xing-mcp

An MCP server for searching jobs on XING — the leading professional network in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

The MCP job-search ecosystem is heavily LinkedIn-centric, and the standard multi-board scraper (JobSpy) does not cover XING. This server fills that gap. Most XING listings include a salary estimate, which is unusual and hard to get elsewhere.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
search_jobs	Search one page of listings by keywords, location, radius, employment type
search_jobs_paginated	Search across multiple pages, rate-limited and deduplicated
get_job_details	Full posting incl. description converted to markdown
get_company_jobs	Open positions on a company's XING page

Install

uv venv && uv pip install -e .

Claude Code

claude mcp add xing -- /absolute/path/to/xing_mcp/.venv/bin/xing-mcp

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "xing": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/xing_mcp/.venv/bin/xing-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Configuration

Env var	Default	Purpose
XING_MCP_USER_AGENT	honest self-identifying UA	Override the User-Agent
XING_MCP_RATE_LIMIT	1.0	Minimum seconds between requests
XING_MCP_CACHE_TTL	300	Response cache TTL in seconds

What works, and what doesn't

XING has no public jobs API (dev.xing.com is plugins-only and closed to new registrations), so this server reads XING's public job-search HTML pages. Search parameters were mapped empirically against the live site.

Supported filters — verified working:

• keywords, location, radius (km), page
• employment_type: FULL_TIME, PART_TIME

Not supported — XING accepts these as URL parameters but they have no effect, so the server does not pretend to offer them:

• remote/home-office filtering
• sort order (results are relevance-ranked by XING)
• career/seniority level filtering — filter by seniority in your prompt or by reading job titles instead

Login-gated results: XING hides roughly a quarter to a third of listings from logged-out visitors. Those appear as UnauthorizedJob and cannot be retrieved. Every tool reports how many were withheld in a note field rather than silently returning a short list.

How it works

Three parser tiers, tried in order, so a XING frontend change degrades rather than breaks:

1. Apollo cache (parsers/apollo.py) — XING server-renders its full GraphQL cache into the page. Richest source: salary, apply URL, company, dates.
2. JSON-LD (parsers/jsonld.py) — schema.org/JobPosting on detail pages, for descriptions and postal addresses.
3. DOM fallback (parsers/dom.py) — data-testid selectors. Sparse (no salary), but durable.

If all tiers fail, the tools return an explicit error. They never return an empty list to paper over a parse failure.

Compliance

This server reads only public job pages and is intended for personal, user-directed job searching.

• XING's robots.txt explicitly Allows /jobs/search for user-directed AI agents (Claude-User, GPTUser, PerplexityBot, …), while the catch-all User-agent: * disallows it.
• XING's internal GraphQL API (/xing-one/api, /graphql/) is Disallowed for every agent. This server never calls it — the forbidden paths are hard-blocked in client.py.
• The default User-Agent identifies this software honestly and does not impersonate a named crawler.
• Requests are serialised at 1/second and cached.

Caveats you should know about: this server is not one of the named agents in XING's allowlist, so it sits in a grey area between that allowlist and the catch-all rule. XING/New Work SE's Terms of Service restrict automated data collection independently of robots.txt, and listings contain personal and company data subject to GDPR. Personal job hunting is a reasonable use; commercial redistribution of scraped listings would need legal review.

Development

uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                    # 39 offline tests, no network
pytest -m live            # 8 tests against the live site

Fixtures are synthetic on purpose. This repo does not commit scraped XING pages — that would republish XING's page content and employers' job-ad text, which is exactly what the compliance note above warns against. The committed fixtures are generated by scripts/make_synthetic_fixtures.py and reproduce the structures the parsers depend on (Apollo cache layout, JSON-LD block, DOM cards) using invented companies and salaries.

The trade-off is that offline tests cannot notice XING changing its site. That is what the live suite is for — it checks that the Apollo tier still parses, that salary estimates are still present, that pagination still returns distinct results, that the employmentType hash ID still works, and that XING's robots.txt still allowlists /jobs/search for AI agents. Run it periodically.

For local debugging against real pages:

python scripts/fetch_live_fixtures.py   # writes tests/fixtures_live/ (gitignored)

License

MIT