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!
Discussion (3 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
How does the recruiting industry see itself surviving if it is just going to turn into "AI said this guy"?