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v28.2 was released on December 3 2024.

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December 2024 (v28.2) is a Minor Release

PDL releases data updates every month with a major release every quarter. Minor releases (such as v28.2) typically contain fewer product updates or key changes, but still contain important data improvements.

Welcome to our December 2024 release notes! We have some exciting updates to share for the last month of the year:

Here are the key highlights:

• The beta release of our new Person Changelog API endpoint!
• Significant quality improvements to our mobile phone data
• Over 123M jobs verified and 674k job changes detected globally across our person dataset this month

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

Table of Contents

❗Breaking Changes

• ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
  • Deprecation of Legacy Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy
  • New Release Schedule
  • Deprecation of gics_sector
  • Deprecation of version_status
  • Free-Tier Restructure for Self-Serve Plans

✨ New Products and Features

• Person Changelog API

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
  • Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

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❗Breaking Changes

⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes

🚧

Upcoming Breaking Changes

Upcoming breaking changes in future versions may impact your current processes. We are announcing them here to provide ample time for you to adjust your processes accordingly.

⚠️ New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy (Person / Company / IP)

Change expected in: February 2025

Previous Announcements: v26 / April 2024, v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024, v28.0 / October 2024, v28.1 / November 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

Last month (v28.0), we officially released our new Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy for full General Availability to all customers. With the GA release of this new taxonomy, the previous (legacy) taxonomy has now entered its deprecation period with support fully ending as of February 2025 (v29.1).

⚠️

Legacy Taxonomy will be fully deprecated in February 2025

As of the February 2025 (v29.1 release, PDL datasets for all customers will be transitioned to the new taxonomy.

To access the new taxonomy, customers must explicitly opt-in for v28.1, v28.2, and v29.0 (Nov - Jan releases) by reaching out to your Account team to enable these fields in your data deliveries. API customers can access the new taxonomy by using a new updated_title_roles parameter in their API requests. Existing customers still using the legacy taxonomy can choose to delay opting-in to receive the new taxonomy until the legacy taxonomy is fully deprecated in the v29.1 release.

Our Recommendations

If you are an existing customer who has not yet evaluated the new taxonomy:

• Please reach out to receive a sample as soon as possible.
• Opt-in to the new taxonomy and begin transitioning your systems to the new taxonomy. The January 2025 (v29.0) release will be the last supported release that you will be able to receive the legacy taxonomy. In February (v29.1), all customers will be transitioned to the new taxonomy. Connect with your CS and TS team to plan and coordinate your migration process.
• If you are an API customer, you can begin accessing the new taxonomy by including a new updated_title_roles parameter in your API requests and setting it to True.

If you an existing customer who has already begun evaluating the data or participated in the beta release:

• Continue or begin your migration process. We strongly encourage you to fully transition your systems to using the new taxonomy as early as possible ahead of the February 2025 deprecation to provide time to address any unforeseen transition challenges you run into.

If you are a new customer or you do not currently use any of the fields impacted by this change:

• In February (v29.1), you will be automatically transitioned to the new taxonomy.
• Again, if you are an API customer, you can access the new taxonomy by including a new updated_title_roles parameter in your API requests and setting it to True.

Timeline

Given the scope of the changes, our goal is to provide clear visibility on the process and ample opportunity to work through this transition together. The projected timeline for this release is as follows:

• ✅ July 2024 - Breaking Change Announcement and Resource Launch:
  • Public notice of our planned role / subrole transition and initial resources provided (see below)
• ✅ August 2024 - Beta:
  • We will open up beta access to the new role / subrole taxonomy as well as a new data field title.class
  • Customers will be able to test sample data from our Technical Services team to explore the new taxonomy and the potential data impacts
  • We will release a guide documenting our recommended best practices for transitioning to the new taxonomy with the beta release as well
• ✅ October 2024 - General Availability:
  • We will make the new role / subrole taxonomy generally available for all customers and begin the deprecation process for the previous taxonomy
  • Customers can opt in to accessing the new taxonomy via API (using a new updated_title_roles parameter) and flat file deliveries. Customers will have the ability to delay transitioning until their systems are updated
• ⏭️ February 2025 - Final Deprecation:
  • We will fully deprecate and officially end support for the previous taxonomy
  • All new and existing customers will be moved onto the new role / subrole taxonomy.

