🚀 LinkedIn Decision Maker Finder

A powerful Apify Actor that finds key decision makers (CEO, CTO, VP, etc.) at target companies using public LinkedIn data. No LinkedIn login required.

📋 Overview

The LinkedIn Decision Maker Finder is an Apify Actor designed to identify decision-maker profiles at companies you're targeting. Given a list of company names or LinkedIn URLs, it uses Google search (via the Apify GOOGLE_SERP proxy) to discover the public LinkedIn profiles of C-level executives, VPs, directors, and founders — returning each person's name, LinkedIn profile URL, and job title.

Key Highlights:

✅ No LinkedIn Login Required – Discovers public profiles via Google search, with no LinkedIn authentication or cookies ✅ Company Name or URL – Provide plain company names or LinkedIn company URLs ✅ Customizable Titles – Target specific roles (CEO, CTO, VP) or use built-in defaults ✅ Confidence Scoring – Each result is scored as high, medium, or low confidence ✅ Reliable & Block-Free – Sources data entirely from search results, so it isn't subject to LinkedIn's logged-out anti-bot blocking ✅ Structured Output – Returns normalized JSON with both company and person data

✨ Features

🏢 Company Resolution

Resolves each input company to its LinkedIn company page:

• Resolves company names to LinkedIn company pages automatically via Google search
• Accepts direct LinkedIn company URLs for instant resolution
• Populates companyName and companyLinkedInUrl

👤 Decision Maker Discovery

Finds key people at each company:

• Discovers public LinkedIn profiles matching target titles at each company
• Extracts the person's name, job title, and current company from the search result
• Configurable max persons per company (1–50)

🎯 Confidence Scoring

Each result includes a confidence score (high / medium / low) based on:

• Whether the person's title matches one of the target titles
• Whether the result's current company contradicts the target company (which lowers confidence)

⚡ How It Works

The Actor runs a 2-step Google-search pipeline (using the Apify GOOGLE_SERP proxy):

1. Resolve Companies – Converts company names to LinkedIn company pages (skipped when a LinkedIn company URL is supplied)
2. Search Decision Makers – Runs site:linkedin.com/in/ "<company>" (<titles>) style queries to find matching profiles, then parses each result for the person's name, title, and current company

Why no direct LinkedIn page scraping? Logged-out requests to linkedin.com/in/... and /company/... pages are blocked by LinkedIn's anti-bot systems almost 100% of the time (HTTP 999), and expose little structured data even when they slip through. The Actor therefore sources everything from Google search results, which is reliable and block-free. See Output Format for which fields this populates.

🚀 Quick Start

1. Get Started: Create an Apify account if you don't have one
2. Prepare Input: List the companies you want to search (names or LinkedIn URLs)
3. Run the Actor: Use the Apify Console to run the Actor
4. Download Results: Export your data as JSON, CSV, or Excel

🛠️ Usage

Input Format

The Actor accepts a JSON input with the following fields:

{
  "companies": [
    "Apify",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/qdrant"
  ],
  "titles": ["CEO", "CTO", "Founder"],
  "maxPersonsPerCompany": 5,
  "country": "com"
}

Field	Type	Required	Description
companies	string[]	Yes	Company names, LinkedIn company URLs, or slugs
titles	string[]	No	Job titles to search for. Defaults to common C-level and VP titles
maxPersonsPerCompany	integer	No	Max decision makers per company (1–50, default: 5)
country	string	No	Country domain for search locality (e.g., com, co.uk, de)

Default Titles

When no custom titles are provided, the Actor searches for:

CEO, CTO, COO, CFO, CMO, CIO, CISO, VP, Vice President, Director, Head of, Founder, Co-Founder, Managing Director, General Manager, Partner, President, Owner

📊 Output Format

Each result in the dataset contains both company and person data:

{
  "companyName": "Apify",
  "companyLinkedInUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/apify",
  "companyIndustry": null,
  "companySize": null,
  "companyHeadquarters": null,
  "companySpecialties": null,
  "personName": "Jan Curn",
  "personTitle": "CEO & Co-Founder",
  "personProfileUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jancurn",
  "personLocation": null,
  "personEducation": null,
  "personConnections": null,
  "personCurrentCompany": "Apify",
  "personAboutSnippet": null,
  "confidence": "high",
  "scrapedAt": "2025-01-15T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Field availability

Because all data comes from Google search results (not from scraping LinkedIn pages directly), the fields populate as follows:

Field	Populated?
companyName, companyLinkedInUrl	✅ Always (URL when the company page can be resolved)
personName, personProfileUrl	✅ Always
personTitle	✅ When the search result exposes a job title; otherwise null (never the company name, a location, or a snippet fragment)
personCurrentCompany	⚠️ When the result heading includes it; otherwise null
confidence, scrapedAt	✅ Always
companyIndustry, companySize, companyHeadquarters, companySpecialties	❌ Always null — these come from LinkedIn company pages, which are not scraped
personLocation, personEducation, personConnections, personAboutSnippet	❌ Always null — these come from LinkedIn profile pages, which are not scraped

The null fields are retained in the output schema for backward compatibility. If you need richer person data (email, clean title, firmographics), pass personProfileUrl to a dedicated enrichment provider downstream.

Export Options

Your data can be:

• Downloaded as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify Console
• Accessed via the Apify Dataset API
• Integrated with Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and more

🔍 Error Handling

The Actor handles errors gracefully:

• Unresolved Companies: If a company's LinkedIn page can't be resolved, person discovery still runs (it only needs the company name), and companyLinkedInUrl is set to null
• Empty Searches: A company that returns no matching profiles simply yields no records; it doesn't stop the run
• Automatic Retries: Up to 2 retries for failed search requests
• Garbage Filtering: Non-person results and unparseable titles are dropped rather than emitted as bad data

📈 Tips for Best Results

• Use LinkedIn URLs when possible for faster, more accurate company resolution
• Be specific with titles to narrow results to exactly the roles you need
• Adjust country to match the region where your target companies operate
• Start small with a few companies to test before running large batches