seek-mcp

An MCP server for Seek New Zealand (nz.seek.com). It lets an MCP client such as Claude Code or Claude Desktop do what the website does: search jobs and read full ads, research companies (profiles, employee reviews, salaries), read Seek's career guide and salary insights, browse the recruiter directory and People search, manage every part of the signed-in profile and its résumés, keep saved jobs, saved searches and notes, tune recommendations and notifications, and submit applications.

Everything runs over Seek's own HTTP API with plain Node fetch. There is no browser, no Puppeteer and no Playwright at runtime: the server sends the same GraphQL documents the Seek website sends, copied verbatim out of the site's own JavaScript bundles (src/documents.ts), and checks every request it builds against the schema those bundles ship. How the operations were found is documented in NATIVE-NOTES.md.

This is an unofficial tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by SEEK. Automating your account may be against Seek's terms of use, applications it submits are real and cannot be withdrawn, and you are responsible for the truthfulness of every answer it sends on your behalf. Use it on your own account, at your own risk.

Why this exists

Built by ezydubs, who got tired of watching decent applications vanish into screening software and decided the only fair answer was to put the same kind of automation on the applicant's side. The method is simple: use AI to beat AI. Employers already use it to rank hundreds of CVs in seconds and to run first-round interviews; this gives job hunters an assistant that can search, read every ad properly, answer the screening questions exactly, write a tailored cover letter and apply, free and open source, with the same honesty rules it enforces on itself. Yes, that makes him a bit of a legend. He said so himself, and the applied-jobs list agrees.

"Beat" does not mean spam. The tool refuses jobs you have already applied to, will not guess an answer, and dry-runs everything before it sends. It exists so a real person can show up to every role they genuinely fit with a complete, honest application, at the speed the screeners read them.

The job market this was built for (New Zealand, 2025–2026)

"The unemployment rate was 5.6 percent in the June 2026 quarter, compared with 5.4 percent in the March 2026 quarter." — Abby Johnston, labour market spokesperson, Stats NZ, 5 August 2026. RNZ called it an 11-year high: 166,500 people unemployed, and underutilisation among 15–24-year-olds up to 37 percent.

"As of November 2025 ... relative to November 2019 ... we have seen a 243 percent increase in the number of applicants per job ad on the Seek site, at least." — Brad Olsen, Infometrics chief executive, in RNZ, 18 February 2026. The same story: Oppo's managing director "would usually consider 500 a high number of applicants for a job ad", then watched one central-Auckland customer service ad pass 2,500 applications.

"Sheryl has applied for 90 jobs since being made redundant last November. Despite decades of experience in human resources and being desperate to work, so intense is the competition for jobs that she's struggled to even get a response to many of her applications." ... "It's demoralising, your self-worth takes a hit, self-doubt starts to creep in." — RNZ, 6 August 2026. In the same piece a 22-year-old graduate had sent almost 200 applications for about six interviews, and a nurse with 37 years' experience put it this way: "They don't tell you when they email you back, they don't tell you why you didn't get the job, they just say 'We're so sorry and thank you for your application', so you never know."

"If you've had 200 people apply for a role, you need to be able to quickly comb that down and rank those employees, so the AI does that and gives you a shortlist." ... "Unfortunately for all the job hunters out there, there is a lot more people looking for jobs than jobs are going." — Neil Webster, Employment Hero chief executive, in 1News, 21 May 2026, which reported more than 2,500 AI-led job interviews run by that one company in April alone.

"More than a third of employers said AI-generated CVs are making it difficult to assess talent quality (36%)", while "automated screening tools tend to miss strong job candidates (37%)". — Robert Half survey of New Zealand employers, reported by HRD New Zealand, 6 February 2026. The screeners are missing good people, by their own users' account.

"There's no way that you can deal with that type of application level." — Liza Viz, Beyond Recruitment chief executive, on an administration role that drew about 1,200 applications in two days, in The Spinoff, 24 February 2025. One job hunter in the same article, after a year of searching: "I don't want to look at another job app, write another cover letter. Oh god, it's like nightmare fuel."

That last quote is the problem this solves. Writing the fortieth tailored cover letter is nightmare fuel; the software reading it on the other side never gets tired. Now neither do you.

