Germany has a free public API with every job posting in the country — so I built a scraper that turns it into recruiter lead lists
Most people don't know this: the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Germany's Federal Employment Agency) runs a free public API — Jobsuche — covering basically every registered job posting in the country. No auth needed, no rate-limit games, official data source. I wrapped it in an Apify Actor and it turned out more useful than expected. Quick writeup of what's interesting: The API nobody talks about The…
Most individuals are unaware that Germany's Federal Employment Agency operates a complimentary public API known as Jobsuche, encompassing virtually all registered job advertisements within the nation. The API requires no authentication and has no rate-limit restrictions, making it an official data source. I integrated it into an Apify Actor, which proved to be more valuable than initially anticipated. Here are some noteworthy aspects of the API:
The Arbeitsagentur search endpoint, akin to arbeitnow but official, provides structured JSON output containing job titles, employers, salary ranges, precise locations with coordinates, remote-work indicators (homeoffice möglich), contract types, and posting dates. This data serves as the foundation for arbeitsagentur.de/jobsuche - Germany's premier job board.
During the development process, I encountered a snag: boolean filters operate exclusively, not inclusively. For instance, zeitarbeit=true signifies only temporary agency jobs, not temporary agency jobs in addition to other job types. Combining two filters results in zero results. It took a genuine API call to identify this issue.
The most valuable component of this API, in my opinion, lies in the raw job listings themselves. While job listings are a common commodity, the real value for recruiters and lead generation lies in understanding who is hiring currently and the compensation offered. Thus, the actor also generates a second dataset - company summaries aggregated from the listings.
By inputting "vertrieb, München," the actor produces a list of companies with open sales roles in Munich, along with the number of such roles and their locations. This list represents a product that a recruiter would likely purchase, and it emerges as a free byproduct of the same API calls.
The actor is publicly accessible on the Apify Store (pay-per-event, approximately $0.75/1k results): Actor link: https://apify.com/dach_data_tools/arbeitsagentur-jobs-scraper Ready-to-use example: https://apify.com/dach_data_tools/arbeitsagentur-jobs-scraper/examples/who-is-hiring-munich Remote job listings across Germany: https://apify.com/dach_data_tools/arbeitsagentur-jobs-scraper/examples/remote-jobs-germany I have also created a similar tool for German company registry data (northdata - legal names, HRB, executive officers): https://apify.com/dach_data_tools/northdata-scraper I am available to address any inquiries regarding the API's functionalities - the documentation tends to understate the comprehensive nature of the data available.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
