LinkedIn People Search — Find Employees by Company & Job Title

Search LinkedIn for people by job title, company, country and job function — and get a clean list of names, titles, companies and profile links. Built for sales prospecting, recruiting and market research. No LinkedIn login, no cookies, up to 2,500 people per search.

🆓 Free to start: 5 searches a month on the free plan · up to 10 people per search · a search that finds nobody costs nothing.

🎯 What it does

You give what you are looking for: job titles (CTO, VP Sales), companies (a name, a LinkedIn URL or a website domain), countries, job functions, or keywords. Any one of them is enough.

You get one row per person: their name, current title, company, location, the About section of their profile, and a link to their LinkedIn profile. Each row also says how many people on LinkedIn match your search in total.

What you won't get emails or phone numbers — this actor finds the people, not their contact details. Titles are what people wrote on their own profiles, so a search for "CEO" also returns people who call themselves CEO of a side project.

Narrowing the search: exclude titles (Intern, Assistant), exclude countries, add a past employer, or pick a job function. Every criterion narrows the search itself — you are never charged for people it filters out.

📦 Output sample

Every person is one row. Here is what a row holds:

• The person — fullName, firstName, lastName, jobTitle, location, about.
• Where they work — company, companyId.
• How to find them again — linkedinUrl, profileId.
• About the search — searchQuery, position (their rank in the results), totalMatches, scrapedAt.

A real row from a recent run — the person's name, company and IDs are changed; the shape and the other values are as delivered:

{
  "fullName": "Jana Weber",
  "firstName": "Jana",
  "lastName": "Weber",
  "jobTitle": "Chief Technology Officer (CTO) & Prokurist",
  "company": "Nordlicht Software GmbH",
  "companyId": "18233456",
  "location": "Zeven, Lower Saxony, Germany",
  "about": "Senior IT executive with over 14 years in IT operations and infrastructure...",
  "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACwAADcNXDMByxd...",
  "profileId": "923622451",
  "searchQuery": "CTO in Germany",
  "position": 1,
  "totalMatches": 10752,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-24T14:56:11.134Z"
}

A value LinkedIn does not show is null, never an empty string or "N/A" — every key is always present. The full field list with types is in .actor/dataset_schema.json, which is also what AI agents read through Apify's MCP server.

⚡ Quick start

A minimal input that works on the free plan:

{
  "jobTitles": ["CTO"],
  "locations": ["101282230"]
}

101282230 is Germany — in the input form you just pick countries from a list. Run it, open the Output tab, and you will see the first people. Add a company or a job function to narrow the list.

Run it with an empty input and the actor runs a small built-in sample (product managers at Microsoft, 10 people) and tells you so.

🧭 When to use it

• Sales prospecting — find the heads of marketing or the CTOs at the companies on your target list, in the countries you sell to.
• Recruiting and sourcing — list the data scientists at a competitor, or engineers who used to work at a company you admire.
• Account mapping — see who works in sales, engineering or product at one account before an outreach campaign.
• Market research — count how many people hold a role in a country (totalMatches) before you size a campaign.
• AI agents — an agent asked "find the VPs of Sales at Stripe and Adyen" can run this actor directly and get structured rows back.

🎯 Example tasks

Ready-to-run examples — each opens a pre-configured task you can run in one click (no setup):

• Find employees of a company on LinkedIn — List the people who work at any company on LinkedIn: name, job title, location and profile link. Narrow by role or country and export to CSV or Excel.
• Find decision makers at a company on LinkedIn — Find the executives, VPs, directors and heads of department at any company on LinkedIn, with name, job title, location and profile link for outreach.
• Find former employees of a company on LinkedIn — Find people who list a company among their past jobs and see where they work now: name, current title, company, location and profile link.
• Find recruiters at a company on LinkedIn — Find the recruiters and talent acquisition team at any company on LinkedIn, with name, job title, location and profile link, so you know whom to contact.
• Find LinkedIn profiles by job title and location — Search LinkedIn people by job title and country, e.g. every Head of Marketing in the United States, with name, company, location and profile link.

🛠 Input

The form has two sections:

Section	Purpose
🎯 Who to find	Job titles, companies, countries, and how many people you want (maxResults).
🔬 Narrow the search	Job functions, past companies, titles and countries to exclude, keywords.

The most useful fields:

• jobTitles — titles to look for. A person matches if their title contains any of them. Short titles ("VP Sales") find more people than long exact ones.
• companies — where they work now. A company name, its LinkedIn page URL, its website domain (stripe.com) or its LinkedIn company ID all work, up to 25 per search.
• locations — countries, picked from a list. Empty means worldwide.
• maxResults — the most people this run returns, and the most it charges for. Default 25, up to 2,500.
• functions — LinkedIn job functions (department), for example Marketing, Engineering or Sales.
• pastCompanies — only people who used to work at one of these companies.
• excludeJobTitles / excludeLocations — leave out titles or countries.
• keywords — words that must appear anywhere on the profile, such as a skill.

💰 How much will scraping LinkedIn people cost?

You pay per person the search returns. There is one event, Person, and its price depends on your Apify plan:

Plan	Per person	25 people	100 people
Free	$0.03	— (10 per run)	—
Bronze	$0.025	$0.63	$2.50
Silver	$0.02	$0.50	$2.00
Gold and above	$0.015	$0.38	$1.50

• A search that finds nobody costs nothing. Neither does a company name that cannot be found.
• maxResults is your ceiling. The run never charges for more people than it asks for.
• The run's "Maximum cost per run" is respected. If it covers fewer people than you asked for, the run returns exactly as many as it can charge for, and says so.

