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How the Person Profile Endpoint Works — and When to Use It

Yury Tsukeman avatar
Written by Yury Tsukeman
Updated over 2 months ago

👋 Meet the Person Profile Endpoint

The Person Profile Endpoint lets you access detailed information about individuals based on a known public profile URL (e.g., a professional or social media profile).

It’s designed for 1:1 enrichment, meaning you provide a direct profile link and get structured data about that person in return. It’s ideal for B2B enrichment, lead validation, talent mapping, and more.

What You Can Get From It

A successful Person Profile Endpoint call can return:

  • Full name, headline, and job title

  • Company and role details

  • Work history, education, and skills

  • Optional enrichments like:

    • certifications

    • projects

    • publications

Just like with the Company Profile Endpoint, you can choose to exclude additional data to reduce credit usage.

⚙️ How It Works

To use the Person Profile Endpoint, you’ll need:

  • A valid social media profile URL

You’ll send a POST request to the Person Profile Endpoint with the URL as the main input.

Example:

{

}

If you don’t include optional enrichments, the default response will return core information only.

How Credits Are Used

A basic Person Profile Endpoint call typically costs 1 credit.

You may be charged 2 or more credits if:

  • data freshness is enabled (use_cache=if-recent)

  • You include enrichments that require deeper data lookups

✅ When to Use the Person Search Endpoint

  • Enriching leads in your CRM

  • Pulling profile data for personalized outreach

  • Verifying job history or current position

  • Building user segments based on industry, education, or company


Want to Try It?

You can test the endpoint using Postman, curl, or a no-code API tool. Just remember—if the profile doesn’t exist or can’t be found, no credits will be deducted.

⚠️ Looking for a different use case? We’ll be adding more endpoint guides soon. Let us know what you’d like covered next!


📊 Understanding Data Completeness

When using the Person Profile Endpoint, you may notice that some experience or education data appears incomplete or missing. Here's why this happens and what to expect.

Common scenarios for incomplete data

Privacy Settings:
Users can set specific sections of their profiles to private, including individual work experiences, education history, or start/end dates. When a user makes data private, we respect their privacy preferences and do not return that information. This is part of our commitment to GDPR compliance.

Missing or incomplete dates:

Some profiles may have missing start dates, end dates, or other details in the `experiences` or `education` arrays. This can happen when:

  • The user didn't provide complete information on their profile

  • Historical data is incomplete

  • The information was added before dates were tracked

We use approximately 10 years of historical data to backfill missing information where possible, but coverage may not be 100% complete.

School names in education:

School names may be missing from the `education` section if the user set their education to private or their account has restricted access to that data.

What you can expect:

  • Public data: We return all publicly available data from profiles

  • Privacy compliance: We strictly adhere to user privacy preferences and GDPR requirements


Why Certain Profile Fields Return Null Values

When using the Person Profile Endpoint, you may notice that certain fields return null or empty values.

Here's why this happens:

We Only Collect Publicly Available Information

Our API only collects data that is publicly visible on LinkedIn profiles. Certain datapoints are not visible on public LinkedIn profiles because they are set to private by the user.

This is why you may see differences between what's available through our API compared to what you see when viewing a profile directly on LinkedIn (especially if you're logged in or connected to that person).

Understanding Public vs. Private Data

LinkedIn users can control their privacy settings and choose what information is visible publicly versus only to their connections. When data is set to private, our API will return null for those fields, as we can only access publicly available information.

This ensures we remain compliant with privacy standards and respect user preferences.

For example: if a user has set their email address or phone number to 'Connections only', our API will return null for these fields.

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