October 2024 Release Announcement
This data version was released on 10/1/2024.
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.
- New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy
- Location Country Enum Updates
- Company Type Enum Updates
- ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
Field Name | Field Type | Field Description | Example |
---|---|---|---|
headline | String | The brief headline associated with a person profile. | "headline": "senior data engineer at people data labs" |
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.
Previous Announcements: v26 / April 2024, v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024
Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema
Person Fields Impacted | Company Fields Impacted | IP Fields Impacted |
---|---|---|
job_title_role job_title_sub_role experience.title.role experience.title.sub_role | average_tenure_by_role employee_count_by_month_by_role employee_count_by_role recent_exec_departures recent_exec_hires top_next_employers_by_role top_previous_employers_by_role | person.job_title_role person.job_title_sub_role |
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
, v28.2
, and v29.0
(Oct - Jan releases) by reaching out to your CS / TS 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.
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 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 toTrue
.
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.
- 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 toTrue
.
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
- We will open up beta access to the new role / subrole taxonomy as well as a new data field
- ✅ 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.
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:
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]
Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024
Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema
Person Fields Impacted | Company Fields Impacted | IP Fields Impacted |
---|---|---|
countries street_addresses.country street_addresses.country possible_street_addresses.country job_company_location_country experience.company.location.country education.school.country | location.country employee_count_by_country | ip.location.country ip.company.location.country |
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:
Additionally, a mapping from the legacy country values to the updated country values can be found here:
Country (pre-October) | Change Type | Country (post-October) | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
swaziland | renamed | eswatini | |
antarctica | deleted | -- | |
macedonia | renamed | north macedonia | |
pitcairn | renamed | pitcairn islands | |
gambia | renamed | the gambia | |
ivory coast | deleted | -- | Redundant with côte d'ivoire |
Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024, v27.1 / August 2024, v27.2 / September 2024
Products Impacted: Person / Company Schema
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:
Canonical Company Types (pre-October) | Canonical Company Types (post-October) |
---|---|
• educational • government • nonprofit • private • public | • educational • government • nonprofit • private • public • public_subsidiary --> new type |
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 may impact your current processes. We are announcing them here to provide ample time for you to adjust your processes accordingly.
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
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.
Release Version | Release Date | Comments |
---|---|---|
v28.0 | Oct 1, 2024 | First Tuesday of the Month |
v28.1 | Nov 5, 2024 | First Tuesday of the Month |
v28.2 | Dec 3, 2024 | First Tuesday of the Month |
v29.0 | Jan 21, 2025 | Third Tuesday of the Month |
v29.1 | Feb 18, 2025 | Third Tuesday of the Month |
Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Products Impacted: Company
Company Fields Impacted |
---|
gics_sector |
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)
Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Previous Announcements: v17.0 / January 2022
Products Impacted: Person
Person Fields Impacted |
---|
version_status |
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.
Change expected in: v29.0 / January 2025
Products Impacted: Person
Person Fields Impacted |
---|
work_email recommended_personal_email personal_emails emails phone_numbers mobile_phone All locations (except country and continent)birth_date birth_year |
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
Legacy Plan (Pre-Migration) | New Plan (Post-Migration) |
---|---|
”work_email”: “[email protected]” | ”work_email”: true |
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.
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).
Dataset | Geography | Field | Records Updated |
---|---|---|---|
Resume | Global | experience | 329,930,531 |
Resume | Global | location | 414,033,487 |
Resume | United States | experience | 82,498,685 |
Resume | United States | location | 102,331,975 |
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).
Dataset | Geography | Records Updated |
---|---|---|
Resume | Global | 11,218,923 |
Resume | United States | 4,547,294 |
Linkage | Coverage in v27.0 | Coverage in v28.0 | Increase (%) |
---|---|---|---|
total_records | 721,091,212 | 727,795,179 | 0.93% |
mobile_phone | 53,145,648 | 67,619,579 | 27.23% |
birth_date | 8,953,517 | 10,061,983 | 12.38% |
Linkage | Coverage in v27.0 | Coverage in v28.0 | Increase (%) |
---|---|---|---|
total_records | 2,794,528,725 | 2,466,332,645 | -11.74% |
street_addresses | 763,464,633 | 495,472,458 | -35.10% |
birth_year | 510,506,896 | 379,611,616 | -25.64% |
emails | 890,326,394 | 699,856,550 | -21.39% |
phones | 1,156,838,256 | 930,152,340 | -19.60% |
sex | 2,009,628,718 | 1,762,357,934 | -12.30% |
Linkage | Coverage in v27.0 | Coverage in v28.0 | Increase (%) |
---|---|---|---|
total_records | 824,742,873 | 636,349,647 | -22.84% |
street_addresses | 353,772,740 | 238,136,599 | -32.69% |
personal_emails | 564,084,125 | 407,345,043 | -27.79% |
birth_year | 198,081,215 | 147,086,729 | -25.74% |
Linkage | Coverage in v27.0 | Coverage in v28.0 | Increase (%) |
---|---|---|---|
total_records | 66,496,323 | 71,340,278 | 7.28% |
affiliated_profiles | 708,110 | 277,363 | -60.83% |
summary | 55,880,200 | 23,520,617 | -57.91% |
industry | 35,376,284 | 45,736,801 | 29.29% |
mic_exchange | 22,792 | 27,907 | 22.44% |
ticker | 23,633 | 27,907 | 18.08% |
Metric | Legacy Taxonomy | New Taxonomy | Increase (%) |
---|---|---|---|
Overall Fill Rate for experience.title.role | 37.5% | 57.5% | 20.0% |
- 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 previous 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.
- 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
- Person
- We have released the
headline
field to all customers who are receiving thesummary
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
- We have released the
- Company
- We launched a new canonical company type,
public_subsidiary
, that is applied to any company that has anultimate_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.
- We launched a new canonical company type,
- 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.