Related MCP server: witness-mcp

Contents

• Why this exists

• Features

• Requirements

• Install

• Connect it to an MCP client

• Signing in

• Tools

• Applying safely

• Standing answers

• Actions that need confirmation

• Files and environment

• Development

• How it works

• License

Features

• Search and read without signing in: keywords, location, work type, work arrangement (on-site, hybrid, remote), classification and subclassification, listing date, salary, one advertiser or one company; counts by work type and arrangement; Seek's refinement pills for a search. Full ads come with the employer's screening questions, contact details in the ad, badges, the advertiser's history on Seek and the company's rating.

• Companies: profile, culture, perks and awards, employee ratings by category, Seek's AI summary of reviews, every review (filter by location, sort by recent or helpful), salary ranges by role, the company's open jobs and its Graduates tab; browse companies by industry.

• Career advice and salaries: Seek's career guide for any role (what it's like, duties, skills, how to become one, satisfaction and hours, growth, similar roles), salary insight New Zealand-wide or by region, annual or hourly, by industry, role reviews, career pathways to next roles with live job counts, roles that use given skills, role counts by industry and interest theme, careers by classification, the advice articles (latest, featured, popular, by category) and the Career Compass quiz with its AI recommendations.

• Recruiters and people: the recruiter and agency directory (search by placements, specialisation and region; featured recruiters and agencies; profiles, reviews, jobs, placements, teams and awards; email a recruiter or record a call) and People search over public candidate profiles.

• Apply natively: the same submitApplication mutation the website sends, with résumé, a written or uploaded cover letter, written or uploaded selection criteria, the profile's most recent role, every employer question answered by exact option id, and optional strong interest (priority apply). Dry-run mode prepares everything and sends nothing. Off-site jobs can be recorded in Applied jobs.

• Answer employer questions deliberately: human-readable answers are matched against the live questionnaire and must resolve to exactly one option; anything unmatched, ambiguous or duplicated is an error rather than a guess. Standing answers fill the standard work-rights, notice-period and salary questions.

• The whole profile: personal details, summary, career history (add, edit, delete, accept or dismiss résumé suggestions), education, licences and certifications, skills (with Seek's suggestions), languages, next-role preferences (availability, work types, locations, classification, role titles, salary, rights to work), approachability, visibility, photo, profile strength and Seek's suggestions, activity and verifications (verified licences and qualifications are edited the way Seek allows); résumés (upload with Seek's virus scan, delete, set default, download, generate one from the profile).

• Your activity: saved jobs, saved searches and their email alerts, notes on saved and applied jobs, applied jobs with the documents sent and applicant insights, priority-apply credits, recommendations and "not interested" feedback, the home feed (AI job summaries, market insights for your role and location, profile performance) and refining recommendations by answering Seek's questions, the salary and market-insight prompts, and Seek's AI assessments of a job (job match, strong fit, how to stand out).

• Settings: email and push notification preferences, changing the sign-in email, and (guarded) deleting the account.

• Self-renewing sign-in: a one-time hand-over from your own Chrome profile, then automatic renewal; tokens live in a mode-600 file outside the repo.

Requirements

• Node.js 22.13 or newer (uses the built-in fetch, FormData, Blob and node:test).

• macOS for the one-time Chrome sign-in hand-over (seek_auth with bootstrap). Everything else is platform-independent.

• Google Chrome signed in to nz.seek.com, for that same hand-over.

No other binaries. PDF CVs are read with Mozilla's pure-JavaScript pdf.js and DOCX files with Node's built-in zlib.

Install

git clone https://github.com/ezydubs/seek-mcp.git
cd seek-mcp
npm install
npm run build        # compiles src/ to dist/
npm test             # builds and runs the unit tests

The server binary is dist/server.js (also exposed as the seek-mcp bin). It speaks MCP over stdio.

Connect it to an MCP client

Claude Code

claude mcp add seek -- node /absolute/path/to/seek-mcp/dist/server.js

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or any other stdio MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "seek": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/seek-mcp/dist/server.js"]
    }
  }
}

Restart or reconnect the client after rebuilding: a running server keeps the code it started with.

