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Overview

AI Apply lets candidates apply to jobs on employers’ career sites without leaving your product. You give Kombo the URL of a public job posting. Kombo parses its application form into a standardized structure, you render that form to the candidate, and Kombo submits the answers on the employer’s career site on the candidate’s behalf.

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How it works

Both parsing and applying to job postings run asynchronously in the background. Parsing a posting takes time, and a posting only becomes applyable once it succeeds. Submitting an application also takes time, and its outcome arrives after the request has returned. Kombo reports both through webhooks, so your system does not need to poll. See Webhooks and data fetching.

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Glossary

  • Career site: a group of job postings that belong together, usually one employer or one source. Every job posting belongs to exactly one career site.
  • Job posting: one job URL that Kombo parses. Its availability is PENDING while parsing is queued or running and no usable form exists, APPLYABLE when a usable form exists, UNAVAILABLE if parsing failed without a usable form, and ARCHIVED when removed from a feed, taken offline, or manually archived.
  • Job feed: a list of job postings from one source, sent to Kombo as a whole. Each import creates, updates and archives postings so that Kombo’s state matches the list. Career sites are created from the feed automatically.
  • Application form: the screening questions of a posting, parsed into a block structure you can render. See Application form.
  • Application: one candidate’s answers submitted against one posting. Its status is PENDING until Kombo has submitted it, then SUBMITTED, DUPLICATE or FAILED.

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Implementation

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Choosing an implementation guide

Use the job board flow by default. Choose the job distributor flow only if you need to pre-sync application forms to your customers.

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Job boards

Follow the job board implementation guide by default. It reduces failed submissions caused by outdated forms or closed postings by using more recent information at application time. You also don’t need to implement sync logic for application forms and submission tokens.
  1. Import postings with a job feed, then fetch them.
  2. Keep your postings current with the data-changed webhook and updated_after.
  3. Inquire when a candidate applies to get Kombo’s stored form and a submission token.
  4. Submit applications with the candidate’s answers and track the outcome.
Start the job board guide →

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Job distributors

Use this flow only if you need to pre-sync application forms and submission tokens before distributing them to your customers.
  1. Import postings with a job feed.
  2. Store and distribute their forms and submission tokens ahead of time.
  3. Keep postings and stored forms current with the data-changed webhook and updated_after.
  4. Submit applications with the answers your partners collect and track the outcome.
Start the job distributor guide →
While career sites and job postings can also be created one at a time through the API, we do not recommend this, because it leaves archival and duplicate handling to you. See Manual management if you cannot send your postings as a feed.

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Recommendations

  • Send postings as a job feed with either implementation guide. It removes most of the state you would otherwise have to keep in step with Kombo.
  • Store the id of every posting and application Kombo returns. Webhooks and list endpoints identify records by these IDs.
  • Supply the candidate’s email from your own system rather than asking for it on the form. Some postings require a candidate account, which Kombo creates and manages for you, see Candidate account creation.
  • If a job posting fails to parse, reach out. Kombo investigates and fixes parsing failures as soon as possible.