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v28.1 was released on November 5 2024.

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November 2024 (v28.1) is a Minor Release

Since January 2022 (v17), PDL has been releasing data updates every month with a major release every quarter. Minor releases (such as v26.2) typically contain fewer product updates or key changes, but still contain important data improvements.

Welcome to our November 2024 release notes! We have some exciting updates to share this month:

Here are the key highlights:

• Public beta release of our Custom Insights Professional Services for customizing headcount breakdowns in our Company records
• Over 153M jobs verified and 2M job changes detected globally across our person dataset this month
• A 9% increase in our coverage of alternative_domains for company records in our company dataset

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

• Custom Insights Professional Services

🚀 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

These are upcoming breaking changes in future versions that 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

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

In February 2025 (v29.1), 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

Custom Insights Professional Services (Company Schema)

This month, we are excited to publicly announce the beta release of our Custom Insights Professional Services. This service allows users to augment PDL company data records with customized headcount breakdowns and insights fields tailored to the specific employee groups and personas you care about.

So far, we’ve seen customers use these customized headcount breakdowns across a variety of use cases including:

• Automating territory mapping processes for sales reps
• Building targeted Account-Based Marketing and GTM strategies
• Conducting competitive intelligence and strategic market research
• And more

How it works

The Custom Insights service is provided through our Technical Services team. Our team will first work with you to scope and refine your desired persona definitions, Insights fields and output format or schema based on your unique needs.

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Example Persona Definition: AI / ML Engineer

As an example, if you were interested in tracking the number of AI/ML Engineers across different companies you could define a custom persona using:

• Job titles (such as “ML Engineer”, “AI Engineer”, etc)
• Job Roles / Sub Role (such as “Engineering”)
• Seniority Levels
• Geographic Regions (such as “United States”)

Using these definitions, our team can then generate tailored Insights fields and headcount breakdowns, which will be included in your PDL company records with each delivery (exactly the same way as our standard Insights fields are delivered).

Furthermore, using our integrations with Salesforce, Snowflake and Databricks, you can seamlessly integrate this Custom Insights data into any type of data workflow no matter how simple or complex.

Getting started

If you are interested in learning more about Custom Insights or would like to try it out, please reach out to your Customer Success team!

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🚀 Data Updates

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November 2024 is a Minor Release

As a reminder, November 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 9% increase in our coverage of alternative_domains in our company dataset as a result of adding new sources of company website information and improvements to our logic for selecting primary websites for company records
• We saw a 6% increase in our linkage between emails and mobile phones

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• We made improvements to our profile deduplication logic by adding a new internal key for identifying profiles. This identifier supported with 4M profile merges in the current build, and will continue to increase helping with entity resolution in future builds
• We adjusted our name cleaner to support more uncommon names in person records
• We made improvements to our standardization for non-english job titles (such as French)

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a bug that was leading to errors in how we tagged a company’s primary HQ location that was discovered in v27.2
• We fixed a bug leading to incorrectly tagging some large, public companies with a revenue range $0-$1M
• We fixed a bug in our School dataset that lead to some Schools having facebook urls in the linkedin_url field
• We fixed a bug leading to incorrect locations in some person profiles due to parsing errors.