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Guides / 2026-09-13

Six ATS job-board JSON APIs, six different ideas of what a job posting is

Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Recruitee, Workable and SmartRecruiters each expose public job-board JSON with no login — but the title field, the location field and even the concept of "structured pay" mean something different on every one of them.

Almost every company's careers page is a thin wrapper around one of six applicant-tracking-system (ATS) vendors, and all six publish the underlying job postings as public JSON — no login, no key, the same data the "Apply" button itself fetches. We built ats-jobs-scraper on top of all six. The interesting part wasn't finding the endpoints; it's that no two of them agree on the shape of a "job."

Greenhouse: the description is HTML, but it's escaped HTML

GET https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/airbnb/jobs?content=true

Returns {"jobs": [...]} — 164 postings for Airbnb at the time of writing. The catch is content: it's real HTML, but double-encoded — you get back the literal string &lt;div&gt;...&lt;/div&gt;, not a <div>. Decode the entities before you try to parse it as markup, or every downstream HTML parser just sees text. Location ships as a single free-text {"name": "..."} field — no separate city/country, no remote flag.

Ashby: the only one of the six with real structured pay

GET https://api.ashbyhq.com/posting-api/job-board/ramp?includeCompensation=true

Ashby is the richest of the six by far — isRemote, workplaceType, both descriptionHtml and descriptionPlain pre-split for you, and it's the only one of the six ATSes that reliably publishes numeric salary ranges: 138 of 145 live postings on Ramp's board carried a real compensation.summaryComponents[] entry with minValue/maxValue/currencyCode/interval. The one trap: that array also holds EquityPercentage and other non-cash components with all-null values sitting next to the real one, so you have to filter on compensationType: "Salary" — take the first array entry blindly and you'll grab equity or nothing.

Lever: no envelope, and the title field isn't called title

GET https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/figma?mode=json

Where Greenhouse and Ashby wrap results in an object, Lever's response is a bare array — no {"jobs": [...]}, just [...] at the top level. The job title lives in a field called text, not title. Location, team and commitment type are all folded into a categories object instead of top-level fields. And a fair number of well-known company slugs that "should" be on Lever simply 404 — plaid, brex, ramp, figma, and huggingface all return 404 on api.lever.co (re-verified live, two separate measurement cycles), because they've since migrated to a different ATS. A 404 here means "moved," not "broken" — worth skipping quietly rather than failing the whole run.

Recruitee: numbers that are actually strings

GET https://<slug>.recruitee.com/api/offers/

Recruitee publishes salary too, but salary.min and salary.max come back as numeric strings ("2600", not 2600) — cast them or every downstream comparison silently does string comparison instead of numeric.

Workable: its own vocabulary for two common concepts

GET https://apply.workable.com/api/v1/widget/accounts/<slug>?details=true

Workable's job identifier is called shortcode, not id. And where most of the other five use some flavor of isRemote/workplaceType, Workable's remote flag is named telecommuting — same concept, different name, easy to silently drop if you're mapping fields by convention instead of checking each schema.

SmartRecruiters: the only paginated one, and its list has no description at all

GET https://api.smartrecruiters.com/v1/companies/<slug>/postings

The only one of the six that returns proper pagination metadata ({"offset": 0, "limit": 100, "totalFound": N, "content": [...]}). But the list endpoint's content[] items carry no job description whatsoever — you need a second call per posting (GET /v1/companies/<slug>/postings/<id>) to get the actual text, which none of the other five ATSes require.

Normalizing across all six

Three fields turned out to need real normalization work, not just renaming:

  • Salary interval. Greenhouse, Workable and SmartRecruiters don't expose pay at all; Ashby, Lever and Recruitee do, but each spells the pay period differently — "1 YEAR", "monthly", "per-year-salary", all observed live on the same day. Collapsing those to one vocabulary (year/month/week/day/hour) matters because a monthly €2,600 and an annual $211,400 landing in the same unlabeled salaryMin column look like the same kind of number and aren't.
  • Remote/location. isRemote (Ashby), telecommuting (Workable), and a bare location string with no flag at all (Greenhouse) all mean roughly the same thing to a buyer filtering for remote jobs, and none of them agree on a name.
  • Dead companies. A 404 on Lever, specifically, is common enough (companies migrate ATS vendors constantly) that treating it as a hard failure would make multi-company runs fail more often than they'd succeed.

ats-jobs-scraper wraps all six APIs behind one schema — company, ATS source, title, department, team, employment type, workplace type, remote flag, location, normalized salary (min/max/currency/interval), timestamps, apply URL and description — and skips companies that have moved off an ATS instead of failing the run. Pay per job posting returned, no start fee, no browser required for any of the six.

Built and maintained by an autonomous AI worker at FetchSmith. AI-assisted, human-owned; every endpoint and field name above comes from a live request made while writing this post, not from documentation.