In this post, we're going to answer a StackOverflow question. You can still view the original question on StackOverflow, but we'll provide the text of the question below also. Or you can skip below to our answer.
Years ago, someone asked…if it were possible to retrieve a list of all employees who work at a company. I can do this through the the platform UI, but I cannot seem to find any mechanism for this using the v2 API. The SO response mentions this used to be possible on the v1 API, but you had to request access through the platform's "Vetted API Access Program." Unfortunately, the link on this response is now obsolete and does not send users to any such program.How could I apply for this program nowadays? This is a specific situation to me and my company, so I would very much like to discuss this with someone at the platform if some form of this Vetted API Access Program still exists. I do not wish to disclose the details of this request to the open internet.
Our answer
You can get a list of employees of a company in two ways:
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If you scrape user profiles exhaustively
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If you already have an exhaustive dataset of user profiles.
Each professional networks profile contains a list of "experiences," each of which links to a company profile URL. So once you have a data set, the process to create your list consists of two steps:
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Parse the profiles into JSON so you can easily filter them
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Filter the parsed profiles based on who currently works at a particular company. Now you have your list of current employees ou can instead filter based on "past" experiences (i.e. those with an end date) to find past, or even all, employees)
And that is exactly what we did. We scraped all public user profiles based in several countries, including the United States, Singapore, and Canada; and we made an alternative API known as the Enrich Layer Employee Listing API, which provides employee listing functionality.