Ultimate Guide To The LinkedIn API: People Profile API (with Python Examples)

Let's kick off this article with a demo. Run the following command to see what an enriched LinkedIn profile looks like when accessed through a 3rd-party LinkedIn API:

$ curl \
  -G \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer demo-bearer-token" \
  'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/v2/linkedin' \
  --data-urlencode 'linkedin_profile_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates/'

Impressed by what you see? This is a demonstration of the Proxycurl API in action. There exists the official LinkedIn API, as well as third-party LinkedIn APIs like Proxycurl.

As the CEO of Proxycurl, and a coder myself, I've garnered a few years of experience dealing with LinkedIn data. In this guide, I aim to equip you with a comprehensive understanding of LinkedIn APIs, both official and 3rd-party alternatives. Expect a deep dive from both a technical and business perspective.

Types of LinkedIn APIs

LinkedIn APIs fall into two categories: the official LinkedIn API and 3rd-party LinkedIn APIs.

To gain access to the official LinkedIn API, you must be a LinkedIn Partner. This means you, the developer, and your associated business will need to navigate through administrative hoops for several months in hopes of getting approved. One of the criteria for being approved as a LinkedIn Partner is that you cannot be a competitor to LinkedIn in any way. So, if you are in an industry like HR tech, building an application that might compete with an existing LinkedIn product, you're out of luck.

As far as I'm aware, another requirement for being a LinkedIn Partner is that you need to be paying five-digit monthly fees to LinkedIn.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have 3rd-party LinkedIn APIs. The world of third-party LinkedIn APIs is like the wild west.

Some 3rd-party vendors, like PhantomBuster, require you to supply your own LinkedIn account(s). PhantomBuster is a great choice if you want to automate actions within your own LinkedIn account and aren't scared of having your personal LinkedIn account banned.

There are also vendors like People Data Labs (PDL), which have obtained bulk LinkedIn data from various vendors and resell access to this combined LinkedIn profile database. The data from such resellers often tend to be out-of-date.

Then, there are 3rd-party vendors that scrape LinkedIn. There are variations in this category too. Some of these scraping vendors engage in fraudulent behavior, such as registering fake accounts and using private throwaway debit cards to sign up for free Sales Navigator trials, and then using such whitelisted accounts to scrape LinkedIn at scale. Meanwhile, some vendors strictly work with publicly accessible LinkedIn profiles.

The ramifications are significant. On one hand, companies that engage in fraud have been sued and shut down. On the other hand, companies that work exclusively with public LinkedIn profiles operate within a legally tested framework for compliance.

Here's a quick recap with the comparison table:

Interested in learning more about 3rd-party LinkedIn APIs? We've compared 7 top LinkedIn scraping tools. You can read more about it.

Official LinkedIn API

What Can You Do with the Official LinkedIn API?

LinkedIn is a formidable professional social network that serves as a treasure trove of data for professionals and job listings. This data is something that a recruitment tech startup or a sales automation product would love to integrate into their offerings. LinkedIn recognizes its value and closed public access to their API in 2015. To access the official LinkedIn API, you'll need to become a LinkedIn Partner.

Once you become a LinkedIn Partner, you'll gain access to a subset of the following APIs:

1. Profile API: Allows access to a user's LinkedIn profile information. You can access basic profile details, pictures, and headlines.
2. Connections API: Allows access to a user's LinkedIn network. You can retrieve the list of a user's connections.
3. Share API: Allows you to post shares for authenticated members. You can share text, URLs, and media.
4. Invitation API: Allows you to invite others to connect on LinkedIn.
5. Organization API: Allows you to retrieve organization and brand data.
6. UGC (User Generated Content) API: Allows you to retrieve, create, and manage rich, multi-faceted content.
7. Compliance API: Allows you to report content that violates LinkedIn's Professional Community Policies.

Getting Approved as a LinkedIn Partner

The LinkedIn Partner Program is open to four types of businesses:

1. Talent Solutions, for HR tech companies.
2. Marketing Solutions, for marketing automation companies.
3. Sales Navigator Application Development, for startups looking to enhance LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
4. LinkedIn Learning Integration, for content companies.

From what I understand, it's a long and arduous process to get a company approved as a LinkedIn Partner. Your best bet is to select the category that best fits your company's offerings and apply to become a LinkedIn Partner.

Most of the impressive LinkedIn API features also require a paid subscription to LinkedIn Developer Enterprise Products.

Profile Enrichment with the Official LinkedIn API

Most companies will want to start with LinkedIn's Consumer Solutions Platform (CSP). When you think of LinkedIn, you likely think of the rich and bountiful profiles, and CSP is your access point to these alluring profiles.

There are only two features of the CSP that allow you to extract profile data from LinkedIn:

1. Sign In with LinkedIn provides the authentication layer to your product by allowing users to sign in with their professional LinkedIn profiles.
2. Profile API returns structured data of a profile programmatically.

"Sign In with LinkedIn" OAuth

Sign In with LinkedIn is an OAuth provider for your application. Most people assume that if you use Sign In with LinkedIn, LinkedIn will provide every user's LinkedIn profile. However, this is not the case. What can be returned are:

1. First/Last name
2. Email address
3. Profile picture

Also, there is a rate limit of 500 requests per day.

