Standby MCP Server for AI Agents: Multi-ATS Career Jobs Search

An always-on Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Agents, LangChain) to search live public job postings across 71 built-in companies + any public career board URL on five applicant tracking systems: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters and Workable. Results are normalized (USD salary, remote/hybrid filters, incremental deduplication). Only official, unauthenticated public job-board JSON APIs are used: no scraping, no logins, no proxies.

The Actor runs in two modes on a single codebase:

1. Standby MCP mode (primary): an MCP server at /mcp exposing the search_jobs and list_supported_companies tools to AI agents.
2. Batch dataset mode: provide input, get a clean, de-duplicated dataset.

Quick start: MCP for AI agents

Standby URL: https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp (authenticate with your Apify API token).

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json, via the mcp-remote bridge):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ats-jobs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "mcp-remote",
        "https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
        "--header", "Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ats-jobs": {
      "url": "https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Tool call examples (JSON-RPC tools/call):

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"search_jobs","arguments":{"query":"python engineer","remoteOnly":true,"minAnnualSalaryUsd":150000,"maxItems":10}}}
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"list_supported_companies","arguments":{"atsProviders":["greenhouse","ashby"]}}}

Batch dataset mode is described under Input below.

Features

• Unified NormalizedJob schema across all providers (deterministic SHA-256 uid, UTC timestamps, workplace type, structured compensation).
• Built-in curated registry of 71 built-in companies + any public career board URL, or bring your own slugs / career URLs.
• Filters: keyword query, locations, remote only, posted within N hours, only new since a date, minimum annual USD salary, excluded job IDs.
• Clean plain-text descriptions (HTML stripped, entities decoded).
• Resilient fetching: timeouts, retry with backoff on 429/5xx, dead company slugs (404) skipped without failing the run.
• Hard spending caps: maxItems and maxTotalChargeUsd are never exceeded. Invalid input is rejected with INVALID_INPUT_ZERO_CHARGE before any network call or charge.

Supported providers

Provider	Public API used
Greenhouse	https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{slug}/jobs?content=true
Lever	https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/{slug}?mode=json
Ashby	https://api.ashbyhq.com/posting-api/job-board/{slug}?includeCompensation=true
SmartRecruiters	https://api.smartrecruiters.com/v1/companies/{slug}/postings
Workable	https://apply.workable.com/api/v1/widget/accounts/{slug}

Recognized career URL formats: boards.greenhouse.io/{slug}, job-boards.greenhouse.io/{slug}, jobs.lever.co/{slug}, jobs.ashbyhq.com/{slug}, jobs.smartrecruiters.com/{slug}, apply.workable.com/{slug} (EU variants, www., trailing paths and query strings are handled). SmartRecruiters slugs are case-sensitive (e.g. Visa, BoschGroup).

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	All whitespace-separated tokens must appear in title, department, team or description.
companySlugs	string[]	provider:slug (e.g. greenhouse:stripe) or bare slug (tried on every selected provider).
careerUrls	string[]	Public board URLs; provider and slug are extracted automatically.
atsProviders	string[]	Subset of greenhouse, lever, ashby, smartrecruiters, workable. Empty = all.
locations	string[]	Keep jobs whose location contains any substring (case-insensitive).
remoteOnly	boolean	Only remote jobs.
minAnnualSalaryUsd	number	Annualized upper-bound USD salary threshold. Jobs without USD pay are excluded.
postedWithinHours	number	Published (or updated) within the last N hours.
onlyNewSince	string	ISO-8601 date/time; only jobs published after it (incremental runs).
excludeJobIds	string[]	uid or external_id values to skip.
includeDescription	boolean	Include description_plain (default true).
maxItems	integer	0 to 10000, default 100.
maxTotalChargeUsd	number	Hard budget cap in USD for the run.

If both companySlugs and careerUrls are empty, the built-in registry is searched (filtered by atsProviders).

