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v29.0 was released on January 21, 2024.

Welcome to our January 2025 release notes! New year, new release schedule, and plenty of exciting new updates to share!

Here are the key highlights:

• A new Targeted Profile Updates service that guarantees updates every 30 days for high-priority profiles
• Reminder about our recently released Person Changelog API to help track record updates across releases.
• Over 300M job updates with 17M job changes tracked globally in our dataset from this past quarter.

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

Table of Contents

📣 Key Announcements

• Schema Changes
  • Deprecation of version_status (Person Schema)
  • Deprecation of gics_sector (Company Schema)

❗Breaking Changes (Going Live This Month)

• New Release Schedule (All Products)
• Deprecation of version_status (Person)
• Deprecation of gics_sector (Company)
• Free-Tier Restructure for Self-Serve Plans
• ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
  • Deprecation of Legacy Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy (Person / Company / IP)
  • (New) Snowflake Listing Migration
  • (New) Deprecation of Skill Enrichment API

✨ New Products and Features

• Targeted Profile Update Service (Person Schema)
• Person Changelog API (Person Schema)

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
  • Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

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📣 Key Announcements

Schema Changes

Deprecation ofversion_status (Person Schema)

We’ve removed the version_status field from our Person Schema. See the Breaking Change Notice below for more information.

Deprecation ofgics_sector (Company Schema)

We’ve removed the gics_sector field from our Company Schema. See the Breaking Change Notice below for more information.

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❗Breaking Changes

❗ New Release Schedule (All Products)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v28.0 / October 2024, v28.1 / November 2024, v28.2 / December 2024

Products Impacted: All PDL Products

As of the January 2025 (v29.0) release, the date for all future releases has been shifted by 15 days to occur in the middle of the month (as opposed to during the start of the month).

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

⚠️

Downstream Considerations

Data License Deliveries: Monthly and quarterly data license deliveries will now align with the new release schedule, starting with v29.0 on January 21, 2025.

API Updates, Changelogs, and Documentation: API data, changelogs, release notes, and documentation will now be updated on the third Tuesday of each month, in line with the new release schedule.

Other Dependencies: Systems, processes, or teams relying on the release schedule should adjust their timelines. This includes automated workflows, integrations, and reporting, which will now align with the new release dates.

Why did we make 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 was an additional gap of half a month as we shifted from one release schedule to the other.

❗ Deprecation of version_status (Person)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v17.0 / January 2022, v28.0 / October 2024, v28.1 / November 2024, v28.2 / December 2024

Products Impacted: Person

With this month’s release, we have now removed 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 have now fully removed 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 Changelog for the relevant monthly / quarterly time period that you are looking to compare against.

❗ Deprecation of gics_sector (Company)

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v28.0 / October 2024, v28.1 / November 2024, v28.2 / December 2024

Products Impacted: Company

This month, we have now removed the gics_sector field from our data. This change only impacts a subset of records in our company dataset.

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

❗ Free Tier Restructure for Self-Serve Plans

Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v28.0 / October 2024, v28.1 / November 2024, v28.2 / December 2024

Products Impacted: Person

As of this release, we have now restructured 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 made the decision to migrate all legacy free tier users to this new free tier plan.

This migration goes into effect this month, 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

⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes

🚧

Upcoming Breaking Changes

Upcoming breaking changes 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) Snowflake Listing Migration

Change expected in: v30.0 / April 2025
Products Impacted: Snowflake Listings

In April 2025, we will be migrating all Snowflake customers with multiple listings to a single listing per customer.

Why this change?
Historically, Snowflake customers receiving multiple data entities (i.e. both Person and Company datasets) were assigned separate listings in Snowflake for each entity. As of August 2024, we transitioned all new customers to a single-listing approach that has improved our ability to onboard, support and deliver data for customers. By April 2025, we will be migrating our remaining snowflake customers to a single listing as well.

Options for Migration
For customers with multiple listings, there are 2 options for migrating to a single listing:

1. New Listing (recommended): PDL creates a new listing for the customer, and moves all data from the pre-existing listings into the new listing. All pre-existing listings will be removed. Note that this is the recommended approach as it allows more time for customers to transition and ensures acceptance of the new format and listing.
2. Merge and Deprecate: Customers can choose to keep one of their existing listings (e.g. Person) and the data from the other listing (e.g. Company) will be moved over to the first listing. Once the data has been moved over, PDL will remove the second listing.

