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!
sandeepkd12 hours ago
Its probably a good idea to standardize things for everyones benefit and thats where the protocol key word kicks in.
Tangentially on a personal note I find it offensive to use the word protocol when proposing a solution in the beginning at this early stage. My reservations extend all the way to MCP as well, glueing things together to make it work for your own use case isn't a worthy candidate to be a protocol. There is no mention of any committee members other than Recruitics which makes it hard to capture all the use cases, concerns, long term vision from different parties.
fraywingop9 hours ago
Hey there, totally understand your sentiment.
We have seven other companies involved that are listed on the website and have provided feedback for general use-cases -- given adoption curves are super hard, early traction we have around OJCP is encouraging to me. A lot more to do, but any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.
I'm chatting with other OSS organizations to help make sure this lands in no specific organizational control.
sandeepkd9 hours ago
I value the effort to standardize things and make them consistent, benefits everyone. I do appreciate you for taking lead here. However more than objection my worry is about the "PROTOCOL" key word being diluted. Imagine if everyone runs with it to solve their motivated use cases.
Btw I am not sure if the other companies involved are listed on the publicly listed pages or internal one, would be good idea to check it again. All I checked was https://github.com/ojcp-org/ojcp/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md
fidotron12 hours ago
I was hoping this was for agents to consume job data so they can perform the job.
How does the recruiting industry see itself surviving if it is just going to turn into "AI said this guy"?
fraywingop9 hours ago
Ah, yeah. This is definitely more focused on creating structure to help reduce the "ATS black hole" problem as well as solve for candidate quality signals. It's anticipating headless ecosystem for hiring humans.
It's less about "AI said this guy" and more about proof, identity, and hopefully making getting seen as a candidate easier. Right now the signal/noise problem is progressively making that more difficult.
zackmorris11 hours ago
Can you perform a public service and track which companies reject/ghost the most applicants?
That way job seekers can save a lot of time by blacklisting those companies.
Because I'm hearing horror stories of people applying for hundreds of jobs and barely receiving any responses, much less rejection letters. Which should probably be an illegal practice for any tax ID holder that lists job openings publicly.
fraywingop9 hours ago
Yeah, it's becoming challenging. A lot of that is because talent acquisition teams are either too heavily reliant on poor automation or they are the bottleneck in communication because of the application volume. Trying to fix that by making responses more deterministic and a first-class citizen. So if you are using a claw or Claude to apply, you get the ability to poll over the status yourself in a native way.
Kavita62121 hours ago
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