LinkedIn, being a popular professional networking platform, holds a wealth of information about individuals and companies. Extracting employee data from LinkedIn can be a time-consuming task, but with tools like LinkedInDumper, the process becomes more efficient. Developed to leverage the LinkedIn API, LinkedInDumper automates the extraction of company employee data, enabling researchers and recruiters to gather valuable insights. LinkedInDumper is also very efficient to retrieve employee data from LinkedIn.
Overview
LinkedInDumper is a Python 3 script that dumps employee data from the LinkedIn social networking platform.
The results contain firstname, lastname, position (title), location and a user’s profile link. Only 2 API calls are required to retrieve all employees if the company does not have more than 10 employees. Otherwise, we have to paginate through the API results. With the --email-format CLI flag one can define a Python string format to auto generate email addresses based on the retrieved first and last name.
Requirements
LinkedInDumper talks with the unofficial LinkedIn Voyager API, which requires authentication. Therefore, you must have a valid LinkedIn user account. To keep it simple, LinkedInDumper just expects a cookie value provided by you. Doing it this way, even 2FA protected accounts are supported. Furthermore, you are tasked to provide a LinkedIn company URL to dump employees from.
Retrieving LinkedIn Cookie
- Sign into www.linkedin.com and retrieve your
li_atsession cookie value e.g. via developer tools - Specify the cookie value either persistently in the python script’s variable
li_ator temporarily during runtime via the CLI flag--cookie
Retrieving LinkedIn Company URL
- Search your target company on Google Search or directly on LinkedIn
- The LinkedIn company URL should look something like this: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple
LinkedInDumper Installation
To install LinkedInDumper, you have to clone the repository and just run linkedindumper.py. Follow this command:
Usage
Outputs
The script will return employee data as semi-colon separated values (like CSV):
Limitations
LinkedIn will allow only the first 1,000 search results to be returned when harvesting contact information. You may also need a LinkedIn premium account when you reached the maximum allowed queries for visiting profiles with your freemium LinkedIn account.
Furthermore, not all employee profiles are public. The results vary depending on your used LinkedIn account and whether you are befriended with some employees of the company to crawl or not. Therefore, it is sometimes not possible to retrieve the firstname, lastname and profile url of some employee accounts. The script will not display such profiles, as they contain default values such as “LinkedIn” as firstname and “Member” in the lastname. If you want to include such private profiles, please use the CLI flag --include-private-profiles. Although some accounts may be private, we can obtain the position (title) as well as the location of such accounts. Only firstname, lastname and profile URL are hidden for private LinkedIn accounts.
Finally, LinkedIn users are free to name their profile. An account name can therefore consist of various things such as saluations, abbreviations, emojis, middle names etc. I tried my best to remove some nonsense. However, this is not a complete solution to the general problem. Note that we are not using the official LinkedIn API. This script gathers information from the “unofficial” Voyager API.
