Open Job Protocol

Why Open Job Protocol?

Job postings today are unstructured prose optimized for SEO, not for AI agents. schema.org/JobPosting serves Google, not hiring agents. Every ATS, job board, and company career page uses a different format. Critical signals like salary, remote policy, and team composition are buried in paragraphs or missing entirely.

Open Job Protocol (OJP) fixes this. It encodes requirements with hard/soft distinctions agents can filter on, compensation and location as structured fields, and hiring process transparency so candidates know what to expect.

Quick start

Validate a document

The validator CLI checks any JSON file against the schema and prints readable errors.

# Install and build the validator
git clone https://github.com/neogene-ai/open-job-protocol.git
cd open-job-protocol/tools/validator-cli
npm install && npm run build

# Validate one of the example documents
node dist/index.js ../../examples/backend-engineer-senior.json
✓ Valid Open Job Protocol document

Minimal valid document

Only meta, role, organization, requirements.must_have.skills, and offering.location.arrangement are required. Everything else is optional.

{
  "$schema": "https://openjobprotocol.org/schema/v0.1.json",
  "meta": {
    "version": "0.1",
    "job_id": "acme-fe-2026-001",
    "status": "ACTIVE",
    "created_at": "2026-02-21T10:00:00Z",
    "updated_at": "2026-02-21T10:00:00Z"
  },
  "role": {
    "title": "Senior Frontend Engineer",
    "description": "Build and maintain our React-based product...",
    "employment_type": "full_time"
  },
  "organization": {
    "name": "Acme Corp"
  },
  "requirements": {
    "must_have": {
      "skills": [
        { "name": "React" },
        { "name": "TypeScript" }
      ]
    }
  },
  "offering": {
    "location": {
      "arrangement": "hybrid"
    }
  }
}

Schema reference

The full schema is a JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) document at schema/openjob-protocol.schema.json. Below, each section is documented with its fields, types, and intent.

Identifiers and lifecycle metadata for tracking, deduplication, and expiration across ATS platforms and job boards.

The substantive content of the job posting — what the role is and what it involves.

The hiring entity. Only name is required within this section.

Split into must_have (hard constraints agents MUST filter on) and nice_to_have (soft preferences agents SHOULD rank on). This distinction is the key differentiator from schema.org and existing standards.

must_have

nice_to_have

What the employer provides: compensation, location, benefits, and growth opportunities. At minimum, location.arrangement is required.

offering.compensation

offering.location

offering.benefits

offering.growth

Team composition and context. No equivalent in schema.org — this is a key OJP differentiator for culture matching.

Hiring process transparency — stages, timeline, and application method. Candidates and agents can use this to set expectations.

Culture signals for work-style and values matching.

Privacy controls governing what information is publicly visible versus restricted to specific stages of the hiring process.

"visibility": {
  "salary": "public",
  "team_details": "public",
  "process_stages": "public",
  "hiring_manager": "after_application"
}

A free extension object for domain-specific or proprietary fields. Use namespaced keys to avoid collisions with future spec additions.

"extensions": {
  "jobgrow:match_score": 87,
  "myats:requisition_id": "REQ-2026-0421"
}

Adding data to extensions never breaks a conforming parser. Removing extensions never breaks core functionality.

OTP ↔ OJP bilateral matching

The killer feature: symmetric matching between Open Talent Protocol candidate profiles and OJP job listings. An agent with both documents can compute a bilateral match score without any natural language processing.

Discovery

Employers host a well-known discovery file so agents can find all active listings without scraping.

# https://acme.com/.well-known/ojp.json

{
  "version": "0.1",
  "organization": "Acme Corp",
  "jobs_url": "https://acme.com/api/jobs.ojp.json",
  "total_active_jobs": 12,
  "updated_at": "2026-02-21T14:00:00Z",
  "accepts_otp_profile": true,
  "contact": "careers@acme.com"
}

Examples

Three complete, schema-conforming documents are included in the repository. They illustrate how requirements, offering, and process are used across different industries and seniority levels.

Tools

Validator CLI

A Node.js CLI that validates any JSON file against the OJP schema and prints readable errors. Source: tools/validator-cli/

cd tools/validator-cli
npm install && npm run build
node dist/index.js path/to/job.json

Agent tools

TypeScript stubs for integrating OJP into MCP-compatible agent frameworks. Source: tools/agent-examples/

Provides composable functions ready to be registered as MCP tools: validateJobPosting, matchCandidateToJob, and introspectJobPosting.

Migration

OJP is designed to be clearly mappable to and from existing job posting formats.

Governance & neutrality

Open Job Protocol is vendor-neutral. JobGrow and neogene.ai are its initial sponsors, but the spec is designed for broad ecosystem adoption. No single company has veto power over the schema.

OJP is the employer-side counterpart to Open Talent Protocol. Together, they form a complete, open standard for agentic talent marketplaces.

The project is governed by a maintainer council using lazy consensus. See GOVERNANCE.md for the full process.

Licensed under MIT. The spec will always be free to implement.