maxPagesPerKeyword` | `integer` | no | `20` | Safety cap on pages fetched per keyword, 25 rows/page (1-200). |
| `proxyConfiguration` | `object` | no | `{"useApifyProxy": true}` | Apify Proxy configuration. |

#### Example input

```json
{
  "keywords": ["java"],
  "location": null,
  "maxResults": 5,
  "maxPagesPerKeyword": 1
}
```

### 📤 Output

One row per deduplicated job matching your search.

| Field | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| `id` | `integer` | Stable job id, dedupe key. |
| `title` | `string` | Job title. |
| `companyName` | `string` | Hiring company's name. |
| `companyId` | `integer` | Hiring company's numeric id. |
| `location` | `string` | Free text, may be multi-city. |
| `datePosted` | `string` | ISO-8601 posting timestamp. |
| `url` | `string` | Absolute job URL, tracking params stripped. |
| `salary` | `string \| null` | Usually null. |
| `unifiedSalary` | `object \| null` | Passthrough. |
| `workFromHome` | `string \| null` | Opaque enum passthrough. |
| `isSponsored` | `boolean` | Sponsored listing flag. |
| `isHighlighted` | `boolean` | Highlighted listing flag. |
| `isAnonymous` | `boolean` | Anonymous employer flag. |
| `postCode` | `string \| null` | Postal code, if published. |
| `textSnippet` | `string \| null` | Passthrough snippet. |
| `skills` | `array<string>` | May be empty. |
| `labels` | `array<string>` | May be empty. |
| `sourceKeyword` | `string` | Input keyword that produced this row. |
| `sourceLocation` | `string \| null` | Input location that produced this row. |

### 💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

| Event | USD | What it is |
|---|---:|---|
| `actor-start` | $0.20 | One-off warm-up charge per run |
| `result-emitted` | $0.003 | Per deduplicated job posting written to the dataset |

Example: 1 000 job postings = **$3.20 per run** ($0.20 start + 1000 x $0.003).
No subscription, no minimum, no card required to try it.

### 🚧 Limitations

- **List-page fields only.** This returns the fields StepStone's search
  result page publishes; full job-description text isn't fetched — use
  the returned `url` for a follow-up detail-page job.
- **`.de` only.** StepStone's `.at` and `.ch` country variants aren't
  covered in this version.
- **A narrow search can legitimately return zero rows.** That's a
  successful run, not a failure — widen your keyword or drop the
  location filter.

### ❓ FAQ

**Do I need a StepStone account or API key?**
No. This reads StepStone's public search result pages.

**Why did my run return fewer rows than `maxResults`?**
Either the search genuinely has fewer matching jobs than your cap, or
`maxPagesPerKeyword` stopped the run first — the status message tells
you which.

**Can I search multiple keywords in one run?**
Yes — pass an array to `keywords`; every row is tagged with the keyword
that found it via `sourceKeyword`.

**Can I run this on a schedule?**
Yes — use Apify Schedules to re-run your keyword set on a cadence and
catch newly posted jobs.

### 💬 Your feedback

Found a bug, or need a field we don't return yet? Open an issue on the
Actor's Issues tab — we read every one.

# Changelog

This Actor's version history is a separate document: https://apify.com/devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper/changelog.md

# Actor input Schema

## `keywords` (type: `array`):

Search terms, e.g. \["java", "marketing"]; one or more searches run per Actor call.

## `location` (type: `string`):

Optional location applied to all keywords, e.g. "Berlin". Leave empty for no location filter.

## `maxResults` (type: `integer`):

Hard cap on total rows emitted across all keywords in the run.

## `maxPagesPerKeyword` (type: `integer`):

Safety cap on pages fetched per keyword (25 rows/page).

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Apify Proxy configuration. Datacenter group, no country pin — measured 2026-09-24: a US datacenter exit and a RESIDENTIAL/DE exit return the same German listings, so stepstone.de does not vary by exit geo.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "keywords": [
    "python",
    "marketing"
  ],
  "location": "Berlin",
  "maxResults": 40,
  "maxPagesPerKeyword": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "BUYPROXIES94952"
    ]
  }
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `datasetItems` (type: `string`):

All dataset items as JSON.

## `datasetItemsCsv` (type: `string`):

Same data exported to CSV.

## `datasetView` (type: `string`):

Open the run dataset in the Console.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "keywords": [
        "python",
        "marketing"
    ],
    "location": "Berlin",
    "maxResults": 40,
    "maxPagesPerKeyword": 1,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": true,
        "apifyProxyGroups": [
            "BUYPROXIES94952"
        ]
    }
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "keywords": [
        "python",
        "marketing",
    ],
    "location": "Berlin",
    "maxResults": 40,
    "maxPagesPerKeyword": 1,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": True,
        "apifyProxyGroups": ["BUYPROXIES94952"],
    },
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "keywords": [
    "python",
    "marketing"
  ],
  "location": "Berlin",
  "maxResults": 40,
  "maxPagesPerKeyword": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "BUYPROXIES94952"
    ]
  }
}' |
apify call devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,devilscrapes/stepstone-jobs-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/0eBrhzgfDvs2CK4sP/builds/2dlnnttrrogBbKugA/openapi.json