As mentioned above, we strongly recommend the New Listing approach (option 1) for customers as it ensures proper configuration and consistency across the transition. To begin your migration process, please connect with your Technical Services and Customer Account team.

⚠️ (New) Deprecation of Skill Enrichment API

Change expected in: v30.0 / April 2025
Products Impacted: Skill Enrichment API

In April 2025, we will be deprecating the and removing the Skill Enrichment API.

Why this change?
The Job Title and Skill Enrichment APIs were designed to help improve the user experience when working with our Person Search API. However, based on historical usage patterns we’ve decided to reprioritize our efforts on these APIs. Specifically, we will be deprecating the Skill Enrichment API, which has had limited usage, in favor of improving our Job Title Enrichment API (details of this will be announced in a future release).

For any questions, please contact your Customer Account Team. If you have feedback or product suggestions, please share them in our Roadmap Feature Request Board!

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✨ New Products and Features

Targeted Profile Updates (Person Schema)

This month, we are excited to introduce Targeted Profile Updates, a new service designed to ensure guaranteed updates every 30 days for high-priority profiles.

Who is this for?
This product is ideal for customers with a high-priority set of profiles that they want to ensure have maximal freshness. It complements our existing data freshness solutions (such as Monthly Data Licenses/Delta Deliveries, Changelog, and Person Changelog API) by enabling customers to make strict guarantees about the freshness of their most important profiles.

Some examples of how this service can be used include:

• Investment Intelligence
  • VC Deal Sourcing: Identify when a senior PM leaves Google without taking a new job, which might indicate the start of a new venture.
  • Stock Options/Secondary Purchases: Track employees leaving companies like Stripe to create opportunities for secondary purchases of stock options.
• Sales & Marketing
  • Champion Tracking: Notify customers when key contacts or champions switch jobs, helping them engage at the new company.

These are just a few of the ways this service can provide value. Customers across industries and use cases can leverage it to ensure their most critical profiles are always up to date.

How does it work?

1. Customers provide a targeted list of LinkedIn URLs for the profiles they want monitored.
2. During each build and release cycle, PDL will prioritize updating these profiles, ensuring their job_last_verified date is always less than 30 days old.
3. Updated profiles are included in subsequent data deliveries as part of your normal deliveries.

⚠️

Profile Monitoring Limits

Note that the Targeted Profile Updates service is designed for high-priority, targeted subsets of profiles (i.e. around a few million profiles per customer). Due to system constraints, there is an upper limit to the number of profiles that can be monitored for each customer. This service is not intended for monitoring an entire dataset of 700M profiles.

Availability and Access
This service is launching in beta as a paid add-on for enterprise customers using our Person data.

If you’re interested in this new offering, please reach out to your Customer Account team for more details.

Person Changelog API

As a reminder, we launched our new Person Changelog API last month into beta. This free 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, and is available to all PDL users.

We encourage all our users to play around with this tool as part of your ingestion and update process (see our documentation pages for code examples and additional information).

If you have any product feedback or suggestions, share them with your customer success team or add your input to the feature request ticket!

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🚀 Data Updates

Freshness

The number of jobs and locations verified in our datasets over the past quarter (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 quarter (based on the job_last_changed field).

Coverage (Full Stats: Person, Company)

Resume Dataset

API Dataset

Email Dataset

Mobile Phone Dataset

Company Dataset

Commentary

• headline
  • Over the past quarter, we saw a significant 3x (326%) increase in our coverage for the headline field in our Person records, which we recently released back in October
• mobile_phone
  • Over the past quarter, we saw a 35% increase in our linkage between email_address and mobile_phone (in our Email Dataset) and a 14% decrease in our total number of mobile phones (in our Mobile Phone Dataset). These are due to our mobile phone improvement efforts described below (see Improvements)

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• mobile_phone Improvements
  • Over the past quarter, we made several improvements to our Mobile Phone data including better accuracy and unique ownership across person records. As part of these improvements we removed a significant number of low-quality or stale mobile phones from our records. These updates were first introduced in our December 2024 release.

Bug Fixes

• We removed netherlands antilles from our dataset (person + company records, and location cleaners), as this country was dissolved in 2010 and was not previously represented in any of our records
• We fixed a bug where some companies with ultimate parents did not have immediate parents
• We fixed a bug causing incorrect locations to be tagged as the primary HQ for companies with multiple locations
• We made some improvements to our name cleaner and have now backfilled ~4M records with previously invalid names