In my opinion, Sign In with LinkedIn offers very little utility for most applications because the key data you want to extract is the user's LinkedIn profile, not general information about the user devoid of any data from their LinkedIn profile.

Fetch Person Profile Data via the Official LinkedIn Profile API

There are two ways to fetch the data of a profile via the official LinkedIn API:

1. The first "Sign In With LinkedIn" method is free and available to most developers. However, you must obtain permission from each profile you wish to extract into your application.
2. The second "Profile API" method is only available to approved developers with a paid subscription to LinkedIn's Consumer Solution Platform. This allows you to fetch profile data from any profile ID.

Using the "Sign In With LinkedIn" Method

The first method requires you, the developer, to seek permission from the user who owns the profile. To do that, LinkedIn requires you to fetch an access_token via 3-legged OAuth, a fancy term describing a two-step process to obtain an access token.

Step 0: Obtain a CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET by creating an app on the LinkedIn Developers page. (You can find this page through a Google search)

Step 1: To get permission from a user, you will generate an authorization URL to send your user to LinkedIn, where they can permit your application to download their profile.

In this case, you must provide a REDIRECT_URI, the webpage to which LinkedIn will send the user back after they have finished granting permission.

def generate_authorization_url():
  """
  Generate an authorization URL for a user to give permission to extract their LinkedIn Profile.

  The generated URL will take the user to a LinkedIn page where they will be asked to give explicit
  permission to share their profile with you (the application creator).

  Should the user agree, they will be redirected to `LINKEDIN_REDIRECT_URI`.
  In the redirect, two fields will appear in the URL parameter, namely `code` and `state`.

  * `state` is generated below using `secrets.token_hex(8).upper()`. This serves as a form of identifier for this user.
  * `code` is the authorization_code, and can be used in `get_access_token()` to exchange for an `access_token`.

  """
  LI_AUTH_URL = 'https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/authorization'
  url = requests.Request('GET', LI_AUTH_URL,
              params={
                'response_type': 'code',
                'client_id': LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID,
                'redirect_uri': LINKEDIN_REDIRECT_URI,
                'state': secrets.token_hex(8).upper(),
                'scope': '%20'.join(['r_liteprofile', 'r_emailaddress', 'w_member_social']),
              }).prepare().url
  return url

Step 2: After a user permits you to access their profile, you'll receive an authorization code. With this code, you will exchange it for an access_token to access the user's profile.

def get_access_token(authorization_code):
  """
  Given an authorization `code`, this function will return an `access_token` which can then be used to access a user's LinkedIn profile.
  """
  LI_ACCESS_TOKEN_EXCHANGE_URL = 'https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/accessToken'
  access_token = requests.post(LI_ACCESS_TOKEN_EXCHANGE_URL, params={
    'grant_type': 'authorization_code',
    'code': authorization_code,
    'redirect_uri': LINKEDIN_REDIRECT_URI,
    'client_id': LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID,
    'client_secret': LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET,
  }).json()['access_token']
  return access_token

Step 3: Fetch the user's profile.

def get_profile(access_token):
  """
  Fetches the profile of a LinkedIn user who has given you their permission to view their profile.
  """
  LI_PROFILE_API_ENDPOINT = 'https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me'
  r = requests.get(LI_PROFILE_API_ENDPOINT, headers={
           'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + access_token})
  return r.json()

The working Python code for this method can be found in our linkedin-api-python3-examples GitHub repository.

Using the "Profile API" Method

The second method does not require you to seek permission from the user. However, your application must be approved to use the People's Profile API endpoint with a 2-legged OAuth.

Step 0: In your pre-approved LinkedIn App, obtain the CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET fields.

Step 1: Using your application's CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET, exchange for an access_token.

def get_access_token():
  """
  If you are:

  1. An approved LinkedIn developer
  2. On a paid subscription to their Consumer Product

  You can use this function to fetch an `access_token` to access the API.
  """
  LI_ACCESS_TOKEN_EXCHANGE_URL = 'https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/accessToken'
  access_token =requests.post(LI_ACCESS_TOKEN_EXCHANGE_URL, params={
    'grant_type': 'client_credentials',
    'client_id': LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID,
    'client_secret': LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET,
  }).json()['access_token']
  return access_token

Step 2: Fetch any profile with profile_id.

def get_profile(access_token, profile_id):
  """
  Given an `access_token`, fetch the structured data of any profile.
  """
  LI_PROFILE_API_ENDPOINT = f'https://api.linkedin.com/v2/people/{profile_id}'
  r = requests.get(LI_PROFILE_API_ENDPOINT, headers={
           'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + access_token,
           'X-RestLi-Protocol-Version': '2.0.0'})
  return r.json()

The working Python code for this method can be found in our linkedin-api-python3-examples GitHub repository.

Proxycurl API

The Proxycurl API offers B2B enrichment services quite like the official LinkedIn API. In some respects, it even surpasses the capabilities of the official LinkedIn API, though it does have its restrictions. It's worth noting that Proxycurl works exclusively with public LinkedIn profiles.