Resources

Please use the following resources to better understand the upcoming changes and to start preparing for the transition. As always, reach out to your Customer Success and Technical Services teams for questions and support.

The new set of canonical classes, roles, and subroles is here:

• Job Title Class [post-v27.1]
• Job Title Roles [post-v27.1]
• Job Title Subroles [post-v27.1]
• Mapping Job Title Class to Roles to Subroles [post-v27.1]

The mapping from the current role/subrole taxonomy to the improved taxonomy is here:

• Role / Subrole Taxonomy Restructure [post-v27.1]

Sample records using the updated role / subrole taxonomy are here:

• Example Person Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example Company Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example IP Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]

⚠️ New Release Schedule (All Products)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Products Impacted: All PDL Products

Beginning in January 2025 (v29.0), we will be modifying the schedule for our releases, shifting the release date by 15 days to the middle of the month.

Currently, all releases (major and minor) occur on the first Tuesday of every month. Under the new schedule, all releases will occur on the third Tuesday of the month, with the first release following this new schedule occurring on January 21, 2024 (v29.0).

Why are we making this change?
The primary goal for this change is to increase the freshness of our Company Insights data, which summarizes aggregate employee headcounts to the “last completed month” of data. Shifting our release schedule by half a month allows us to calculate the aggregated headcount totals immediately after the completion of a month. The end result is that we will be able to report our Insights data with an extra month’s worth of information in each data release.

Timeline

❗️

Notice that between v28.2 and v29.0 there will be an additional gap of half a month as we shift from one release schedule to the other.

⚠️ Deprecation of gics_sector (Company)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Products Impacted: Company

In January 2025 (v29.0), we will be removing the gics_sector field from our data. This change will only impact a subset of records in our company dataset.

Currently, this field is only populated in ~27.8k PDL company records (0.003% of our company dataset) since it is derived from the self-identified industry sector reported in the filings of public companies. This field is redundant with other self-reported industry fields contained in our company records (which have much higher coverage). As a result, we have made the decision to deprecate this field in favor of our other industry field representations.

For customers interested in continuing to source public company sector information, we recommend the following resources:

• Free web sources:
  • Finbox.com: Presents the GICS sector label on each company profile (example)
  • Yahoo! Finance: Presents the Morningstar sector label on each company profile (example)
• Paid API and programmatic resources:
  • SEC-API.io: Provides an API endpoint that returns the Morningstar sector label among the company attributes returned (documentation)
  • Financial Modeling Prep: Provides an API endpoint that returns the Morningstar sector label among the company attributes returned (documentation)
    
    

⚠️ Deprecation of version_status (Person)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v17.0 / January 2022

Products Impacted: Person

In January 2025 (v29.0), we will be removing the version_status field from our person dataset.

We officially deprecated this field in January 2022 (v17.0). While this field has continued to exist in our data since then, we have introduced more reliable references to a profile’s history / lineage across releases via the recommended alternatives below. As such, we are fully removing this field from our schema.

Recommended Alternatives
For customers that were using the version_status field to lookup the current version of the data, please use the dataset_version field available in both our Person and Company records.

For customers using this field to understand the change history of records, please use the ID Changelogs (Person / Company) for the relevant monthly / quarterly time period that you are looking to compare against.

⚠️ Free Tier Restructure for Self-Serve Plans

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025

Products Impacted: Person

In January 2025, we will be restructuring all existing free-tier plans to limit access to specific fields in our Person datasets. This change impacts all self-serve customers with free tier plans created before July 29, 2024.

