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v28.0 was released on October 1, 2024.

Welcome to our October 2024 release notes! We have exciting updates to share as we head into the final quarter of 2024!

Here are some of the key highlights:

• A new headline field in our Person schema
• Our new taxonomy for Job Roles and Subroles has entered General Availability (bringing a 20% increase in coverage !)
• A new CSV Batch Enrichment tool for self-serve customers coming later this month
• Significant QA improvements in our Company Dataset
• Over 329M job updates with 11M 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
  • headline (Person Schema)

❗Breaking Changes (Going Live This Month)

• New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy
• Location Country Enum Updates
• Company Type Enum Change
• ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
  • New Release Schedule
  • Deprecation of gics_sector
  • Deprecation of version_status
  • Free-Tier Restructure

✨ New Products and Features

• API Dashboard Batch Enrichment Tool

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
  • Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

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📣 Key Announcements

Schema Changes

headline (Person Schema)

We’ve added a new headline field to our Person Data schema that represents the text headline associated with person profiles.

This field is available in our premium resume field bundles. Any customers currently receiving summary fields will also have access to the new headline field. To get access to these field bundles, please reach out to your Customer Success team.

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❗Breaking Changes

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

Change expected in: v29.1 / February 2025 Previous Announcements: v26 / April 2024, v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

Over the past few months, we have been making significant changes to our job_title_role and job_title_subrole enum values in order to improve our fill rates and categorization of job titles. In August 2024 (v27.1) we launched the first beta version of this new taxonomy to give customers an early opportunity to evaluate the data and provide feedback. As of this October release (v28.0), this new taxonomy has now entered General Availability (see coverage stats below).

The new taxonomy is now fully available to all customers via API and flat file deliveries. To access these new fields customers will have the option to explicitly opt-in for v28.0, v28.1, and v28.2 (Oct - Dec releases) by reaching out to your CS / TS team to enable these fields in your data deliveries or by using a parameter in the API.

The previous (legacy) taxonomy has now entered its deprecation period with support fully ending as of February 2025 (v29.1). Existing customers 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. In February 2025 (v29.1), all PDL datasets for all customers will be transitioned to the new taxonomy.

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 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:

• Please opt-in to the new taxonomy as this will be the taxonomy supported moving forward.

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 timeline for this release is as follows:

✅ V27.0 (July 2024) - Breaking Change Announcement and Resource Launch:

• Public notice of our planned role / subrole transition and initial resources provided (see below)

✅ V27.1 (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 by 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

✅ V28.0 (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 and flat file deliveries (but will have the option to delay transitioning until their systems are updated)

V29.1 (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 of Job Title Class to Roles to Subroles [post-v27.1]

The mapping from the legacy role/subrole taxonomy to the new taxonomy is here: Role / Subrole Taxonomy Restructure [post-v27.1]

A set of sample records illustrating this new role / subrole taxonomy is here:

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

❗ Location Country Enum Updates

Change expected in: v28.0 / October 2024 Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

This quarter we have updated the set of canonical countries values to better accommodate geographical renamings as well as correct redundancies in our set of country values.

This change is part of an ongoing effort to improve our overall location standardization process within our data. As such it impacts the location country values in our Person, Company and IP datasets, as shown in the table above.

The updated set of country values is available here:

• Location Countries

In addition a mapping from the current country values to the upcoming country values can be found here:

❗ Company Type Enum Change

Products Impacted: Person / Company Schema Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024

Change expected in: v28.0 / October 2024

This quarter, we have updated the set of canonical company type values to include a new public_subsidiary value in the set of canonical values:

This change is part of an ongoing effort to improve the coverage and accuracy of our stock ticker fields. The addition of the public_subsidiary company type is intended to provide customers a mechanism to easily filter and pull public companies and their subsidiaries, and to provide a more specific label indicating that the company is owned by a public company. Previously, companies like Slack (which is owned by Salesforce) would have been labeled as private in our data. With this release, Slack will be labeled as a public_subsidiary.

⚠️ 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 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 is built off the “last completed month” of data. Shifting our release schedule by half a month allows us to build our data 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 freshness.

Timeline Here is a preview of the timeline for this change as we transition to the new release schedule:

⚠️

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 (and with 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 Changelog 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

API Dashboard Batch Enrichment Tool

This month, we will be launching a new batch enrichment tool in our API dashboard for Free and Pro-tier self-serve users. This service will allow users to run their own batch enrichments on a CSV file without writing a single line of code.

This new Batch Enrichment tool will replace our existing Data Stats tool which allows users to understand fill and match rates across our Person, Company and IP datasets. The Batch Enrichment tool will follow a similar workflow, where users can upload a CSV of Person/Company/IP records to process. After processing, users will be able to view a fill rate report as well as purchase the enriched records and premium field add-ons.

This service will be launching later this month in our self-serve dashboard, so stay tuned!

📘

Enterprise Customer? Try our Professional Services!

Note that this batch enrichment tool through the API Dashboard will only be available to self-serve users. For enterprise customers, our Technical Services team offers a variety of Professional Services including bulk enrichment of data as well as customizable reporting, query building support, and more. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to your Customer Success or Data Consultant team members.

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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

Company Dataset

Special Coverage Stats: New Role / Sub Role Taxonomy Fill Rates

Commentary

• Person
  • We saw a 20% increase in our coverage for roles across our Person data as a result of our recent Role / Subrole taxonomy improvements that have now entered General Availability. See the sections above for additional details on coverage and access.
  • A 27% increase in our coverage of mobile phones in our resume dataset based on previous improvements to our mobile phone sourcing and QA processes from September.
  • A 35% decrease in street address coverage in our API dataset as a result of our removal of a low-quality, legacy data source last month.
• Company
  • We removed ~600k low quality records from our company dataset, the vast majority of which represented LinkedIn “Showcase” pages that had been inadvertently canonicalized as companies. This can be seen in the 60% decrease in affiliated_profile coverage highlighted above.
  • An 18% increase in our coverage of stock tickers in our company dataset as part of our ticker improvements released in September.
  • In our v27.1 August release we had removed ~35 million “autogenerated” or low quality company summaries, which is reflected in the decrease in summary field coverage seen in our company stats.

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• Person
  • We have released the headline field to all customers who are receiving the summary field
  • Based on customer feedback and poor user experience, we have removed a small percentage of person records that have a LinkedIn ID but no LinkedIn URL.
  • Inversely, we have also removed a small number of company profiles that had LinkedIn URLs but no LinkedIn ID
  • We improved our ability to deconstruct frankenstein records (i.e. falsely merged profiles), which will allow us to start removing them over time
• Company
  • We launched a new canonical company type, public_subsidiary, that is applied to any company that has an ultimate_parent company that is public.
  • In response to user feedback, when a company has provided a Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Crunchbase URL as its primary website, we now also populate that website in the profiles and top-level social fields of those company records. This added 187,827 new social profiles, including 156,093 Instagram URLs. If there are other other social URL linkages that you’d like to see us target, please provide that feedback on the PDL Feature Request page.

Bug Fixes

• We addressed a bug responsible for missing values in the ultimate_parent_ticker field.
• We fixed an issue where a large number of VC investors were being dropped from the funding_details.investing_companies field.