The Proxycurl API provides the following functions:

1. People API: This feature enriches people's profiles, identifies people from emails or names, searches for prospects, and retrieves profile pictures.
2. Company API: Enrich LinkedIn company profiles, fetch funding data, list and search employees, identify companies, and obtain the employee count.
3. Contact API: Use this to fetch personal phone numbers, personal and work email addresses, and social media profiles of anyone with a LinkedIn profile via Proxycurl's Contact API.
4. Jobs API: This function fetches up-to-date job posting data.
5. School API: List students and enrich school profiles.
6. Search API: Perform advanced searches for people and companies.

Enrich Person Profile Data via Proxycurl's Person Profile Endpoint

Negotiating the challenges of LinkedIn's API can be daunting. Thankfully, there's Proxycurl, which provides its LinkedIn API so you can get everything that LinkedIn's official Profile API offers, and a whole lot more. To see what data fields are supported, check out Proxycurl's Person Profile API documentation.

To get profile data from any profile ID, you just need to follow one method.

Step 0: Get a Proxycurl API key by signing into Proxycurl with your work email address.

Step 1: Query the Person Profile Endpoint with a LinkedIn Profile URL.

import requests

PROXYCURL_API_KEY = '' # todo - fill this field up


def get_profile(profile_id):
  api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/v2/linkedin'
  header_dic = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + PROXYCURL_API_KEY}
  params = {
    'url': f'https://www.linkedin.com/in/{profile_id}',
  }
  response = requests.get(api_endpoint,
              params=params,
              headers=header_dic)
  return response.json()

You can find the working Python code for this method in our linkedin-api-python3-examples Github repository.

What if you don't have the user's LinkedIn profile URL?

For some industries, like recruitment tech, identifying profiles of interest is a necessary step before profile enrichment. The current solution for the non-tech native involves purchasing LinkedIn Sales Navigator and performing a Boolean search. However, Proxycurl offers a "headless" equivalent known as the Search API.

To perform a Boolean search on the Person Search Endpoint and identify people living in the US who have previously worked at Google as Software Engineers, use the following code:

import requests

YOUR_API_KEY = 'your-api-key-here'  # Replace with your API key

headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {YOUR_API_KEY}',
}

params = {
    'country': 'US',
    'past_company_name': 'Google', 
    'past_role_title': '(?i)software engineer',
}

response = requests.get('https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/', headers=headers, params=params)

if response.status_code == 200:
    data = response.json()
    print(data)
else:
    print(f"Request failed with status {response.status_code}")

The response will include a linkedin_profile_url that you can use within the Person Profile Endpoint for enrichment.

Advanced Proxycurl Features

Proxycurl supports some advanced features that the LinkedIn API does not natively support.

Fetching Contact Information

For many use-cases, the natural next step after enriching a profile is to reach out to the person. Proxycurl's Contact API allows you to fetch three different types of contact information.

1. Work emails via the Work Email Lookup Endpoint.
2. Personal (free) emails via the Personal Email Lookup Endpoint.
3. Personal phone numbers via the Personal Contact Number Lookup Endpoint.

This contact information is not sourced from LinkedIn, but from a myriad of other external sources.

Listing Employees or Students

You can also fetch (or search for) a list of employees from any target company or school. To get a list of past or present employees, you can use Proxycurl's Employee Listing Endpoint. The Student Listing Endpoint is available for listing graduates of any school organization.

Identifying Key People in a Company

With Proxycurl's Role Lookup Endpoint, you can easily identify the key people you need to reach out to within any company.

Profile Pictures and Company Logos

This is a freebie from Proxycurl. You can get business logos of any company with Proxycurl's Company Profile Picture Endpoint. Similarly, you can get profile pictures of any LinkedIn Profile with the Person Profile Picture Endpoint. Both of these API endpoints are free :)

There's a whole lot more you can do with Proxycurl API, including other free API endpoints. Check out the full list of Proxycurl powers here!

Summarizing the State of LinkedIn Profile APIs

LinkedIn has made it extremely difficult for developers to work with their API, creating many hoops to jump through. "Sign in with LinkedIn", while free, is throttled with rate limits and requires cumbersome per-user permission granting. Even then, you won't be able to obtain rich LinkedIn profile data about the user signing into your service. The Profile API, with its 2-legged OAuth that lets you query any profile ID, requires you to be a LinkedIn Partner and necessitates a hefty payment via a LinkedIn subscription.

Proxycurl offers an alternative equivalent to LinkedIn's Profile API. The key difference lies in latency and data completeness. Proxycurl's Person Profile Endpoint performs a live scrape of a profile on each API call, so each call might take a few seconds to complete. To overcome throughput, a developer can launch requests to Proxycurl's API in parallel.

Proxycurl is cost-effective and eliminates most of the headaches involved with pulling data from LinkedIn—even when compared to the official paid tools available from LinkedIn, like their own limited API or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Give Proxycurl a try today.

P.S. Do you have any questions about Proxycurl or how we scrape data from LinkedIn and beyond? Reach out to us at “hello@nubela.co”, and we would be happy to help.