LinkedIn People Search & Candidate Finder — No Cookies

Thirdwatch portfolio: 5K users across 133 public Actors, 2M+ records delivered, and >99% run success. Explore all Thirdwatch Actors.

Find publicly indexed LinkedIn people by general query, person name, job title, skills, location, company, school, industry, seniority, or experience. Run several searches in one job and receive a deduplicated dataset with the public evidence behind each match.

No LinkedIn account, password, session cookie, or browser automation is required.

What this Actor does

• Searches public web results limited to canonical linkedin.com/in/ profiles.
• Supports both a simple searchQuery and structured recruiting filters.
• Runs up to 25 distinct people queries in one Actor run.
• Supports alternative names, titles, locations, companies, schools, and industries.
• Lets skills match as all or any.
• Excludes unwanted companies or keywords before results are collected.
• Deduplicates every profile across queries and pages by canonical URL.
• Preserves the Google title and snippet as auditable public match evidence.
• Returns stable profile slugs, name parts, matched criteria, query provenance, and timestamps.

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": [
    "platform engineer",
    "site reliability engineer"
  ],
  "jobTitles": [
    "Staff Software Engineer",
    "Principal Engineer"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "python",
    "kubernetes",
    "aws"
  ],
  "skillsMatch": "any",
  "locations": [
    "London",
    "Greater London"
  ],
  "currentCompanies": [
    "Stripe",
    "Cloudflare"
  ],
  "excludeKeywords": [
    "recruiter"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 30
}

Input parameters

Parameter	Description
searchQuery	One general people-search phrase, such as software engineer or John Smith product manager.
searchQueries	Up to 25 additional phrases. Each becomes a separate bounded search; results are globally deduplicated.
personNames	Exact person names combined as alternatives.
role	Backward-compatible single job-title input.
jobTitles	Alternative job titles combined with role using OR.
skills	Skill or technology phrases.
skillsMatch	all requires every skill phrase; any builds an OR group.
keywords	Additional required exact phrases.
excludeKeywords	Phrases excluded from the public search.
location	Backward-compatible single location with common alias expansion.
locations	Alternative cities, regions, or markets combined with OR.
country	Optional country required alongside the location group.
currentCompany	Migration-friendly single current-company signal.
currentCompanies	Company signals to require and expose in visible match evidence.
pastCompany	Migration-friendly single former-employer signal.
pastCompanies	Former-employer signals. Public indexing cannot enforce LinkedIn's authenticated current/past facet, so the evidence is returned explicitly.
excludeCompanies	Company phrases excluded from the search.
school	Migration-friendly single school or university signal.
schools	Schools or universities combined with OR.
industry	Migration-friendly single industry signal.
industries	Industry phrases combined with OR.
seniority	Seniority phrase such as senior, staff, principal, or director.
minExperienceYears	Minimum public years-of-experience phrase.
maxExperienceYears	Maximum public years-of-experience phrase.
maxResults	Global limit after deduplication, from 1 to 1,000.
maxResultsPerQuery	Per-query limit before moving to the next search phrase.

At least one positive search criterion is required. Exclusions alone cannot start a run.

Output fields

The original fullName, headline, and url fields remain for backward compatibility.

Field	Description
name, fullName, firstName, lastName	Public display name, migration-friendly alias, and convenience name parts.
headline	Headline parsed from the public search-result title when present.
location	Only an explicitly labelled or visibly matched location; never invented.
country	Requested country when it is visible in the result evidence.
currentCompany, pastCompany, school, industry	First visibly matched requested value in each group.
url, profileUrl	Canonical https://www.linkedin.com/in/.../ URL.
profileSlug	Stable public identifier parsed from the profile URL.
matchedJobTitles, matchedSkills, matchedLocations	Requested values visible in the public title or snippet.
matchedCurrentCompanies, matchedPastCompanies	Requested company signals visible in public evidence.
matchedSchools, matchedIndustries, matchedKeywords	Other visibly matched criteria.
visibleEvidenceScore	Percentage of requested criterion groups visible in the returned title/snippet. It is evidence coverage, not a claim about the complete profile.
sourceTitle, sourceSnippet	Public search-result evidence used for the structured fields.
searchQuery, searchQueryIndex, searchCriteria	Provenance showing which search and shared filters produced the row.
scrapedAt	UTC collection timestamp.

Example output

{
  "recordType": "linkedin_people_search_result",
  "fullName": "Aisha Khan",
  "firstName": "Aisha",
  "lastName": "Khan",
  "headline": "Staff Software Engineer at Stripe",
  "location": "London",
  "currentCompany": "Stripe",
  "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/aisha-khan/",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/aisha-khan/",
  "profileSlug": "aisha-khan",
  "matchedJobTitles": ["Staff Software Engineer"],
  "matchedSkills": ["python", "kubernetes"],
  "matchedLocations": ["London"],
  "matchedCurrentCompanies": ["Stripe"],
  "visibleEvidenceScore": 100,
  "sourceSnippet": "Location: London · Staff Software Engineer at Stripe · Python and Kubernetes",
  "searchQuery": "platform engineer",
  "searchQueryIndex": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-12T08:00:00Z"
}

Recipes

Search software engineers in London

{
  "searchQuery": "software engineer",
  "locations": ["London"],
  "maxResults": 50
}

Find product managers with company signals

{
  "jobTitles": ["Product Manager", "Senior Product Manager"],
  "currentCompanies": ["Airbnb"],
  "locations": ["New York", "San Francisco"],
  "maxResults": 50
}

Find engineering alumni from selected schools

{
  "searchQuery": "software engineer",
  "schools": ["MIT", "Stanford University"],
  "skills": ["machine learning", "python"],
  "skillsMatch": "any",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Search a list of specific people

{
  "personNames": ["Jane Doe", "John Smith"],
  "jobTitles": ["Product Manager"],
  "currentCompanies": ["Notion", "Figma"],
  "maxResults": 20
}

Use cases

• Recruiting and technical sourcing
• Public professional lead research
• Talent-pool and market mapping
• Alumni and educational-background research
• Company and industry workforce research
• Building URL lists for consent-aware downstream enrichment
• Scheduled discovery of newly indexed public profiles

Authentication and data safety

This Actor deliberately does not accept a LinkedIn session cookie. A session cookie is effectively an account credential: it can expose personalized network data and may put the user's LinkedIn account at risk.

Because the Actor is cookieless, it does not return connection degree or mutual connections. Those fields depend on the authenticated account's private network graph. Profile pictures and complete experience/education histories are also not guaranteed by public search results.

For public profile enrichment, pass the returned URLs to LinkedIn Profile Scraper, which has separate pricing appropriate for the additional requests.

Limitations

• Results come from publicly indexed profile pages, not LinkedIn's authenticated Voyager search.
• Search engines can relax or reinterpret long queries. The Actor therefore returns the visible match evidence instead of claiming every filter is definitive.
• A blank matched field means the value was not visible in the public title/snippet; it does not prove the complete LinkedIn profile lacks that value.
• Highly restrictive combinations can legitimately return few or zero profiles.
• Search ordering and public snippets can change as indexes refresh.
• Use personal data only with a lawful basis, honor applicable privacy and outreach rules, and do not treat public visibility as consent to spam.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $0.002 per returned profile, with lower BRONZE, SILVER, and GOLD tiers. Results rejected as duplicates are not saved or billed.

Last verified: 2026-08

More scrapers at thirdwatch.dev.