We're building a recruiting platform and need a person search API that our users can search candidates with. The core requirements are pretty straightforward - search by job title, skills, location, years of experience, company size, education, industry. We also want to be able to combine filters with AND/OR logic and nest them so our users can get really specific with their searches.
The problem we keep running into isnt the data itself. Most providers have decent coverage. Its the API experience. We've evaluated 4-5 providers so far and the common issues are:
- poor or outdated documentation
- inconsistent response formats
- rate limits that are way too low for production use
- filters that exist in their UI but arent exposed in the API
- no webhook support so we have to poll constantly for updates
We need something our engineering team can actually build on without constantly running into undocumented edge cases or having to reverse engineer how their filters work. We're processing thousands of searches a day so reliability and consistency matter more to us than having the absolute largest database.
Has anyone actually built a recruiting product on top of a person search API? What did you end up going with and how was the developer experience? Specifically interested in hearing about filter flexibility and how the API held up at scale.