How to list all employees of any company

May 27, 2021

8 min read

How to get a list of all employees with Enrich Layer's Employee Listing API Endpoint?

I receive a lot of requests seeking for help in listing employees of companies. Which is why I am happy to share that the Employee Listing Endpoint is generally available on Enrich Layer API today

It is not easy to launch this endpoint because no publicly available professional networks page lists all employees. Without a focused page to page, the only way forward is to scrape every (person) profile. That is what we did.

Yes, to launch the Employee Listing Endpoint, we had to:

Scrape every person profile
Implement infrastructure to keep profiles up to date

That brings me to the next point – how else can you get a list of all employees other than Enrich Layer's Employee Listing API Endpoint?

Use the platform to list employees

Given that we scrape the platform public profiles to power the Enrich Layer's Employee Listing Endpoint, it is only natural that the platform, the canonical source of these data should be the best way forward to get employee listing data, And for the most part, that is true.

There are two "buts".

It is non-trivial to scrape the platform as a logged-in user at scale. It is also not legal.
You are capped at 1000 results per company.

I tried to list all 235,789 employees of Apple.

So, the platform works if you do not mind scraping the platform with an active login session, abiding by their rate limits and their 1000 profile limit.

Use LinkDB to list employees

LinkDB is our publicly accessible PostgreSQL database populated with people and company profiles.

Before the launch of our Employee Listing API endpoint, I usually shepherd inquiries on the employee listing problem to LinkDB. And yes, you can use LinkDB to list employees and perform very complex queries recommend LinkDB if you are looking to perform a complex search such as:

Find me all

who have left Apple in the last 3 months
who is a Software Engineer
And for the simple use case of listing employees, this is the SQL query you can run on LinkDB to get a list of active employees of DigitalOcean.

And this is the SQL query I can run on LinkDB to get results for the complex search above.

SELECT profile_experience.profile_id, profile.first_name, profile.last_name, profile_experience.title FROM profile_experience JOIN profile ON profile_experience.profile_ WHERE profile_experience.company_profile_ AND profile_experience.ends_at IS NULL However, the caveats of LinkDB remains true:

You have to be comfortable with writing SQL. We do not provide support with programming (or writing SQL queries)
LinkDB is beta software, and will likely remain so in perpetuity.
Performance is not guaranteed and we do not offer the service of optimizing LinkDB for customers' (arbitrary) queries.

Use Enrich Layer's Employee Listing Endpoint

I will not use LinkDB in my user-facing product. But I will integrate Enrich Layer's Employee Listing Endpoint into my product because it checks the following criteria

Enrich Layer's Employee Listing Endpoint is

highly-available
predictable (and fast) response
consistent in performance
predictable pricing

With the endpoint, you can list

past employees
present employees
both

All you need is a the platform Company Profile URL. Given that Enrich Layer is a developer-tool product, let's dive into code. Let's get a list of Clearbit's employees.

Counting Clearbit employees

`from pprint import pprint import requests

api_

api_ Social Network/company/employees/count'

header_ = requests.get(api_endpoint, 'url': f'https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/company/clearbit', }, pprint(response.json()) Enrich Layer returns 69` active employees.

`$ time python employeelisting.py 200 {"total_employee": 69}

real 0m1.814s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.051s The endpoint takes 1.8s` to complete.

But who exactly are the employees?

Let's make another API call, but this time to the /Enrich Layer/api/the platform/company/employees/count endpoint

`from pprint import pprint import requests

api_

api_ Social Network/company/employees/'

header_ = requests.get(api_endpoint, 'url': f'https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/company/clearbit', }, pprint(response.json()) `Here are the results, 69 user profiles (truncated).

real 0m1.010s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.047s The endpoint takes 1s` to complete.

the platform says that Clearbit has 108 employees. We have 63 of them. This is expected because

We scrape US Profile only. If Enrich Layer have employees outside of the US region, our API will not be able to return them.
Not all user profiles have public profiles. We can only return public profile results.

Counting Clearbit employees

`from pprint import pprint import requests

api_

api_ Social Network/company/employees/count'

header_ = requests.get(api_endpoint, 'url': f'https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/company/clearbit', }, pprint(response.json()) Enrich Layer returns 69` active employees.

`$ time python employeelisting.py 200 {"total_employee": 69}

real 0m1.814s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.051s The endpoint takes 1.8s` to complete.

But who exactly are the employees?

Let's make another API call, but this time to the /Enrich Layer/api/the platform/company/employees/count endpoint

`from pprint import pprint import requests

api_

api_ Social Network/company/employees/'

header_ = requests.get(api_endpoint, 'url': f'https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/company/clearbit', }, pprint(response.json()) `Here are the results, 69 user profiles (truncated).

real 0m1.010s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.047s The endpoint takes 1s` to complete.

the platform says that Clearbit has 108 employees. We have 63 of them. This is expected because

We scrape US Profile only. If Enrich Layer have employees outside of the US region, our API will not be able to return them.
Not all user profiles have public profiles. We can only return public profile results.

We recommend that you use Enrich Layer's Employee Listing Endpoint for just US region only

Remember how earlier in the article, I mentioned that the only way we can support the Employee Listing Endpoint is by crawling all profiles in a region. It turns out that we do have limited crawling capacity. Just to give you a sense of what limited means to us. We are talking about scraping millions of profiles a day.

It takes a lot of resources to

Surface all user profiles of a region
And KEEP them refreshed as best as we can

As such, we have to limit the Employee Listing Endpoint to the US region only. (It does work internationally, but we do not offer any guarantees on the quality of the results.)

How much does Enrich Layer's Employee Listing endpoint cost?

The Employee Listing endpoint costs 5 credits per employee returned.
The minimum cost of this endpoint is 10 credits.
The Employee Listing Count endpoint costs 10 credits per call.

Get started with Enrich Layer's Employee Listing endpoint today ou can view the documentation for the

Employee Listing endpoint at #company-api-employee-listing-endpoint
Employee Listing Count endpoint at #company-api-employee-count-endpoint

Do give it a spin and if you have any questions, you can always talk to me at [email protected] . I look forward to your emails and I do reply promptly :)

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