🆓 Free vs paid plan

	Free plan	Paid plan
People per search	10	up to 2,500 (maxResults)
Searches per month	5	unlimited
All filters	✓	✓
Total matches count	✓	✓

When a free search matches more than 10 people, you get the first 10 and a message with the real total. Upgrade to get the whole list in one run.

🧪 Recipes

Copy-paste inputs for the most common jobs:

Decision makers at a list of companies

{ "jobTitles": ["CEO", "Founder", "VP Sales", "Head of Sales"], "companies": ["stripe.com", "Adyen", "https://www.linkedin.com/company/mollie/"], "maxResults": 100 }

Several short titles cast a wide net; companies can be names, domains or URLs in one list.

Engineers in two countries who used to work at a big company

{ "functions": ["Engineering"], "locations": ["101282230", "106693272"], "pastCompanies": ["Google"], "maxResults": 250 }

A function instead of titles catches every engineering title; the past employer narrows it to a profile.

Marketing leaders, no agencies

{ "jobTitles": ["Head of Marketing", "CMO", "VP Marketing"], "excludeJobTitles": ["Agency", "Freelance"], "locations": ["103644278"] }

Excluding words is often the fastest way to clean a list.

📡 Live status & storage records

Storage key	Type	What it holds
status.html	HTML page	Live progress while the run is going; the result and the reason afterwards.
USER_MESSAGE	JSON	What happened and what to change — written on every run that returned nobody, and on free-plan runs that reached the limit.
RUN_SUMMARY	JSON	People delivered, total matches, price per person, the stop reason.
FREE_LIMITS_APPLIED	JSON	Which free-plan limits applied to this run.

The people search runs in the background: the actor waits until it finishes, then fetches the results once. You can pull all of these records through the Apify API.

🤖 Programmatic / API use

Start a run from your own code:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/afanasenko~linkedin-people-search/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jobTitles":["VP Sales"],"companies":["stripe.com"],"maxResults":25}'

MCP / agentic clients (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, …): the actor is exposed as a tool through Apify's MCP server at mcp.apify.com. An agent can run it from an instruction like "find the heads of marketing at HubSpot and Salesforce in the United States".

💡 Tips & Best Practices

Getting maximum results

• Start broad — one short title and a country — then narrow. A long exact title often matches nobody.
• Use several titles at once (CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering): a person matches if any of them fits.
• If a company returns fewer people than expected, try its LinkedIn URL instead of its name.

Cost optimization

• Set maxResults to what you will actually use; it is the ceiling of what you pay.
• Narrow with exclusions and functions rather than fetching more and filtering later — people outside your criteria are never fetched or charged.
• Use totalMatches from a small run to size a search before running the big one.

Performance

• Small searches (10–25 people) usually finish in about 30 seconds.
• Big searches take longer: a few hundred people can take several minutes while the search collects them.
• Run several different searches one after another rather than all at the same moment.

Data quality

• Spot-check the first 5–10 rows before scaling up a search.
• jobTitle is what people wrote on their profile; filter or exclude words to remove the self-titled.
• Use profileId to deduplicate people across several searches.

❓ FAQ

Q: How do I find all employees of a company on LinkedIn? A: Put the company in companies, leave jobTitles empty and set maxResults to how many you want (up to 2,500). Add a function or a country to narrow the list.

Q: Is there a free LinkedIn people search? A: Yes — the free plan gives you 5 searches a month with up to 10 people each. See Free vs paid plan.

Q: Can I use the LinkedIn API instead? A: LinkedIn's own people search API is available only to approved partners. This actor searches public profiles without a login and returns them as data.

Q: What are the alternatives to Sales Navigator? A: Sales Navigator is a paid LinkedIn subscription built for browsing. This actor gives you the search results as rows you can export to CSV, Excel or a CRM, and pay per person instead of per month.

Q: Does it need my LinkedIn account or cookies? A: No. It never logs in to LinkedIn and never uses your account.

Q: Does it return emails? A: No. It returns the person, their title, company, location and profile link. Use a separate enrichment step for contact details.

Q: Why does linkedinUrl look like /in/ACwAA… instead of a name? A: That is LinkedIn's member-ID form of the profile link. It opens the same profile as the named link.

Q: Why did my search return nobody? A: Usually one criterion is too narrow — a long exact title, a keyword, or a function that the company does not have. The run's User Message names the fields you set and what to loosen. Nothing is charged.

Q: What happens if a company cannot be found? A: It is left out of the search and named in the User Message. If none of your companies can be found, nothing is searched and nothing is charged.

Q: How fast is it? A: About 30 seconds for 10–25 people. Searches of hundreds of people take a few minutes while the search collects them.

Q: How many people can one search return? A: Up to 2,500 on a paid plan, and 10 on the free plan. totalMatches tells you how many exist in total.

🔗 Other related actors (same author)

You start with…	You want…	Use this actor
A job title, company or country	A list of people	This actor
Profile or company links	Full profiles: experience, education, followers	LinkedIn Profile Scraper
A role, a company or a job link	Job postings with salary and hiring contacts	LinkedIn Jobs Scraper

Find people here, then send their linkedinUrl to the profile scraper when you need their full career history.

🛟 Support & feedback

• Open an issue in the actor's Issues tab — the fastest way to get a fix shipped.
• Feature requests in the same tab; we read every one.
• Ratings & reviews on the Apify Store page help other people find the actor.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape LinkedIn?

The actor reads publicly available profile information and does not log in, bypass authentication, or act on LinkedIn on your behalf. Use the data in line with LinkedIn's terms and privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA — for outreach, have a legitimate interest and give people an easy way to opt out.

📋 Changelog

See the CHANGELOG.md for every release.