Signing in

The tools marked "no" below work without an account. Every other tool needs Seek's sign-in.

1. Sign in to nz.seek.com in Google Chrome (the Default profile unless CHROME_PROFILE says otherwise).

2. Ask the client to run seek_auth with bootstrap: true. The server copies Seek's sign-in out of that Chrome profile once, renews it, and stores the result in ~/.seek-mcp/tokens.json with mode 600.

3. From then on the server renews the sign-in by itself. seek_auth with no arguments reports whether a usable sign-in is held and when it expires; check: true asks Seek which account it is; logout: true revokes and deletes it.

Things to know:

• Seek rotates the sign-in on every renewal, so the copy Chrome held becomes stale after the hand-over and Chrome will usually ask you to sign in again. That is expected. Do not run the bootstrap again unless seek_auth reports the server signed out, or you deliberately want the server to take over whichever account Chrome is on now.

• An unused sign-in lapses after about a week. Seek's identity provider stops renewing a refresh token that has not been used for roughly seven days (invalid_grant). seek_auth then reports signedIn: false with the reason; sign in to nz.seek.com in Chrome and bootstrap again.

• The server acts as whichever account Chrome was signed into at bootstrap time. If you have more than one Seek account, check seek_profile (it returns the account email) before applying to anything.

There is no username/password or email-code sign-in for the server: Seek's identity provider refuses those grants for this client, and its email-code login requires a reCAPTCHA, so a real browser login has to exist first.

Tools

62 tools. "no" in the sign-in column means it works without an account.

Jobs

Applying and activity

Profile

Account

Companies

Career advice

Recruiters and people

seek_apply arguments

Both modes return the résumé used, whether documents were prepared, the most recent role Seek will attach, the standing answers that were auto-filled and the resolved option for every question. submit: true additionally returns Seek's applicationId.

Applying safely

• Always dry-run first. submit: false runs the full preparation (questionnaire resolution, document generation) and returns exactly what would be sent. Nothing reaches the employer.

• Submissions are irreversible. Seek has no withdraw. The tool refuses jobs the account has already applied to and jobs that take applications off Seek (externalApply).

• Every question must be answered, honestly. Unmatched, ambiguous or duplicated answers fail loudly instead of guessing. Privacy-policy consent questions are ordinary questions and are never filled automatically: pass { question: "privacy policy", option: "Yes" } yourself when you mean it.

• Know which account you are on. seek_profile shows the email. Applications go to that account and its notification inbox.

Standing answers

Seek asks the same three screening questions on most jobs. seek_standing_answers stores your answers so applications can go out unattended; they are the user's own declarations and the tool never invents others.

// seek_standing_answers arguments
{
  "workRights": "New Zealand citizen",          // option text for the right-to-work question
  "notice": "None, I'm ready to go now",        // option text for the notice-period question
  "salaryDefault": "$90k",                       // when a job advertises no salary
  "salaryBands": [                               // chosen by the midpoint of the advertised range
    { "upTo": 80000,   "answer": "$75k" },
    { "upTo": 110000,  "answer": "$100k" },
    { "upTo": 9999999, "answer": "$130k" }
  ],
  "salaryHourly": "45"                           // for questions that ask an hourly rate
}

Call it with no arguments to read the current settings. Answers are stored in ~/.seek-mcp/answers.json. An explicit answer in seek_apply always wins over a standing one, and a question is never answered twice.

Actions that need confirmation

Some tools reach other people or cannot be undone. They say so in their descriptions and MCP annotations, and refuse to act without an explicit argument:

• seek_report_job, seek_contact_recruiter and seek_company_review_feedback need confirm: true.

• seek_delete_account needs confirmEmail equal to the signed-in account's email (Seek itself asks for nothing).

• seek_apply sends only with submit: true; seek_change_email changes nothing until the emailed code is given.

A Seek mutation that answers with a typed failure (…Failure, error, errors) is reported as an error, never as done.

Files and environment

Nothing about your account is written inside the repository.

