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Welcome to our May 2026 release notes!

This month, we’re making data delivery easier, expanding dataset coverage, and improving quality across the board.

Check it out:

• ⬇️ Direct Downloads is GA: Our faster, easier "pull-based" delivery method is now officially supported for all customers, featuring a new, high-security AWS IAM Role authentication option
• 🔧 Data Quality & Coverage Improvements: More Github data, better coverage of phone numbers, and more complete parent/subsidiary company relationships.
• 🪲 Important Bug Fixes: Better school type classifications, and corrected job verification timestamps
• 📊 Freshness Updates: This past month, we verified 36M+ jobs and detected 4M+ job changes across our global dataset

Dive into the full details below, or jump to what interests you using the table of contents below.

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Table of Contents

✨ New Products and Features

• ⬇️ Direct Downloads: General Availability & AWS IAM Role Access

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
• Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

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✨ New Products and Features

⬇️ Direct Downloads: General Availability & AWS IAM Role Access

What’s New

This month, we are excited to announce that Direct Downloads has moved out of beta and is now in General Availability (GA). Alongside this milestone, we have launched AWS IAM Role Access, a new, highly secure authentication method for customers who prefer a "pull" delivery model.

📘

Direct Downloads gives customers a “pull-based” delivery model for licensed datasets: PDL hosts and secures the data, and customers retrieve it on their own schedule.

The new AWS IAM Role Access support means AWS-native teams can securely authenticate using existing their existing AWS identity setup, eliminating the need to manage traditional credentials and simplifying ingesting workflows.

Why We Built This

Our goal is to provide maximum flexibility and security for how you receive your data. By moving Direct Downloads to GA and introducing IAM Role Access, we are:

• Enhancing Security: IAM Role Access provides a more robust, enterprise-grade way to manage access to your PDL-hosted S3 buckets.
• Simplifying Workflows: Teams using AWS can now leverage their existing infrastructure to automate data ingestion with less overhead.
• Improving Reliability: Direct Downloads removes the need for customers to configure and maintain their own destination storage, as PDL hosts and secures the delivery environment for you.

📘

What about SFTP?

SFTP will continue to remain as a supported option for Direct Download data access. However, AWS IAM Role Access allows a more streamlined experience for security-conscious teams to download licensed datasets at scale without the burden of managing traditional credentials.

How To Get Started

You can now manage your authentication preferences directly from the License Delivery page in the API Dashboard.

1. Navigate to the API Dashboard > Settings > License Delivery.
2. Choose AWS IAM as your access method.
3. Enter your IAM Role ARN and select Share Credentials.
4. Once updated, a dedicated S3 bucket path will be displayed for your future deliveries.

There are no changes to pricing for these quality-of-life improvements.

To learn more about switching from a "Push" to a "Pull" model, check out our guide: Data Delivery Using Direct Download

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🚀 Data Updates

Freshness

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

Monthly (v34.0 → v34.1)
Freshness updates over the past month.

Job Changes

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

Monthly (v34.0 → v34.1)
Freshness updates over the past month.

Coverage (Full Stats:

Person, Company, Job Posting, IP)

Monthly (v34.0 → v34.1)

Resume Dataset

API Dataset

Email Dataset

Mobile Phone Dataset

Company Dataset

Job Posting Dataset

Commentary

• Person Data
  • We saw a >40% increase in our coverage of skills in our resume dataset this past month.
  • We saw a 26% increase in coverage for our headline field in our resume dataset this month.
  • We saw a 16% increase in coverage of github-related fields in our resume dataset as a result of sourcing improvements this past month (see Improvements for more details).
  • We saw a 7% and 6% increase in coverage of phone_numbers and mobile_phones respectively this past month.
  • We saw an increase of 5 - 6% for various education-related fields this month as a result of a couple improvements and bug fixes.
• Job Posting Data
  • We saw a 17% increase in the number of unique companies tracked in our Job Posting Dataset over the past month.

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• Direct Download Authentication
  • Added support for AWS IAM Role Access, providing a more secure and scalable alternative to SFTP for data retrieval.
• GitHub data added to person profiles
  • We expanded our person data pipeline to incorporate GitHub as a source, improving profile enrichment and source attribution for supported records.
• School search and classification improvements
  • We tightened our search requirements to determine matches in our canonical school dataset to address incorrectly mapped schools, resulting in a drop in canonical school field values.
• Expanded parent and subsidiary coverage for companies with PE and VC ownership
  • We removed logic that excluded venture capital and private equity firms from being represented within PDL’s parent and /subsidiary data relationships. PE/VC companies may now appear as parent companies in cases where they have majority (>50%) ownership. This improves the overall coverage of company hierarchy information coverage and unlocks new use cases that leverage information on these relationships.

Bug Fixes

• Corrected School Type Classifications
  • We fixed a bug that was classifying all schools as post-secondary institution. Schools are now correctly classified into one of three categories: post-secondary institution, secondary school, or primary school.
• Updated job_last_verified dates
  • We updated timestamps associated with some of our sources to more accurately reflect the date the data was captured instead of the date the data was ingested by PDL. As a result some records have earlier job_last_verified dates then were available in the 34.0 release.