Example:

{
  "query": "python engineer",
  "companySlugs": ["greenhouse:stripe", "ashby:openai", "lever:palantir"],
  "remoteOnly": true,
  "minAnnualSalaryUsd": 150000,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

Each dataset item (snake_case):

Field	Description
uid	SHA-256 of provider:slug:external_id
ats_provider, company_slug, company_name, external_id	Source identification
title, department, team, employment_type	Job attributes
workplace_type	remote, hybrid, onsite or unspecified
locations, is_remote	Locations list and remote flag
published_at, updated_at	ISO-8601 UTC (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ)
compensation	{min_amount, max_amount, currency, interval, raw_text} or null
apply_url, source_api_url	Application link and API endpoint used
description_plain	Plain-text description (when enabled)

Standby MCP mode

When the Actor runs in Standby mode it serves HTTP on the Standby port:

• GET /health returns 200 {"status":"ok"}.
• POST /mcp accepts JSON-RPC 2.0: initialize, ping, tools/list, tools/call.

Tools:

• search_jobs: same arguments as the batch input (camelCase; maxItems defaults to 20). Returns structuredContent with jobs, count and charged.
• list_supported_companies: lists the built-in registry, optionally filtered by atsProviders.

Example MCP client configuration (replace the token):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ats-jobs": {
      "url": "https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Quick check:

curl -X POST "https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"search_jobs","arguments":{"query":"data scientist","maxItems":5}}}'

Pricing

This Actor is currently Free to use (Pay for usage): there is a $0.00 Actor fee. You only pay the standard Apify platform compute usage on your own Apify account.

The maxItems and maxTotalChargeUsd hard caps are enforced in code (src/billing.py and .actor/pay_per_event.json), so runs never exceed the limits you configure. Invalid input is never charged.

Limitations

• No descriptions for SmartRecruiters and Workable. Their public list endpoints do not include job descriptions or compensation. For these providers, query matches only the title and metadata (department, team, location), and compensation/minAnnualSalaryUsd cannot be derived. Searching "python" will miss jobs whose title lacks the word.
• EU boards. Greenhouse and Lever EU career URLs (boards.eu.greenhouse.io, job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io, jobs.eu.lever.co) are detected as EU boards. Lever EU career URLs (jobs.eu.lever.co) are fetched from api.eu.lever.co. Greenhouse EU career URLs (boards.eu.greenhouse.io, job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io) are served via boards-api.greenhouse.io (the EU board API host does not resolve). The region is tracked per request/target; there is no process-global state, so an EU URL never affects later requests. Built-in registry entries are US-hosted; supply EU boards through careerUrls.
• SmartRecruiters pagination cap. Pagination stops after 10 pages of 100 (1000 postings per company). If a company has more, a warning is logged, the fetch result is flagged truncated, and the run/MCP errors list gets a truncated_at_1000 entry with severity: "warning"; the remaining postings are not returned.
• Pay-per-event limits. The platform's charge limit is respected: when the run's max total charge is reached, items beyond the limit are not returned (neither pushed to the dataset nor returned by MCP search_jobs), in addition to the maxItems and maxTotalChargeUsd caps. The remaining platform charge capacity is read before every charge, in both batch and Standby mode (shared across all MCP calls of a run), so nothing is delivered once the limit is exhausted.

Notes

• Only publicly available job postings are accessed. Respect each company's terms when reusing the data.
• Company slugs that do not exist are reported in the run log and skipped.

Related MCP Servers by Mutualistic Labs

Actor	Covers	Store	Standby MCP URL
Multi-ATS Career Jobs Search MCP	Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable	https://apify.com/mutualistic_housing/multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp	https://mutualistic-housing--multi-ats-career-jobs-mcp.apify.actor/mcp
Google Ads Transparency & Ad Spy MCP	SearchCreatives, SearchSuggestions, content.js ad-copy & video metadata	https://apify.com/mutualistic_housing/google-ads-transparency-mcp	https://mutualistic-housing--google-ads-transparency-mcp.apify.actor/mcp
Multi-Engine Keyword & Autocomplete MCP	Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave + google:suggestrelevance & search intent	https://apify.com/mutualistic_housing/keyword-autocomplete-mcp	https://mutualistic-housing--keyword-autocomplete-mcp.apify.actor/mcp
Discourse Forum Search & Threads MCP	community.openai.com, discuss.huggingface.co, meta.discourse.org + any public Discourse	https://apify.com/mutualistic_housing/discourse-forum-mcp	https://mutualistic-housing--discourse-forum-mcp.apify.actor/mcp
Google Trends Realtime & Entities MCP	i0OFE realtime trends, trending/rss news, Knowledge Graph autocomplete entities	https://apify.com/mutualistic_housing/google-trends-realtime-mcp	https://mutualistic-housing--google-trends-realtime-mcp.apify.actor/mcp