Development

src/
  server.ts            createServer(), the core tools (search, job, apply, profile, résumés, saved/applied, auth) and INSTRUCTIONS
  tools/*.ts           the other tools, one module per area: jobs, activity, profile, settings, companies, career, directory
  documents.ts         generated: the GraphQL documents nz.seek.com sends, copied verbatim from its bundles
  seek.ts              constants, signed-out GraphQL (nz.seek.com and the career-guide API), clean(), shared helpers
  auth.ts              token store, renewal, signed-in GraphQL, typed-failure checks, status/check/logout
  api.ts               search, job page fallback, application requirements, profile, saved/applied jobs
  apply.ts             application documents and submit, résumé and attachment uploads, roles, personal details, saved jobs
  jobs.ts              job details over GraphQL, similar jobs, insights, AI job match, reports
  activity.ts          saved searches, notes, applications, priority apply, recommendations and job preferences
  profile-sections.ts  every other profile section, preferences, avatar, résumé download and generation
  settings.ts          notifications, email change, account deletion
  companies.ts         company search, profile, reviews, salaries, jobs, review feedback
  career.ts            career guide, salaries, role reviews, articles
  directory.ts         People search and the recruiter directory
  discover.ts          autocomplete / id lookups, classifications, profile option lists
  answers.ts, cv.ts, chrome-storage.ts, leveldb.ts   standing answers, CV text, Chrome hand-over
test/                  node:test unit tests; scenarios.mjs drives every signed-in operation; fixtures/ holds Seek's schema
scripts/               live checks (below) and research/ (how documents.ts and the schema were produced)
NATIVE-NOTES.md        the Seek API as observed: endpoints, operations, payload shapes, how they were found

• npm test builds and runs the unit tests. They need no network and no account. requests-schema.test.mjs drives every signed-in operation through the real code with canned replies and validates each request's document and variables against Seek's own GraphQL schema.

• npm run check:public calls every tool that needs no sign-in against the live site.

• npm run check:shapes sends every signed-in request to Seek without a sign-in and checks Seek answers UNAUTHENTICATED (the request is well formed and nothing ran) rather than BAD_USER_INPUT. Operations that might run anonymously, and the application submit, are never sent.

• npm run smoke drives the built server against the signed-in account: search, job, requirements, profile and all its sections, preferences, notifications, saved/applied lists, insights, recommendations, and round trips that leave the account as they found it (save → note → clear → unsave, saved search create → alerts off → delete, and a dry-run apply). Set SEEK_CV_PATH to a résumé file to also exercise seek_cv_read and upload → delete. It sends no applications.

• node scripts/matrix.mjs "<keywords>" and node scripts/scan.mjs dry-run many jobs to see which the standing answers can complete and which questions block the rest.

• node scripts/submit.mjs <jobId> <hourlyRate> [yes] submits a real application after a dry run; yes passes the privacy-policy consent.

To add another Seek operation: rebuild the research catalogue (scripts/research/, see NATIVE-NOTES.md), add its name to scripts/research/gen-documents.mjs, run npm run research:documents, call it with sgql (signed in) or publicGql, and add a scenario to test/scenarios.mjs.

How it works

• Job search is a GET to Seek's public jobsearch/v5/search endpoint. Everything else is GraphQL: nz.seek.com/graphql for jobs, companies, the recruiter directory, People search and the account, and career-guide-api.cloud.seek.com.au/graphql (with country: NZ headers) for the career guide, salaries and articles.

• The documents are the website's own, copied verbatim from its JavaScript bundles: scripts/research/ downloads each app's bundles, reads the compiled GraphQL ASTs and query strings out of them as data (never running them), and gen-documents.mjs writes the ones the server uses into src/documents.ts.

• Account calls send a bearer token and Seek's brand/country headers. On UNAUTHENTICATED the server renews once and retries. Mutations that answer with a typed failure are reported as errors.

• Applying mirrors the website step for step: TrackJobApplicationStarted, GetJobApplicationProcess for the questionnaire, generateCoverLetter / generateSelectionCriteria for written documents (or the presigned upload plus processUploadedAttachment for files), then one submitApplication whose input is built exactly as the site's bundle builds it (optional parts omitted, not nulled).

• Sign-in renewal is the standard refresh grant against Seek's identity provider; the refresh token rotates on every use, which is why only one party may hold it.

Details, field names and the captured operation list are in NATIVE-NOTES.md.

License

ISC