Get Historical Employee Growth With Proxycurl's Employee Count Endpoint

I am excited to introduce you to the new at_date parameter to the Employee Count Endpoint, which will allow you to fetch historical employee count data of any company. Effectively, you will be able to build historical employee growth charts like this:

Or employee count in tables like such:

For more information, see the API documentation for the at_date parameter for the Employee Count Endpoint.

How To Use The at_date Parameter?

Effectively, the at_date parameter lets you time travel into the past with a date with the ISO8601 representation of YYYY-MM-DD.

For example, this is how you can get Nvidia's employee count in September 2024:

curl \
  -G \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${YOUR_API_KEY}" \
  'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/linkedin/company/employees/count' \
  --data-urlencode 'url=https://www.linkedin.com/company/nvidia/' \
  --data-urlencode 'linkedin_employee_count=include' \
  --data-urlencode 'at_date=2024-09-01' \
  --data-urlencode 'employment_status=current'

Note the at_date=2024-09-01 parameter.

The response of this will be:

{
  "total_employee": 21854,
  "linkedin_employee_count": 35023,
  "linkdb_employee_count": 21854
}

You will see that there are 2 employee counts under 2 similar looking labels, which might seem a bit confusing. Let me clarify:

• linkedin_employee_count: The employee count of this company from its LinkedIn profile at the stated at_date.
• linkdb_employee_count: The total number of employees found in LinkDB for this company at the stated at_date. This value is limited by pre-crawled LinkedIn profiles stored in LinkDB.

In general, you will want to use the linkedin_employee_count value.

Similarly, to fetch the employee count for August 2024, all we have to do is to replace the at_date parameter with a new date: at_date=2024-08-01 parameter, like this:

curl \
  -G \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${YOUR_API_KEY}" \
  'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/linkedin/company/employees/count' \
  --data-urlencode 'url=https://www.linkedin.com/company/nvidia/' \
  --data-urlencode 'linkedin_employee_count=include' \
  --data-urlencode 'at_date=2024-08-01' \
  --data-urlencode 'employment_status=current'

Historical Employee Growth As An Investment Signal

Historical employee growth data is a great way to judge a company's past performance, and hence a great investment signal. A company which is growing very fast is a good proxy for how fast they are growing in revenue; or if they had just raised a venture capital round.

The only quirk is that historical employee count data is a backwards looking metric. If you are seeking a forward looking metric, we have a Job Listing Count API Endpoint, which lets you identify how many open job posts there are for a given company. The total job post count is a good proxy for how fast a company might grow in the very near future.

How does it work?

In March 2023, we built a prototype to count employees via historical snapshots and wrote a blog post about it while open sourcing the code which leverages Proxycurl API as the data backend. It has proven to work extremely well, but the raw cost of Proxycurl primitive API endpoints makes it prohibitively expensive. It will cost tens if not hundreds of dollars per company to get a full historical employee count snapshot of any company.

The way the time travel feature is made possible via the introduction of the at_date parameter, is that it uses Proxycurl's APIs to scrape employee information from LinkedIn, calculating employee trends by leveraging historical snapshots and employee profiles. For more details, you can refer to the full article about the historical employee count tool that we built here.

How much does it cost?

The at_date parameter will cost 1 extra credit on top of the base cost of the endpoint for users on the Growth or larger subscription. For all other users, it will cost 5 extra credits.

If you are not already on our subscription plan, do consider upgrading! You will see everything on Proxycurl start to become cheaper.

Questions?

Should you have any questions about time travelling into the past via the Employee Count Endpoint and fetching the historical employee count, shoot me an email at hello@nubela.co !