Back in July 2024, we made the decision to limit access for new free tier plans to certain person fields that were prone to exploitation for unauthorized and potentially nefarious use cases. Based on the usage patterns we’ve observed since then, we have made the decision to migrate all legacy free tier users to this new free tier plan.

This migration will go into effect in January 2025, after which the person fields shown in the table above will be converted from values to true/false flags. To continue accessing these fields, customers will need to upgrade to a Pro plan with at least $100 minimum monthly commitment.

Example Free Tier Field

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✨ New Products and Features

Person Changelog API

This month, we are excited to announce the beta release of our new Person Changelog API. This new endpoint lets you instantly search for record changes across releases, without needing to ingest, host, or process any large files to do so. This solution also provides an easier way to interface with data updates compared to the Webhooks flow

How does it work?
The Person Changelog API is built on top of our existing Person Changelog, and provides an interface to directly query for information from the changelog. For example, you could use the Person Changelog API to identify all the records that were deleted in the last release, which would return the list of corresponding PDL IDs and metadata from the changelog.

What can you do with it?
One of the key benefits to using the Person Changelog API is using it to filter records based on which fields were updated. This means, you can easily perform queries over previous monthly/quarterly releases to:

• Find all the records with new contact information from this release
• Check if specific records had updated work experience from this release
• Query for records that were added, deleted, merged, opted_out, or updated

Subsequently, you can take the records IDs that you’ve retrieved and get the up-to-date data via the Person Enrichment API.

How to get started
The Person Changelog API is a free endpoint that is available to all PDL customers to use (similar to some of our other supporting endpoints, like our Cleaner APIs). All you need is a PDL API key (you can sign up for one for free), to begin using this API endpoint.

We recommend checking out the documentation pages for additional details and code examples.

If you have any product feedback or suggestions, please get in touch with your customer success team or share your input on the feature request ticket!

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🚀 Data Updates

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December 2024 is a Minor Release

As a reminder, December 2024 is a minor release. This means that the information reported below is based off of the last one month of updates (rather than the 3 months of updates we typically report for the major releases).

Freshness

The number of jobs and locations verified in our datasets over the past month (based on the job_last_verified and location_last_updated fields).

Job Changes

The number of person records where the primary job experience changed in our Person Dataset over the past month (based on the job_last_changed field).

Coverage (Full Stats: Person, Company)

Resume Dataset

API Dataset

Email Dataset

Mobile Phone Dataset

Company Dataset

Commentary

• We saw a significant decrease in the number of mobile phones across our datasets as a result of our mobile phone quality improvement (see below).

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• This month, we released several improvements for our Mobile Phone data:
  • Better accuracy in mobile phone tagging: We demoted phone numbers from the mobile_phone field into the phones array that did not correspond to cell numbers or are no longer owned by the associated person
  • Improved mobile phone promotion: numbers in the phones array that were determined to be mobile are now elevated to the mobile_phone field
  • Ensured unique ownership: each mobile_phone is now uniquely linked to one person, distinguished based on first name.
• Updated list of company websites where we allow subdomains and paths
  • For v28.1 we had narrowed the list of company websites for which we allow a subdomain or path. Unfortunately, this resulted in unwanted duplication of the website field for important websites, including “apple.com” and “amazon.com”.
  • For v28.2 we reverted this change and further expanded the list of company domains for which we allow a subdomain and a path.
  • For v28.2 users can still expect to find some longtail cases of duplication in the website field. The team is working on a solution to ensure the website field is distinct.

Bug Fixes

• We made improvements to our school name canonicalization
• We fixed a bug that was allowing certain certifications to appear in profile name fields (e.g. MCIPS or FRCPC certifications)
• We fixed a bug that resulted in inaccurate inferred_revenue values for ~1,600 large, public companies.
• We fixed a bug that allowed individuals to have -1 inferred_years_experience