OJCP
an open protocol for agent-consumable job data
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Author here!Agents are applying to jobs for people right now, with progressively more volume, and there's nothing built for it. So they scrape career pages and fight ATS forms with Playwright/Browser Use, which breaks constantly (or they get bot blocked). Employers get buried in applications that don't fit, candidates hear nothing back, and the resume is now an AI-written thing that another AI scores (which breaks the existing model entirely, btw).OJCP is MCP tools for search and apply, a manifest at /.well-known/ojcp.json so agents can find providers, and schemas that extend schema.org instead of replacing it. The playground on the site is a live MCP endpoint, so you can throw calls at it right now.Why a spec at all when models keep getting better at figuring things out? Inference can't produce authorization. An agent can work out what a form wants. It can't establish that someone consented to this specific submission, and then employer has no way to verify who's calling. So TL;DR a more capable agent is also a more capable impersonator.In this model, trust runs both direction. Agents sign requests using the same method that CloudFlare and OpenAI are already using, providers sign their manifests, agents can check against a JWKS, and trust tiers cap how much candidate PII can go to a given provider. Validation happens at consent, so browsing costs nothing and you only pay the verify when the interaction occurs.I'm the CTO of Recruitics (job advertising) and spent time at LinkedIn before that, so I've been at the intersection of hiring and job search for a while and have felt the pain of both sides.Happy to answer any questions!
HN · launched Aug 12, 2026 · 39 upvotes (top 16%) · 0 views
Niche: open-source software platforms · 61 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- HR & recruiting
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 61 launches in open-source software platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes OJCP is an open schema and API protocol specification for publishing structured job data to automated agents, which is fundamentally JSON-LD/schema design and static documentation.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Job-Ops, Claude/Claw for job applications, ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems)
Concerns raised: Protocol keyword being diluted by different motivated use cases, Lack of transparency on all companies involved in governance, Company ghosting/rejection practices not being tracked or held accountable, Early stage solution being called a 'protocol' prematurely, Only Recruitics listed as committee member, missing diverse party representation
Feature requests: Track which companies reject/ghost applicants most to help job seekers blacklist them, Enable job seekers to poll application status in a native way, Public listing of all involved companies and their feedback
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 347 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #66 of 348 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 284 days after the earliest competitor.
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