October 2021 Release Notes (v16.0)

Person v16.0 was released on 10/11/2021

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DEPRECATION NOTICE -- v4 API ENDPOINT

Support has officially ended for the v4 (Schema 4) Person Enrichment API. We will no longer provide bug fixes for this endpoint. We strongly urge all customers currently using the Schema 4 Person Enrichment endpoint (v4/person) to transition to the Schema 5 endpoint by October 31, 2021. This endpoint will have an End of Life date of January 1, 2022.

Please see our v4 (Schema 4) to v5 (Schema 5) migration guide for more information, and reach out to your Customer Success team if you have any questions or need assistance with the migration.

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DEPRECATION NOTICE -- Canonical Data

This is the final release where we will put the "canonical" location, school, and company files in s3://pdl-prod-schema. We will continue providing access to this relational data via complimentary access to our Cleaner Endpoints and Autocomplete API for all customers.

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DEPRECATION NOTICE -- Version Status from API Responses

People Data Labs will be launching monthly data updates for API users by Jan 1, 2022 and will be deprecating the Version Status field (along with its nested fields) from API responses as part of that change. We will continue supporting version status for our data license customers in our quarterly releases.

Additionally, the ID Changelog provided to all customers through S3 will continue to be updated through our major quarterly releases, but will not be updated in monthly API releases for minor version updates.

Please reach out to your Customer Success team at PDL if you have any questions or concerns.

Person Schema Changes

last_initial Field

As of the October 2021 release (this release) will allow records with no last_name and only a last_initial (new field).

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last_name is now a nullable field

While previously full_name, first_name, and last_name were not nullable, now full_name, first_name, and last_initial are the minimum requirements for a record.

Example Name

{
  “full_name”: “ben e”,
  “first_name”: “ben”,
  “last_name”: null,
  “last_initial”: “e”,
   ...
}

This change should lead to an increase in our coverage of profiles in our Resume Data. This change will also yield increased matches for customers desiring a match even when a name is not fully populated. Person Enrichment customers desiring a full name should use the required parameter to get desired fields according to their use case.

Indexing Date Fields as Dates

As of this current release (October 2021 - v16) we will be changing the mapping of all date fields to Date type. This will allow range searches on dates for our Search API users. See the Search API Field Changes section below for more information.

Changing founded and birth_year to Integer

As of this current release (October 2021 - v16) we will be returning birth_year, job_company_founded, and experience.company.founded as integer types instead of string types to data license customers. See the Data License Field Changes section below for more information.

Company Schema Changes

employee_count Field

As of the October 2021 release (this release - v16) we are adding a new employee_count field to the Company Schema:

Company Schema

New Products, Features and Integrations

We launched a number of new API endpoints and integrations this past quarter, and we are excited to get them into the hands of current and potential customers. Check them out!

New Endpoints

Autocomplete API [open-access beta]

• Access via: v5/autocomplete endpoint
• Description: The Autocomplete API allows users to retrieve suggestions for Search API query values along with the number of available records for each suggestion (for example, schools starting with "stanf"). This endpoint is in open-beta and we would love to hear your feedback as you use it!
• Resources:
  • Docs: Autocomplete API

Person Retrieve API [open-access beta]

• Access via: v5/person/retrieve endpoint
• Description: The Person Retrieve API allows users to pull profiles based on PDL ID in order to “refresh” their record. This endpoint is in open-beta and we would love to hear your feedback as you use it!
• Resources:
  • Docs: Person Retrieve API

New Integrations and Tools (No Coding Required!)

Zapier Integration [open access to all customers]

• Access via: People Data Labs Zapier Integrations
• Description: Our new People Data Labs Zapier integration allows users to connect our Enrichment API to thousands of the most popular apps, letting you automate your work with no code required.
• Resources:
  • Tutorial: Lead Enrichment with Zapier and Salesforce
  • Video Demo: PDL + Zapier | Automated B2B Data Enrichment

Query Builder [open access to all customers]

• Access via: Self Serve API Dashboard
• Description: The Query Builder allows you to interactively construct queries for the Person Search API right from your browser - no coding necessary!
• Resources:
  • Tutorial: Building Elasticsearch Queries with the Query Builder

New Page Updates

API Status Page [publicly viewable]

• Access via: People Data Labs System Status Page
• Description: We recently launched our updated API status page, which provides not only a refreshed view of each of our endpoints, but also provides detailed reporting on outages and other incidents. Users can now also subscribe to receive real time notifications of outages and scheduled downtime as well.
• Resources: N/A

Data Field Changes

Data License Field Changes

Data license customers will see the following field changes in their flat file dataset:

Person Schema

Search API Field Changes

Person Schema

Company Schema

Freshness

This quarter, we made huge strides in refreshing our datasets and have updated job titles for over 208mm of our global profiles and locations for over 182mm in our resume dataset. We also updated jobs for 57mm of our United States profiles and locations for 62mm in our resume dataset. Our street_address slice, in particular, saw a significant number of location updates from our efforts this past quarter leading to a total of 449mm updates globally in the API.

Coverage

We are continuing to make strides to link more PII to our core datasets. See some highlights below and click the links on each slice to see the full set of stats for each.

Resume Dataset

API Dataset

Street Address Dataset

Mobile Phone Dataset

Commentary

• We increased our current work email coverage across all our datasets including linkages between work_email <> B2B info and work_email <> mobile phone.
• We significantly improved our linkages between mobile_phone and location_names (and other related location information) as well as linkages between mobile_phone and work_email.
• We increased our coverage or records in the resume dataset by almost 4% and our coverage of job titles for that dataset by ~8%.
• Overall, we had a significant lift in new jobs, emails, and locations this quarter.

Improvements

• We merged ~1.5mm records together in the resume dataset, reducing our rate of duplication.
• We added a new last_initial field to our data which allows users to retrieve profile matches for records even without a fully populated name. See notice above.
• We added an employee_count field to our company data representing the current employee headcount as an integer value. See the Company Schema Changes section above.
• We improved the matching logic for the Company Enrichment API and also support enriching on ticker and location.
• We improved the accuracy of our estimation for inferred_salary.
• We added the ability for users to exclude datasets when using the Search API (see code example).
• We added clearer messaging when hitting rate limits in Search APIs.
• We updated our Search APIs to support queries containing uppercased strings.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a bug in our data causing null values in job_company_founded to have value "None".
• Fixed bug with bulk person enrichment API not handling nested required and min_likelihood parameters.
• Fixed bug with Bulk Person Enrichment API returning incorrect metadata values for unmatched(404) requests.
• We fixed a bug with the Person Enrichment API in handling hashed emails with capitalized characters.
• We corrected a bug in our data with undesired characters appearing in experience summaries.
• We fixed a bug in our build process parsing for names with false-positive inputs.