April 2023 Release Notes (v22.0)

Release NameDataset VersionPublish Date
April 2023v22.004/04/2023

This data version was was released on 4/4/2023.

Welcome to our April 2023 release notes! We’re rolling out some exciting updates with this release.

Here are some of the key highlights:

Excited yet? Read on to learn more, or jump to a specific section using the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

📣 Key Announcements

✨ New Products and Features

🚀 Data Updates

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes


📣 Key Announcements

Recommended Personal Email in Base Person Bundle

We launched the recommended_personal_email field to our Person Dataset in v20. This field is the statistically most likely deliverable personal email for a profile. When we ran deliverability tests on this field, we saw a 37% improvement in deliverability.

Previously, this field had an additional cost on top of our base packages. We are pleased to announce that the recommended_personal_email field is now part of the Base Person Bundle for API customers and will be available for our Data License customers after May 2023! There are no changes made to the pricing of the Base Person Bundle, and we will continue to list additional emails in the emails field.

The recommended email is chosen using a proprietary process that probabilistically correlates to higher deliverability, but is not guaranteed to be deliverable. We are continuing to improve our overall deliverability of this field and our other email fields by investing in our data sourcing efforts.

Parent & Subsidiary Company Tagging Improvements

In this release, we’ve increased our company parent & subsidiary coverage to expand the connections between companies that already exist as profiles in our company data. This change will increase the accuracy and coverage of the parent/subsidiary fields within our company records, which makes it more reliable for users to understand key relationships between matched profiles and easier for users to roll up the headcount or employee movement summaries of companies operating within larger corporate conglomerates.

This change affects the fill rates in the all_subsidiaries, direct_subsidiaries, immediate_parent, and ultimate_parent fields.

Here’s a quick overview of our increased linkages:

Old #New #Increase %
Companies with 1+ Parent32,19381,353- 152.7%
Companies with 1+ Child9,12129,362- 221.9%

Person ID Length Upcoming Changes

🚧

Upcoming Person ID Maximum Length Change in October 2023

We will be adjusting the maximum character length of PDL Persistent Person IDs. We will be launching this change in October 2023 to allow for ample time to adjust any of your processes impacted by this change.

Currently, IDs are 27 characters long. We recommend allowing for a 64 character maximum for our IDs and will not have any IDs beyond this length, but in practice we expect the changes to result in IDs closer to 32 characters in length. Existing IDs will not change or change length. Only newly created IDs will have the new length.


✨ New Products and Features

Monthly Data License Delivery Options

Currently, PDL delivers Data Licenses on a quarterly cadence. We've had a number of customers request a more frequent Data License delivery cadence and we hear you! With this release, we are implementing monthly delivery options for Data License customers.

Monthly deliveries will be directly tied to our monthly data build timelines, meaning we will be providing the freshest data we can to our customers.

Monthly delivery options will be available at an additional cost for all of our global datasets, including Person and Company data! If you’d like to upgrade your Data License delivery, please reach out to us.

Retrieve Webhook for Data License Customers

Last quarter (V21), we released the webhook functionality for the Person Retrieve API. As a quick refresher, the webhook functionality enables customers to receive updated profiles automatically instead of periodically having to make hundreds of thousands of Retrieve API calls to keep their records up-to-date.

With this release, we are expanding the webhook functionality to Data License customers who want a delta of IDs that have changed on a monthly basis.

Functionally, the only difference in the webhook between API and Data License customers is which IDs will be pulled. For API customers, the webhook checks for updates to all person profiles accessed by calling the Person Enrichment, Person Search, and Person Identify APIs. For Data License customers, the webhook will check for updates to all person profiles included in the customer’s data pull query.

If you’d like access, please reach out to us.

Person Enrichment & Preview API Support for PDL ID Input

The Person Enrichment API will now support PDL Persistent Person ID as an input parameter. Additionally, customers who use our Search or Enrichment Preview APIs can now choose to enrich their new records on ID as opposed to currently supported PII parameters.

If you enrich on ID and anything else, only ID is used and the other inputs for matching are ignored.

pdl_id

TypeDescriptionExample
StringThe PDL Persistent ID for a record in our Person Dataset.qEnOZ5Oh0poWnQ1luFBfVw_0000

🚀 Data Updates

Freshness

This quarter, we updated millions of jobs and locations in our Global Resume Dataset. See below for details:

DatasetGeographyFieldRecords Updated
ResumeGlobalexperience149,059,103
ResumeGloballocation96,426,401
ResumeUnited Statesexperience49,852,494
ResumeUnited Stateslocation40,190,936

Coverage

API Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
personal_emails683,676,725708,085,3153.57%
street_addresses784,304,951803,791,7752.48%
phones1,140,318,2221,150,823,7070.92%

Resume Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
total_records732,702,622741,406,0221.19%
phones44,881,01554,048,41520.43%

Email Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
phones292,736,432310,472,4406.06%

Phone Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
work_email21,710,22728,850,00732.89%
personal_emails222,133,824234,147,8985.41%

Street Address Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
work_email3,341,1913,810,24114.04%

Developer Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
work_email241,862288,56319.31%
personal_emails338,597374,99610.75%

Company Dataset

LinkageCoverage in v21Coverage in v22Increase (%)
total_records22,876,45728,212,38123.33%
all_subsidiaries9,12129,362221.92%
direct_subsidiaries9,12129,362221.92%
immediate_parent32,19381,353152.70%
ultimate_parent32,19381,353152.70%

Commentary

  • Significant increases in contact information linkages across all person datasets.
    • work_email and personal_emails linkages increased across datasets, most notably work_email increased by 33% in the phone dataset.
    • phones linkages in the resume dataset increased by 20%.
  • Added 9.7 million profiles to the resume dataset.
  • Added 4.8 million profiles to the company dataset (23% increase).

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

  • Added Company HQ by country stats to our build process & docs.
  • Previously, if a company did not have a value in an insights field, that field would be missing from the response. Now, all fields will populate with any blank values shown as None.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved instances where end date is before start date in the experience object.
  • Continued reduction of LinkedIn URL duplication across profiles by improving our resolving logic for nicknames (Richard → Rick).
  • Fixed non-canonical values appearing in the size field for certain companies in our company dataset.
  • Resolved instances where certain signifiers would incorrectly be parsed as first or last names. For example, fixed "CSPO" appearing as a last name.