Job advertising integrations: direct APIs, multiposters and application ingestion

Four things called the same word

A direct API connection to a marketplace, under a commercial agreement with that provider. Reliable, structured, and the only version where publish status and errors are genuinely visible. Also the only one that requires the provider to agree.

A multiposter: a third-party service that sits between your system and many boards. One integration for the vendor, many boards for you, and an extra party in the chain who owns the failures.

An email or feed arrangement, where roles are handed over in bulk and appear when they appear. Cheap, and effectively unmonitorable.

A link. Your ad lives on your own page and the "integration" is that somebody can click through to it. Not dishonest, but not what a buyer hears.

The one question worth asking

"Do you have a written agreement with that provider, and is it live for customers today?" Not "do you support it".

A connector framework can be genuinely built and complete while no marketplace is connected, because the missing piece is commercial rather than technical. That is a legitimate position, and the only wrong thing a vendor can do about it is describe it as connected.

Then ask what the ongoing cost is and who bears it. Marketplace posting is rarely free, and whether the fee appears on your invoice or theirs changes the economics of a role.

The channel you own

Your own job page is the only channel no agreement can switch off. It should be indexable, carry structured data that describes exactly what the visible page shows, and be removed the moment the role closes.

Structured data that mentions an employer the page conceals is both a policy breach and, for a confidential role, a client relationship ended by a script. If a system cannot keep a confidential role confidential in its markup as well as its copy, that is a serious defect rather than a detail.

Google’s job posting requirements change; they are worth re-reading before each release rather than assuming a system built two years ago still complies.

Ingestion is where the value actually is

Publishing is the easy half. What decides whether advertising is worth doing is whether the applications arrive as usable records.

That means: deduplicated against candidates you already hold, with the source recorded so you can tell which channel worked, with the document parsed, and with a failure quarantined rather than discarded. An applicant silently dropped is a placement you never knew you had.

Ask what happens when the same person applies for three roles in a week, and when a CV is a scanned image. Both are ordinary, and both are where ingestion quietly fails.

Reading a status

Connected means it works now. Partner approval required means the code exists and the provider’s approval does not. Anything vaguer than those two is a status that means nothing.

A vendor whose directory cannot tell you which of those applies to each board is telling you something about the vendor rather than about the integrations.